July books: Still 3/5 (but I foresee finishing a few here shortly)
Why is it so hot? auuuuugh
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I told you last week a little about my generation ship idea. Well, I have been doing my researches, and, well, wow. People get really into this. Or, alternatively, you can find 50 million YouTube videos about how generation ships are a terrible idea and we should never ever do them.
(I have, actually, about twenty minutes ago, thought of a good reason to use a generation ship versus other methods, so that’s at least partially sorted.)
When worldbuilding, you can always run the chance of not worldbuilding enough, so your world feels flat and unrealistic, or you can worldbuild too much, spending months or even years building every minutiae, things that would never in a million years show up in an actual story.
I do think I need to err on the side of more, here, though, and even do some math (speed calculations, distance calculations, how fast the ship has to rotate to get the right amount of gravity vs. how big is the ship, as a bigger ship would rotate slower) but some other things I think can probably be a bit fudgier, such as how recycling and repair systems function.
(People have made three hour long YouTube videos about generation ships. I started one but got, like, ten minutes into it before I got bored.)
As I said last week, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve had to build a world from scratch, and my normal method has traditionally been to get a bunch of books related to my subjects and read through them. This is generally slow, as you can imagine, but often results in interesting facts that I wouldn’t have otherwise come across or thought of, which then make it into the worldbuilding. I have been unable to find any relevant books thus far, as my searches are mostly giving me fiction or vaguely related engineering books that are far enough off that they’re not going to be helpful. Normally said books are about mythology or folklore or forest biomes or 15th century sailing ships, all of which already exist, and not theoretical spaceships.
So, hence, the YouTube videos, though they’ve not been very useful thus far, and also tend to all involve the same sort of ship design. I’m having more luck with websites and blogs, including some generation ship contests where people actually go through the whole engineering process (though this is, I believe, getting a little too in the weeds).
I do feel like I’m nearing the end of the information gathering phase, though, and then can move into the actual designing soon.
Anyway, hope things are going well for you, squider, and I’ll see you next week!
