Azathoth wrote:

Cool, thanks for the ideas! I imagine if you plan to live there full time you would re-purpose some of the living space to mnake it less sardine-like.

This is where you can probably tell 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' barges (or parts of a barge) apart. In the unsuccessful ones people cannot improve their lot much and have to rely on putting up with things, wallpapering over the ugly parts of life with AR while living in what is essentially a 3D favela. In the successful cases people extend their space with inflatable sections, nanobuilt additions and remodelling that adds a bit of proper biosphere.

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What you describe sounds a lot more modular than what I envisioned. I was imagining something like a tin-can habitat with propulsion. The problem I have with that design is that for any moderately sized can, it would have to spin pretty fast to provide any significant g force at human comfort level (<2rpm) . Then I had a hard time picturing docking to such a fast spinning can, or moving from stationary portions to the rotating portion...

At a high rotation rate the Coriolis force also becomes pretty unbearable. So you need to keep gravity low if it is a small habitat. A tincan can be inhabited with little or no gravity: just fill the interior with a 3D shantytown (you can literally build out of cardboard, or in this case graphene paper). Some intriguing and smelly problems with sanitation and life support. Some horrifying risks of fires. Non-modular scum barges have the advantage of better safety than module collections (would you trust the engineering thrown together by refugees in the middle of a dash away from a doomed Earth? Every hour you inspect the welding joints and try to improve the stability another hundred desperate people arrive) while modular ones can be expanded fairly easily as population grows.

Azathoth wrote:

Ok, still looking for a basis on which to base a deck design. How would you think a barge would compare with, say, a modern cruise ship? Or is there a better modern analog? Thanks for your continued input!

I think a better analogue would be people living in the shipping containers on and in a big bulk freighter. Imagine the labyrinth of metal, every nook and cranny inhabited by families. The smell, the wear and tear, the strange repairs. The makeshift lamps, sewage and ventilation units. The graffiti and the noise. My above sketch using old fuel tanks would seem to suggest a deck design mostly consisting on long corridors surrounded by pie-shaped living spaces, bundled into rather open structures (but of course, the interior would usually not have any windows). A core with a more standard spaceship deck plan since it is an old bulk freighter, and then a bundle of solar collectors and heat radiators attached wherever they fit.

I think pretty much all kind of ship may have been turned into scum barges. from freight transport rust buckets to luxury cruisers to generation ships Look at the Colonial convoy in Battlestar Galactica or the Quarians' Migrant Fleet in the Mass Effect universe. The way I describe the Scum culture borrow quite a lot from the Quarian's own. Like the Chàoséng, for exemple, that comes from the Quarian's pilgrimage concept Or attaching the name of the barge to the scum's name with a particle like Duì to express the barge of adoption or Láizì to point the native barge.

I did a little writeup of what one can do with my standard tanks, resulting in this: http://www.aleph.se/EclipsePhase/Tank%20habitats.pdf Of course, most real scum barges will be far more irregular.

Quincey Forder wrote:

Now picture this: tie those thanks together, end to end in hexagons, and assemble those hexagons to form a hollow spherical 'soccer ball' looking stucture. In the center of the sphere build a smaller sphere Cover the ensemble with smart material sail that is airtight and resistant to particle and dust imact, pressurize to keep it round and tight and then magnetize it to attract floating dust that will form a crust around the sphere and act as shield. polarize two ends of the sphere to create an artificial Van Halen Belt. the crust can be pierced with a net of optical fiber-like material to transmit sunlight minus UV

Van Allen belt. You have been listening to too much rock :-) I would actually not bother with making the interior spherical, just stretch material across the frame made by the tanks. It is going to be in microgravity anyway (you don't want to rotate the assembly, because then you would get some big tensions and torques in the joints). This way you can have openings straight into the sphere. Getting a crust has to be more active than just electromagnetism, since most of space is very empty (exception: rings of Saturn - you can get plenty of ice there). I would simply send out scoop bots or rocket sleds to gather regolith from an asteroid you build next to. Transparent sections and mirrors, and you have a homestead Bernal would be proud of!

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Now, I'm a total klutz with numbers, so I don't know how many tubes it'd take and what would be the size of these spheres, but I'm damn curious to find out!

Think of the dice you likely have around, and count edges. The smallest habitat of this kind would be a tetrahedron (D4), where 6 tanks form a pyramid. Then you have cubical habitats (12 tanks) that would have a volume of 125,000 m^3 inside. A dodecahedral (D12) habitat would need 30 tanks and get a 957,500 m^3 volume. The soccer ball structure (technically, a truncated icosahedron) would need 90 tanks to build it. It would have an internal volume of 7 million cubic meter, and be about 500 meters across. This kind of habitat will not be short of space.

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Arenamontanus, do you think you could modelize that?

Yup. Somewhat limited for time at the moment, but will do it when I get the time.

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I reckon that would make a very nice habitat for the Carnival of Goat, right? or Fresh Kill, maybe? Or a Port Tortuga for scums, Anarch and other pirates type to R&R

Note that you need to know beforehand what you build and have the right resources - leaving out a few tanks ruins the whole construction. This means that it won't happen organically as people add stuff to existing stuff. So I see this more as the "new town" near Fresh Kills where a crimelord has been building it as his own project, than a part of the Carnival or pirate nest. Of course, someone might build polyhedra like this and sell them to other groups once they are finished. As I see it, most Fall-era scum barges start out as unplanned ad hoc additions to anything that "floats". Then they grow and grow, running into lots of problems that are solved by patching them. In the end they are accretions on accretions, very messy and hard to maintain and expand. Nanorebuilding doesn't solve the problem much since the core is messy anyway. Meanwhile people building a homestead from scratch are usually under less desperate constraints and can plan them well, so that they can be expanded and maintained easily. So these polyhedra are typical of new scum settlements, often inhabited by people fed up with the creaky mess of an old barge.

Xagroth wrote:

Remember that there is comet mining up to 50 UA from the Sun... I bet all the ice that can be safely/profitably exploited from everywhere between Mercury and Pluto has already been taken (at least the one in orbit).

Nope. Because we are talking about entire moons of ice. The ice in the rings of Saturn alone masses 3*10^19 kg, enough to make a good size ocean. One reason to do far comet mining is to get useful material close to where you are building something, in suitable orbits or because you are looking for something different from ice. .

Remember that it is much more expensive to transport things up from a gravity well than down one.

I posted this in art thread, to me that looks like a good idea of what a scum barge might look like: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GX2sB3cLdNc/Tebdr_HWp8I/AAAAAAAAAEo/MtWOh9eiq-... In this thread there are many other images that might be of assistance: http://www.eclipsephase.com/some-images Also I recently had a chance to browse a war game called Infinity, and while it has its ups and downs, there are certain post-human ideas in it that are of use to EP. One of which is that among factions you got Nomads, which are based on three different large ships that ideally fit the Scum barges. Each ship has detailed description and back story, along with its origins and how its population earns a living and they would be really ideal to copy into EP setting.

I think the Carnival is nomadic, so the answer is "wherever the GM needs it to be" XD. I wouldn't use the Quarian Fleet as an example, the Carnival would more likely use something more in the lines of Warhammer 40K spaceships... I don't think spaceships carved inside and outside asteroids are that rare, aside from the need for fuel.

I've always thought of the Scum swarms to be more like the Fleet in Battlestar Galactica. Resorts ships convererted into residentail craft, factory ships, agriculutre ships, casino ships ect.