[Black Wolf]

I have a sleeper ship travelling at 0.2C for sixty years to get to Epsilon Indi. I need my people to wake up for one day out of every two months to exercise to prevent muscle atrophy (I'm not sure if that's enough, but they'll be in simulated (i.e. rotational) gravity so I'm assuming they wont lose muscle mass anywhere nearly as quickly as modern day astronauts do). The  problem, however, is that if they're waking up every two months, and somebody is awake at least once a week (If everyone got up at the same time, respiration rates would go through the roof and overstress the life support) then there's no reasonable way to assume that earth wouldn't be keeping up regular contact with them. I need one. My entire story idea rests on the fact that the sleepers wake up at Indi, they will have no idea about what has been happening on earth for the past several decades.

So, come up with a reason for me. I can;t really think of anything other than a malfunction, which seems both a little deus ex machina (though I can live with that) but also bloody hard to imagine... I mean, these things would have backups, right? You'd think anyway. So, err, any other ideas?

[jr2]

Sabotage.

[TrashMan]

Interference from nearby stars/nebulas...loos of signal..background radiation?

[Colonol Dekker]

Use a futurama style stasis freezer or a red dwarf stasis field, that way, they wont lose muscle and earth wont be able to contect them. Then have a malfinction make them wake up.

[Mefustae]

The propulsion system creates an electromagnetic field surrounding the craft that helps to protect it from cosmic radiation - a la the Earth's protective electromagnetic shielding - but also distorts and deflects most radio wavelengths approaching the craft, rendering communication impossible whilst the engine is active.

You could also fall back on a micrometeoroid shower damaging the transceiver early in the voyage, downing communications for the duration. Or possibly stellar phenomena interrupting communications, like an abnormally prolonged period of heightened stellar variance generating a communications blackout.

Honestly, if you want a reason outside of a deus ex machina or technobabble solution, you'll be hardpressed to find one.

[Black Wolf]

Hmmm...

Well, stasis fields and whatnot are out. I want this to be low tech space travel. I need to have stasis for the basic premise to work, but I want it to have disadvantages. Plus I need my guy to form friendships on the trip out there.

Interference from nearby stars and stellar phenomena and whatnot are out, since the ship's only going to Epsilon Indi - 11.3 light years away. If Alpha centauri is next door, then Indi is, well, across the road. There's nothing in between us and it.

Sabotage is a possibility. I'm trying to "foreshadow" later events in the story as much as possible in the first part, and sabotage would work well for that, if I could do it properly. It'd be strange to have the communications system be the only thing damaged, but it could be worked in.

Micrometeorite collision is also doable. The ship will have to pass through the Oort cloud after all, so there's a nice convenient source in roughly the right spot (about 10% of the journey, five or so years in, too late to turn back if nothing critical was damaged).

Hmm, well, I'll pick one. Cheers guys.

[Goober5000]

[late response]

Muscles are exercised by tiny electric shocks.  No need to wake up.

[BS403]

It could be a top secret project and everyone involved was arrested or killed, like in Idiocracy

[Black Wolf]

[late response]

Muscles are exercised by tiny electric shocks.  No need to wake up.

Would that even work? Sure, you could make them contract, but would that do the trick if you're not generating the impulses yourself? After all there's no energy being used, so... hmm, I wonder...

Anywya, it's no good as I need my people waking up in order to develop relationships with other members of the crew, getting to know each other.

[Colonol Dekker]

Of course it would work, They sell stupid belts with battery packs for lazy fat people. Boditek etc 

[Goober5000]

Would that even work? Sure, you could make them contract, but would that do the trick if you're not generating the impulses yourself? After all there's no energy being used, so... hmm, I wonder...

The electric shocks are merely the signal to contract.  The contractions use energy.  The muscles are working, so they don't atrophy.

Anywya, it's no good as I need my people waking up in order to develop relationships with other members of the crew, getting to know each other.

Err... but people shouldn't be interacting, forming relationships, etc., because that'll stress the life support.

If you want to make this a sleeper ship, the primary purpose should be sleeping, not getting up and talking to everybody.  Besides, wouldn't they have formed relationships during training, before they left?

[jr2]

Perhaps a certain number of them take turns (work in shifts) as an awake monitoring/maintainance force?  Maybe a group of 4-8 ppl stay up for a month, then go to sleep when the next crew comes awake, etc... unless you really want to trust George*... y'know, he's got a mean streak. 

*autopilot

[Herra Tohtori]

Well there's always this old, proven option...

Onboard computer: I've just picked up a fault in the AE35 unit. It's going to go 100% failure in 72 hours.

[jr2]

Linky for AE35 unit.

[Black Wolf]

It's like jr2 has said - you stagger the awakenings so that the entire group isn't awake at once. On a ship with 1500  odd people, with 60 24 hour days in there means you can get away with 25 people per day. I'm going to have more than that (either by increasing the crew size or by having one day on, one day off) but still, there'll not be an entire colony's worth of people awake at any given time.

I need them to form relationships on the ship because it means you'd get a diverse range of people to make up the cast of characters for later on in the story. When you're forming relationships at a training stage, you can choose who you spend your time with, and, in most cases, you tend to stick to people who are broadly of a similar mindset to yourself, which is a problem. Basically, the gist of the storyline is that the sleeper ship spends 60 years in space, and arrives at the colony, only to find that humanity developed FTL technology while they were gone and colonized the planet 40 years ago. The result is that they have to reintegrate with a society where they will have essentially no connections left - the only ones they'll have are those with people who were on the ship - and that has fundamentally changed since they left. I need a group of people who are diverse enough that their reactions to what has happened will be across the board, so I need to throw my main guy in with a bunch of people that he didn't choose to spend time with.

[Herra Tohtori]

Well if you're willing to make the ship go faster and further, you can use the relative time difference to your advantage. 40 light year journey at 0.55c would take round'bout 72.7 years in Earth time, 60.7 years in ship time due to time dilatation. Just upon arriving to the distant system, the ship would be receiving signals from Earth that were sent 40 years ago... or 32,7 years after the ship left.

Assuming the FTL travel also introduces FTL communication, there would be no way to contact the ship with FTL comm systems since they don't have one. Although the neocolonists could possibly reach the ship with signals as the journey gets closer to it's end, it's not certain they would be using suitable frequencies, or that the original colony ship would be trying to pick anything special up - or be able to.

AS to what comes to disabling/destroying comms... I'm afraid there's no way of destroying or disabling all redundant comm systems AND repair facilities on the ship so that it would be believable, without massive damage to the ship, which would somehow leave the life support and propulsion fully functional...


A possibility is that you make Earth cut off communications for some reason. Political change, a world war or something like that. Perhaps the colony ship was a top secret project committed at utmost stealth and secrecy, and only a select group knew about it and was killed in an accident or something. Or perhaps a world war occurred (wars always speed up scientific research and developement by the way) and communications facilities were lost, and following some trajectory change of the ship in the Oort cloud, there would be no way to re-detect the ship with traditional measures. And without the exact position of the ship, it would be extremely difficult if not downright impossible to hear radio signals sent from the ship, even if they were directed towards Earth with parabola antennae, the Earth antenna would still need to be pretty closely aligned to the signal to receive a good signal. So it's possible they just lost it, or purposefully abandoned the attempts to re-establish communications.


Pick one, or all.

[General Battuta]

I do want to point out that this exact story has been done before.  A. E. van Vogt, I believe?  You might read that one for some pointers as to cliches to avoid - I'll try to dig up the title.

This is not a reason to not do it, however - in fact, the idea is timeless.  Most of SF consists of new perspectives and takes on old stories, after all.

[Black Wolf]

I didn't know the story had been done before, but, well, I guess it's not all that original - not surprising someone else has thought of it before. Ultimately, it's very similar to the Forever War. Personally though, the basic idea is timeless - you put a normal person into an abnormal world and see what happens.

[Unknown Target]

Make them used modern-day radio, so all they can do is send back regular radio updates that take several years to reach Earth to advise them of their situation.

[jr2]

Eh, I like HT's idea, how about doing it this way:  Have the ship do an emergency last-minute manuver to avoid a collision with a chunk of an asteroid that broke off from two larger asteroids colliding elsewhere.  This manuver had to be performed before they could send Earth a transmission about their new trajectory, thus their lock on Earth's radio was lost.  (although, they should be able to re-aquire it using calculations based on their manuever... maybe if some of the debris hit them & knocked them further off course... IDK, it's hard to think of a way to cut comms...)

How about radio interference caused by an equipment malfunction that is accessible only be going outside the spacecraft, which they elect not to risk.