The Uriah

About me:

After linking the entire Solar System through accelerator chains, the "Big 5" nations of Earth (China, EEC, Pacific, US Empire and USSR) set in motion a plan to colonise the galaxy know as the Terran Expansionary Phase. It lasted 90 years from 2120 to 2210.

The first step was to launch probes into outer space. The probes reported any Earth-sized planet they encountered during their voyage, which would last centuries. Each probe was followed by a survey ship 10 years later. The ship's mission was to map the planet and if it was habitable, it would signal Earth and then, while waiting for the colonists to arrive, it would terraform the planet.

Terraforming was a complex process. The survey ship needed to mine materials from asteroids to build a robot factory in space and this could take decades. The robots then proceeded to build more space factories that in turn would produce better robots. The robots also built large satellite dishes to collect data sent from Earth containing the latest technological advances. Then the actual terraforming took place. The robots landed on the planet and started to build cities while also launching more probes and survey ships further into space.


Once Earth received news of a habitable planet, the plan's third and final step took place. Ten giant passenger discs, each carrying 200,000 colonists in stasis, were towed into space. Next came the engine unit, which was linked a week later to the front of the discs, and then the colony ship was completed and ready to go.

During the 2190s, 50 colony ships were launched from the EEC's Ceres base, among them the Snowball 9, which carried the first colonists for planet Eden on the Eridani A system. For the next three years, the accelerator chains beyond Pluto fired ten-ton blocks of ammonia ice at the travelling ship. The Snowball 9 caught the ice blocks with hooks and piled it around the passenger discs, forming a hollow shell that would cover most of the ship and would serve as a shield until it was needed to fuel the fusion engines on the later part of the trip. This ice shell gave the Snowball series its name.

After receiving the last ice block, the crew put the ship in autopilot and went to hibernate with the passengers, leaving the ship's maintenance to robots. Except for a brief period of activity to start deceleration, the crew slept for most of the trip, waking up one year before reaching Eden. The plan was to continue deceleration while consuming the last of the ice shell, and then put the ship in orbit around the planet, delivering the passengers down by gliders that would be retrieved by hooks to be reused.

....