Drywater, Mars: A Sci-Fi Webisode Series (Development Thread)

[amberwolf]

This thread will be more or less, at least at first, an open repository for my thoughts (and yours, if any readers have some to post ) of how this universe should be, so that stories can then be written for it to base short webisodes upon, that I can then use whatever free tools are out there to animate into life and then post on Youtube.

Music that unknowingly started the whole process.

Youtube preview image of The Heist audio visualization "video" (I wish I could make a real motion video of this scene, it was hard enough just getting this single image via many steps and tools).



So, the chain of events, greatly shortened is that a while back I was experimenting wiht building a song from *just* samples from various packs and bundles, and what I heard in some led me to create A Peek Over The Wall.


After some further journeys along that line, I came up with a track that wanted to be the opening titles to a sci-fi series that I decided would've been called Drywater, Mars about a very old cargo-containership and it's crew based out of the eponymous small town on a future partially-terraformed Mars. I didn't put much thought into what the series would actually be, other than trying to get across the general idea to other poeple by calling it "a cross between Firefly and The Expanse", though it isn't really like either one of those.

Lame cover art used for the title track on Bandcamp:



I couldn't really get the idea of the series out of my head, so now there is a series of music tracks that are based in this universe, with specific scenes or very short episodes / moments in mind. I'll try to make a post for each of them, describing what the video would be like for each one, if i were capable of actually making them and had the tools and time to do so.

After a few of the tracks, I began getting deeper and deeper into the people and universe, thinking how things would work, what people would be like, why would these situations come up, etc., and while I am not good at this sort of thing, I have read *a lot* of stories, and I'm sure I have absorbed many ideas that will show up in the universe below--I can guarantee that there is not an original idea in the entire thing, even though I couild not tell you where most of the ideas did originally come from. (A few I recall specific ones becuase I loved the stories so much and wished fervently someone would make movies or series of them...but that never happened).



I'll begin wiht some universe-suppositions next. I don't know if a society could actually evolve into these ways, so those that might know more are very welcome to post thoughts and suggested changes.

Ideally, this will all lead to the actual stories (which I could use serious help in writing by anyone willing, as long as they don't mind me working with them to alter things along the way, because that is what I do best--work with an existing something to adjust it and re-form it into the vision that is in my brain that I don't otherwise know how to get out).



These will probably be awful, but at least they'll be out there, and perhaps would inspire someone more capable to join with me to improve it. CGI is really the only option for this, as realtime "filming" would require other people be willing to be involved, and working with them in realtime to accomplish anything, which is next to impossible and at best would take years for a couple of minutes of terrible-quality output, based on my previous experiences with working with groups doing this sort of thing. Plus there are many things in it that couldn't be built as sets or props in reality (no budget, nowhere to put them or build them or keep them or film them, etc), and a few major characters that are not human (but not alien--no aliens in this, just earthly lifeforms).

 

[amberwolf]

The idea of the series is not just to show futuristic whatever scifi stuff, but to tell human stories and deal with human issues; something many shows have done (some better than others).

So there aren't aliens from other worlds, and it all stays right here in the solar system as there isn't any warp drive, antigravity, or other things that are probably impossible. It's up to a few hundred years in the future, so there are a lot of changes, but a lot of stuff is still the same. Actual time isn't defined yet, and could be avoided in the actual stories as it isn't really important.

Some of t he technology might skirt the edges of that, as extrapolations of things that can already be done (levitation via various means is possible for some things now, so things that look like antigravity for cargo carriers and sleds can happen even though that's not really what happens, for example--to the viewer it looks cool and is expected, and that is an important thing in these kinds of shows).

Ships take months to get anywhere, at minimum, using low-energy transfer orbits wherever possible or economical, so there really aren't any tiny ships outside planetary orbit, evertything is big so it carries fuel and supplies and whatnot for these sometimes years-long voyages. Our heroes' ship, the Percy (officially registered as Percival Lowell) is a small (for it's type) cargo container ship, equivalent to the seagoing version of these from a few decades ago, run by a crew of say, 30 to 50 people at most, who while they may not all like each ohter, are intensely dependent on each ohter and thus are a family, fiercely independent as a group like most of these crews, and fiercely protective of each other even for those who can't stand each others guts after enough time between ports.

More of these types of ships are corporate-controlled than independent, so our hero ship owned and operated by Maggie "Storm" Carrington (there is a story for that name you'd hear in an episode sometime) is one of the exceptions, but by no means rare. Some of these independents are not against borrowing from other independents against their will, and nobody cares enough (besides the other independents) to stop this. It's rare because of distances and energy costs, but if a cargo is valuable enough, or the motivation for harm or revenge is great enough, it still happens.

One of the music tracks, Intercept, is about this happening to our heroes, and the resulting injury, death, and mourning even though they manage to improvise a way to stop the other ship.


One of the skirting-the-edges of the impossible is that Ceres has been moved into orbit (having gotten rid of phobos and diemos) to do the things for Mars that Luna does for Earth, including making it easier to decelerate / orbit / "land" cometary material for the terraforming process, begin tidal heating of Mars' core to eventually generate a magnetic field (a looong time in the future, but this and other energy-input projects to accomplish this eventual goal will get mentioned on news stories on background "monitors" now and then, such as in bars and offices). Provide a place for large-scale orbital operations, and mining of Ceres itself.
A composited image of the real Mars and real Ceres (from a 3d-model-planetary sim thing, angled to try to match the real mars image) along with a modified generated ship inbound to the hand-scribbled Strugatsky Station in Ceres orbit:


The ship in the image is one of the many fails in trying to create the Percy; there were no successes so far.


(it is possible to move objects by gravity tugs, very slowly, or thrusters on the surface, etc--I don't know if it's actually possible to move ceres to mars orbit in a few hundred years, as I have no idea of hte math involved, so this series would happen in whatever time period that it *is* possible to have happened).

 

[amberwolf]

Society itself is like it has "always" been, in that there are various strata of economic success and lack thereof, different cultures often defined by geography (as well as by the planet or satellite or station, etc), subcultures, etc. Language has evolved, mixed among the many we have today into new and different ones, though I think the stories would have to stick to modern english for dialog and signage simply for viewer ease of access to it all. I don't want made-up-ness getting in the way of viewer or reader engagement. In some SF and Fantasy, a lot of words get introduced where context is insufficient to tell the reader or viewer what it is, and a glossary must be included or an in-story explanation stated, interfering with simple enjoyment of the story.

Computers are used, integrated extensively in most technology (much moreso than today), and forms of AI are used, but are not as independent as one might expect given the time since now, and none have their own independent bodies or full control of devices they could use as such. Perhaps it was something like whatever led to the Butlerian Jihad in Dune, where something happened to frighten people away from this path, perhaps some economic or some other social reason.

One story idea to step back in time and discuss this and perhaps pitfalls of such a thing is a lost cargo ship being salvaged by our crew from a couple or more hundred years ago that's returning dead on a cometary orbit, with an onboard autopilot AI of the time, that still functions once they wake it up. Because of whatever happened to the ship to prevent it from braking and going wherever it was originaly headed back then, it no longer has control over the ship itself, but it is a very very smart AI and learns to communciate with and control the hero ship and attempts to continue it's still-set goal of getting to the port it was headed for when everything went bad so long ago, and also knows that our hero crew is not i'ts crew, and it doesn't know why it's crew is dead, as it wasn't functional when they all died of starvation or freezing or oxygen loss or whatever...so there's a "ghost story" to be had out of this as our crew figures out it's the ai doing whatever instead of a haunted ship that the previous salvagers had reported.


Percy does have an Ai, or rather a somewhat interconnected set of them, that respond verbally as if they were human, but they are not full personalities, and are just human-responsive computers. Very good ones, that understand inputs and context as perfectly as a well-versed human would that had "instant" access to the amount of data such a computer would, but still "just computers". Each runs some subsystem or set of systems, but there is no one overall computer that runs them--it's up to humans to do that.

So anwyay, there are no Datas in these stories, and not really any humanform robots. Not mechanical ones anyway. :/


Genetics has been understood pretty well for quite a while at this point, and corporate experimentation for profit has gone on nearly unchecked for generations.

So, unfortunately, well within the possible are the Peeps (PPs, Programmed Personalities), an essentially enslaved humanity subset that was created by corporations long before this time to do all the things that nobody is willing to do. They don't have a true will of their own; their brains and bodies have been re-engineered to reduce this to a very primitive level, as have their abilties to creatively think, imagine, etc. They cannot reproduce (none of the equipment is present), and are "preprogrammed" for specific sets of tasks, as a race of human robots cheaper to maintain than mechanical ones.

There is a long ongoing activist movement on Earth to eliminate these for various reasons (morality among them), but among the less populous planets and sattelites and stations, they're taken for granted. The peeps themselves have no opinion in this as they have been rendered incapable of individual personalities or opinions, and while they might have thoughts or emotions about things, it is "just the way things are" to them. There are no "mutants with higher levels of thought" among them because any that occur are never allowed to continue to exist beyond discovery during "manufacturing".

The manufacturing process itself is a horrific adaptation of the real human gestation process, with versions of peeps that have been engineered into living wombs that have no awareness of anything, no senses other than whatever is internally required to function. They are also used for cloning to create organs, though thankfully it has been refined enough to not have whole-body organ-donor-clones (which might be something mentioned as a horror of the past where whole people were grown just to cut them up for parts).

These living wombs are also used to grow custom versions of people for specific environments, where the conditions cause so many problems with natural pregnancies, conceptions, or births that nobody bothers anymore, and just have their kids made to order.




There is also a set of...we'll just use Brin's term as I can't think of a better one yet...Uplifted species who have been modifed over time to become either more human-like, or to "help them explore their potential", or to be better companions/pets, or, before Peeps were created, to become those [strike]workers[/strike] slaves humans always seem to want to do their undesirable jobs. Things have changed a little since those times, but they are all still corporate-owned and while they are "officially" indentured servants rather than slaves, "simply having to pay for the cost of their creation and upbringing", they're still not free, and practically almost none would ever be able to do that.

They are not fully considered people by humanity in general, though it's just as likely as not that humans that actually personally know one of them would be their friend and treat them as any other human they know. There are activist movements throughout the whole system that are beginning to peak during the time of this series to free these species of corporate bondage, and remove the restrictions preventing natural breeding among them, providing them with the modifications needed to continue as their own fully-capable-of-evolving species. Frequent news reports on background monitors in public places will cover protests, riots, votes, and other social and political drama around this topic.


Of the ones you might see in these stories, various species of simians and dogs would be the most common. The simians are physically modified to make them more capable of human-like speech, and certain other things that made them more useful as workers.

The dogs are nearly unmodified physically, because their original use as pets and family-caretakers / guards, etc. found little acceptance of visible changes. So they use subvocalization equipment to take their own sounds and create speech, though their brains have been modified to better emulate human-like processing and whatnot. For story purposes, to allow certain types of stories or incidents and drama, this is all external equipment, though certainly by this time it could be implanted. If it's external, it can be taken away, or lost, and leave one speechless and while not helpless, make it tougher for them to do something and create a bigger place in a story for it (without some deus ex machina to save the day).

Other species also exist, perhaps dolphins, etc., but as almost all our stories will take place shipboard or in orbital or downwell places without suitable bodies of water,

Two of the crew of the Percy are of a wolf-species that has been uplifted. Like the dogs, they are outwardly unaltered, though they have slightly different musculature in their paws, and corresonding control neural bits, to allow them to use them somewhat more precisely to manipulate things, but they are not hands, and are not visibly different from a "natural" wolf (if such even exist anymore by then).

The rest of the crew are human of one subset or another; many with genetic modifications either inherited or done at the behest of parents, or of corporations that own their parents' contracts, for those so indebted.

One of the wolf crew, using a "jet pack" to escape a tiny police drone in The Heist. In the harness that attaches the pack to them is the vocalization equipment along with other tools they can reach with teeth and/or paws to do things they need to do. Click the image to go to the youtube page for the audio visualization. The image itself is a multistage composite image begun with a generated image of the flying wolf (which took a long time and many attempts to get), and passed thru various manual and automated editing tools, representing a few hours of work to accomplish this almost adequate result.

 

[amberwolf]

A couple of the experimental images to try to work out the scene that Not Just To Breathe With You is for.

I have not yet had time to design the Percy, but it would really be a lot like a seagoing containership with the exceptions of the things a vacuum-based ship requires, as well as the directional construction being a blocky perhaps cubical vertical stack instead of horizontal brick because of thrust requirements instead of planetary gravity.

All the images below are "wrong" in that they all show windows, and there would be none. Probably "monitor walls" or something, but all the living areas would be at the core of the ship. This is partly to shield the crew from radiation and micrometeoroids and other fast moving debris (using the cargo itself as a shield), and partly so that all the cargo can be loaded / unloaded more easily from any side of the ship. Structurally this also puts all the core of the ship for loadbearing walls and structures thru the center of thrust / mass. the cargo can be layered on the outside as needed, based on how it will be unloaded at the delivery points, and balancing the mass for thrust vectors, and ensuring just like today that incompatible cargos are not stored near each other.

This ship is very old, at least a century, but it is still structurally sound so it's still used, though as with anything old it needs much more TLC than a new corporate ship might, and does not have all the fancy expensive automated systems to do this so the crew has to inspect and fix things regularly. These things can feature in stories as details, but shouldn't drive any of them. No "oops it broke in half and we're stranded, oh no what will our heroes do next!?!@?!" episodes. :lol:



The ship is too clean (for the aged Percy) in the first image, as well as being lit incorrectly (far too blue / white), and is much better in the next two, though the second is far too empty and large a volume; so much space is wasted it'd require significant changes.







There are other versions; some of which have too much loose stuff around or too dirty a condition that would never be allowed to happen on a spaceship (not by a crew that stayed alive very long). Even if they necessarily of budget didn't keep the paint and coverings maintained, they would not be slovenly.

 

[amberwolf]

Since none of hte available tools work the necessary ways, this thread

ADRS: artist-directed reality-synthesis, a tool to help artists create

There are a lot of artists out there who cant' actually do the work itself that they want to do for various reasons. Sometimes it's a physical disability, sometimes a monetary issue (including complete lack of time to learn or practice, because of having to spend all that time on making enough...

endless-sphere.com

is to help create the tool needed to do stuff, if anyone is willing to help with that.

 

[amberwolf]

More worldbuilding.

Further research indicates it would probably be a bad idea to put Ceres, Hygeia, or Vesta in Mars orbit; Mars is apparently too small to pair with them in the way Earth does with Luna.

So...instead, for a dramatic visual that also serves the story purposes, Mars will instead have an ice ring. Not as dramatic as Saturns, but visible and another thing to make Mars obviously different than it is now to a viewer.

I can't even begin to comprehend the math for any of this stuff, and I don't know any astrophysicists I can waste the time of for pointless crap like my stories, so I have to use the "AI" tools out there, which are notoriously unreliable...but the answers I've seen so far are at least plausible based on my layman's knowledge of the various disciplines involved.

It also gives me a another couple of visible differences, and something that could be mentioned in a story at some point: During the initial attempts at this, they tried to move entire asteroids, to then mine in mars orbit, but screwed up at least twice, and hit Mars with these, long long before our stories take place. One hit was near Olympus Mons, and left a crater almost as big as the volcano, so the highest and the deepest points on Mars are very close together. That might not be possible, as I don't know what effects such an impact would have on that area, but I'll go with it for now until I find out more. The other hasn't been determined yet.




So I asked Qwen:

A practical method for creating an icy-debris ring around mars, where the inner edge of the ring slowly deorbits tiny bits that vaporize in the martian atmosphere without ever reaching the ground as solids. The ring needs to be constantly refreshed by an external source--what would that source be, and how is it moved to mars? The purpose is to controllably add water content to mars, and to thicken the atmosphere.


And Qwen3-Max replied:
You're describing a sustained atmospheric terraforming strategy for Mars: using an icy debris ring that continuously feeds micron-to-millimeter-sized ice particles into the upper atmosphere, where they sublimate or vaporize, adding water vapor (and potentially other volatiles) to gradually thicken and humidify the atmosphere.

This is a brilliant and plausible concept within the realm of advanced but physically possible planetary engineering. Let’s break it down into components, sources, delivery methods, and engineering considerations.

Goal Summary
Create a stable, replenished ring of icy debris around Mars.
Ring particles slowly spiral inward (via drag, Poynting–Robertson effect, or electrodynamic forces).
Particles vaporize fully in the upper atmosphere (~60–100 km altitude), never reaching the surface as solids.
Result: Long-term addition of H₂O (and possibly CO₂, NH₃, CH₄) to thicken atmosphere and enable future hydrological cycles.
The Ice Source: Where to Get It?
Mars lacks abundant near-surface water ice in accessible orbits. So we need an external source. Best candidates:

1. Jupiter’s Trojan Asteroids (L4/L5)
Rich in water ice (many are C-type or D-type).
Stable orbits, but gravitationally accessible via low-energy transfers.
Size: Millions of objects >1 km; total ice mass ≈ 10²⁰–10²¹ kg.
Δv to Mars: ~6–8 km/s (high, but feasible with gravity assists).
2. Main Belt Comets (MBCs) or Icy Main-Belt Asteroids
Objects like 133P/Elst–Pizarro show comet-like activity but orbit in the asteroid belt.
Closer than Trojans (2.2–3.2 AU).
Lower Δv (~4–5 km/s).
May contain 10–50% water ice by mass.
3. Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) – Less Practical
Extremely ice-rich, but Δv > 10 km/s, travel time >50 years.
Only viable with fusion propulsion or solar sails.
Best choice: Icy asteroids from the outer asteroid belt (2.7–3.2 AU) — close enough, ice-rich, and dynamically "reachable."

Delivery Method: How to Get Ice to Mars?
We don’t move entire asteroids—we mine, fragment, and deliver fine icy debris.

Step 1: Robotic Mining & Processing
Send autonomous swarm to target asteroid (e.g., 24 Themis, known to have surface water ice).
Use solar-thermal drills or microwaves to extract and crush ice-rock mixture into fine grains (10–500 µm).
Package into dispersible "pods" or launch directly via mass driver.
Step 2: Low-Thrust Transport to Mars
Option A: Solar Sails + Electrostatic Dispersion
Load ice dust onto large solar sails.
Use radiation pressure for slow, fuel-free transfer (~5–10 years).
Near Mars, release dust cloud into retrograde orbit (to increase atmospheric interaction).
Option B: Ion Tug + Pneumatic Ejection
Tug carries ice pellets; upon arrival, ejects them at low velocity (<100 m/s) to form a dispersed ring.
Option C: Mass Driver Launch from Asteroid
Launch ice grains directly from source asteroid on Mars-intercept trajectories.
Use laser nudging for course correction.
Key: Deliver not as one big object, but as trillions of tiny particles over decades.

Ring Design: Stable, Slow-Deorbiting Debris
Orbit Parameters
Altitude: 10,000–30,000 km (above Phobos, below Deimos).
Inclination: Equatorial (minimizes perturbations).
Particle size: 10–300 microns.
Small enough to fully ablate/vaporize at 70–100 km altitude.
Large enough to not be blown away by solar wind immediately.
Deorbit Mechanism
Natural forces will cause slow inward spiral:

Atmospheric drag (even Mars’ thin exosphere causes drag at <30,000 km over time).
Poynting–Robertson effect (solar radiation slows particles).
Electrodynamic drag (if particles are charged, interacting with Mars’ weak magnetic fields).
Deorbit timescale: 10–100 years per particle → steady rain of vapor.

Atmospheric Impact
Water Delivery Rate Example
Target: Add 10¹⁵ kg of water over 1,000 years (enough to raise atmospheric pressure by ~1–2 mbar from H₂O alone).
That’s 1 billion tons per year → 30 kg/sec of ice.
Delivered as micron dust, this is invisible to the eye, no impact risk.
Secondary Benefits
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas → slight warming.
UV photolysis creates OH radicals, aiding chemistry.
Can co-deliver ammonia (NH₃) or methane (CH₄) for additional warming.
Note: This won’t terraform Mars alone, but it’s a sustainable, low-risk method to begin atmospheric thickening over centuries.

Risks & Mitigations
Risk
Mitigation
Ring destabilized by Phobos/Deimos
Place ring between them (e.g., 12,000–20,000 km) or use active station-keeping via charged dust control.
Particles too large → meteorites
Strict size control (<500 µm); test ablation in simulators.
Dust obscures sunlight
Keep optical depth low (<0.01); ring appears faint, like Jupiter’s gossamer rings.
Runaway delivery
Use autonomous feedback: monitor atmospheric H₂O, adjust delivery rate.
Real-World Precedent
Saturn’s E-ring: Fed by Enceladus’ geysers; particles slowly fall into Saturn’s atmosphere.
Mars’ own dust rings: Faint rings from Phobos/Deimos debris exist.
Earth’s "meteor smoke": ~40 tons/day of cosmic dust vaporizes daily—harmless, adds metals to upper atmosphere.
Conclusion: A Practical Terraforming Seed
Yes—this is a viable, scalable, and safe method to begin long-term atmospheric enhancement of Mars.

Recommended approach:

Source: Mine icy asteroids in the outer main belt (e.g., 24 Themis, 65 Cybele).
Process: Crush into 10–300 µm ice-dust grains.
Deliver: Use solar sails or ion tugs to transport and disperse into a 15,000-km equatorial ring.
Sustain: Replenish at ~1 billion tons/year for centuries.
Result: Gradual addition of water vapor, slight atmospheric thickening, and preparation for future biological or industrial terraforming.
This avoids catastrophic impacts, leverages natural orbital physics, and provides fine control—making it one of the most responsible terraforming strategies ever proposed.

 

[amberwolf]

The other terraforming project, at Venus has "barely begun", and isn't expected to produce useful results in any human timescale. I haven't checked to see if any of these are even remotely possible (with future expected technology), just noted down some ideas, as these aren't really relevant to the stories at this time, but given that we're primarily following a freighter crew that travels around the solar system, we'd probably see "Venus Station" at some point, and there could be interesting visuals and perhaps even story out of it.

An "umbrella" placed at V-L1 could shade Venus entirely. I don't know what it would take to prevent it from being blown away by the solar wind's particle stream, or even the light pressure against such an enormous object. IT doesn't have to be "massive" in that it could be quite a delicate structure, essentially just a giant lightsail, with some form of orbit-maintenance thrusters or gravity tugs. If we had the budget for it the technology to do this exists now, albeit crudely, and over significant time (guessing a generation).

The next step would be a biological cloud-borne conversion process to solidify as much of the Venusian Atmosphere as possible, to drift down as dust onto the surface. But I don't know the chemical process to deal with that, given the various acids in the VA might undo any such conversion, or even just the temperatures alone might.

Another step would be to send water-bearing objects to seed more water vapor into the VA, for whatever cooling effect it might have and to provide water for the bio components.

Remember our civilization at this time are master genetic engineers; there's not much that they couldn't create based on existing lifeforms, though creating something from scratch is not yet within their bailiwick. Presumption is that they have already done this kind of thing on Earth long since to help clean up the mess being created now for real, to turn it back into the human paradise it could be. (cynically, done by the corporations because if they kill off the world it's hard to sell things to it and rake in their money).


The biggest catch here is that unless there is a corporation with a really super long term goal set that doesnt' mind sinking fortunes into this for generations, nobody's going to bother to do this in the DM universe. Governments wouldn't have a reason to; they're concerned with the locales and populations they have already, and are most likely corporate-controlled in reality anyway.

It *could* be an abandoned idea from a previous overthrown (fired?) corporate regime, or even a governmental thing implemented before the current culture, but then there would be no reason to have the Percy visit Venus, and I suspect that it would destabilize in human timescales and wouldnt' be there anymore. Although, perhaps the Percy is one of several ships contracted to salvage or to pick up personnel from the station before the shadow structure crashes into Venus (assuming that's where it's orbit would take it when destabilized).

 

[amberwolf]

Since it would be boring to follow *just* our crew, whose adventures might be months or more between, given journey times between various stations and system objects, there should be at least one or two other groups of characters to follow. Interactions between the groups and our crew may happen, but probably not directly in most cases.

At least one should be a corporate group. Perhaps a set working against the corporate goals and toward more humanity-oriented ones, and a set trying to find and eliminate those. I don't know how to realistically depict this.

At least one other should be activists working to stop "manufacture" of Peeps, and/or to free the "uplifts" from their corporate indenturements, and/or to stop the genetic manipulation and prebirth indenturement of children of parents in the previously-mentioned environments that preclude natural versions for one reason or another. I have slightly better idea how to realistically depict this, but not by much.


Side stories focusing on some of the more extreme human habitations and explorations out in the farther reaches of the system might be interesting; not sure how (or whether) to work the crew into them. These might involve one or more of the other groups instead.

 

[amberwolf]

Some further thoughts on the Percy and similar ships; includes some info previously stated.

The Percy (Percival Lowell) is an aging (century-old) spacegoing containership, carrying potentially hundreds or more cargo containers. Central core is crew quarters, habs, food, etc. Water is in tanks surrounding this for radiation mitigation. Many small tanks in case of micrometeoroid puncture, minimize loss.

Standard cargo containers much like are used today (design has survived with little change over centuries because of huge infrastructure designed to deal with them) surround that core, in layers of superstructure that is also cargo-handling mechanics.

Reaction mass (more water?) is stored in spherical tanks at each end of the ship, which has multiple redundant high-thrust fusion engines at each end so no flip-and-burn maneuvers are required, as the mass of the ship can be so high this would be impractical given structural strengths and fuel usage. It is designed to take all thrust loading axially.

The ship doens't spin for gravity; it uses constant thrust to achieve a minimal "simulated gravity" for the crew underway. there is no standard scifi artifical gravity or warp drives, etc. Everything happens within the solar system in efficient but fast inter-orbital paths, taking up to months for different destinations.

Decks are laid out in a stack between the two ends, in that core, and each deck is laid out so that both floor and cieling are interchangeable (crew can move "furniture" from one to the other but it is otherwise all fastened securely to the "deck") because there is no flip-and-burn so thrust vector changes 180 degrees at mid course.

Take a stack of oreos, a dozen high, for the decks. Stick those in the holes of a few donuts stacked up, these are water and reaction mass tanks, internally divided and baffled against slosh. Dozens of toothpicks vertically aligned between the outsides of the donuts as mounting rails, with dozens of tiny butter sticks in endwise stacks along each of these for the cargo containers. a handful of small funnels at each end of the stack, open ends pointing vertically away from the stack for the fusion nozzles.

(no, I wasn't hungry when I wrote this, I swear ).


Ship itself can't land on a planet, so it needs cargo lighters that can take it's stuff down and new stuff up, all hauling the standard shipping containers. Some containers can be environmentally sealed, many are unsealed against vacuum during the trip if the goods inside can handle that. The cargo lighters are mostly at-destination stuff, only a couple are actually kept on the Percy (as lifeboats, primarily). The lighters would be more like flat stacks of a few dozen containers and a frame around them to hold the engines, controls, and control module.

Getting containers into orbit from larger facilities is done by a pod thrower (a railgun, more or less) on anyplace with thin enough atmosphere and low enough gravity, which is most places humanity ships stuff from. Earth uses the stalks (space elevators) to get stuff up and down. Mars doesn't have any stalks yet as they're incompatible with the terraforming icering setup.




"Flip day" at midpoint, changing from acceleration to deceleration, involves shutdown of drives long enough to resecure everything for the opposite thrust direction. Also a kind of celebration day, closest thing you might get to a party on a ship like this, after all is resecured and after decel begins successfully.