The first several months after entering the system were spent searching for resources. The various cargo shuttles were taken out of storage, refueled, and fully checked over before being sent around the entire debris belt looking for valuable minerals. The colony ship went into orbit of the sun and deployed its solar panels, bringing in all of the now empty fuel tanks and processing them into the hulls of new ships. As the ship had massive amounts of excess steel, aluminum, and titanium from recycling all of the extra fuel tanks and armor plating, the new hulls would be made out of a material called Alumix, a titanium aluminum alloy that was invented on Luna but which never saw widespread use due to the difficulty of working with it. The crew had gotten used to using it, however, as it could be made in large quantities and filled many roles that other metals couldn’t.
After the journey into the system many engineers of numerous fields had been woken up so that they could design a new ship. With all of planets being around the same size, and so close to one another, they didn’t have to design a very impressive ship. It only took a week to get finalized designs for the factories to start on, one which could travel between the various worlds and haul over one hundred tons of cargo with them.
The new ship had an open cycle nuclear engine. While they couldn’t be used on the surfaces of planets due to the radiation risk they would put any people in the area under, including in the future, carrying only half their mass in fuel would mean that they could make it to any other planet in the system in less than four days regardless of how poorly the planets were positioned. Their engine’s exhaust velocity was only a mere 50 kilometers per second, but since all they would be doing is moving cargo between space elevators they didn’t need to have the best performance. Stock engine designs from the Sol system could just be used as is, so no new technology needed to be designed. The survey ships which would be sent to the planet surfaces would be closed cycle, with much lower exhaust velocities, but they had old ships for that purpose and could swap out the engines in some of the new ships if need be.
Eventually the survey ships found a small dwarf planet in the debris belt that was 1600 kilometers across, making it larger than Ceres in the Sol asteroid belt. While it didn’t have the most or easiest to access minerals in the belt, it had a little bit of everything, so it was chosen to be the first manufacturing base in the system.
A bowl shaped spinning habitat was built on the surface to simulate the gravity of Earth, with the bowl shape being necessary to adjust the direction of gravity along its surface. Four mag-lev train lines fanned out from the central base and went to all of the best nearby deposits. After six months the base had around five thousand inhabitants and a copy of every piece of manufacturing equipment on the colony ship. Drones went out to haul in resources, which were then brought into the colony and turned into equipment from prefabricated buildings and manufacturing equipment to space elevators.
With over three hundred thousand people in cryonics there was no shortage of people to man the factories and refineries. Soon the colony had built four more rotating bowls and increased their population to twenty two thousand, outnumbering the number of crew that were operating on the ship.
They also set up the Transceiver just outside the colony where all of the data could be sent back to Sol. The asteroid did rotate a bit, so more transceivers would need to be built around the asteroid to guarantee that at least one could pick up any transmission sent from Earth, but for now they could broadcast information back to Sol only part of the time.
A few weeks after it was complete, on the first anniversary of their entrance into this system, the captains came together to give speeches about how this was a momentous occasion. Their speeches would be transmitted back to Earth along with all of the scientific data the colonists had gathered, and the colonists would continue to add to the data as they lived in this system and made more discoveries about it.
Once the transmitter was up and sending all of their data back unencrypted to the solar system, everyone started focusing on the space elevators. By the time the signal got back to the Solar System it would be spread across the entire system, including most of the Kuiper belt colonies. After all, even the best lasers spread out some as it traveled. The data was also meant to be completely open to the public, so there was no point trying to hide the signal from others.
It only took one month before the first space elevator was built and ready to be installed. The lower section was taken by most of the older cargo ships, who could safely land on planets, to a spot on the equator near the night/day line of planet D. Other, newer ships brought the parts for the upper section, including a rotating space habitat to the orbit and started its construction. They didn’t need to build much to make it able to accept a cable connection with the surface, and soon they had finished the core, non-rotating part and started on the rotating ring that attached to the top of it. Any deviation from the equator in its placement would cause it to be unstable at the top as the cable tried to pull it into an impossible to follow orbit. When they were done with the station, it would be one hundred meters in diameter and the cars from the surface would be transferred into its center, where they would then be routed to their proper level for unloading. The non-rotating part would have storage for various cars, both pressurized for humans and non-pressurized for cargo.
The bottom part wasn’t quiet as complicated, but it would take longer as the build crews there were operating at planetary gravity and therefore had more severe mass restrictions on what they could move. The crew that were sent down took a few moments to celebrate being the first humans to step foot on this planet, the possible main world of the system, before they got started. It was a comfortable fifteen degrees down here, so they only needed to wear pressure helmets and suits to function there. They dug down to the rock below using automated bulldozers and set the eight pylons into the rock. Each pylon was an Alumix tower, built to hold the carbon nanotube wires while being anchored deep underground. For that reason they were very careful to make sure everything was square, even setting a concrete slab around the ground area once the hole had been filled with regolith. They then built the auxiliary building and the tracks for moving cars onto and off of the cable.
Once the bottom station had been built a cable was dropped down from orbit and anchored in the top of the first tower. Seven more cables were then sent down in order and attached in their correct places on the tops of the two towers. No human was allowed to touch them due to how dangerous a stray strand of nanotube wire would be to the human, but VR piloted robots were almost as good, and they had hands made of super dense titanium-osmium alloy which the nanotube wires could barely scratch.
Now that the elevator was complete they needed to test it. The ground crew loaded a pressurized car onto the line and sent it climbing to the station in orbit before they began to clean up the sight. After all, they had six more of these to install, and couldn’t waste time on this planet, even if most of them would move here once the colony had been established.
Six hours after the car had been sent up, it returned to the surface down the other line with a bottle of wine inside. The people on the surface and in orbit each threw a party to celebrate, and the next morning, as judged by standard ship time and not the unmoving sun, those on the ground returned to the Trappist Traveler to refuel and pick up another elevator.
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The next elevator worked much like the last. A spot on planet E was picked out on the equator but slightly closer to the hot spot, where the temperature averaged twenty degrees. There was a large lake nearby, where the spot on D only had a moderate sized river. There the two groups repeated their action with even more speed, having now gone through the process once and being more familiar with it. Once both of the elevators were finished along with both of their space stations and a dozen cars each of the cargo and passenger type were loaded into the storage area, about a year after the message to Sol, the ship started asking for volunteers to live on the station. It was currently only big enough for five hundred people to live on it, but they had all of the factory and refining equipment the colonist ship had, so once they had enough people they could start colonizing the surface.
The experts in the ship’s Personnel division created a list of which roles would be most necessary on the space stations and the best qualified one thousand people were split into two equal sized groups. Captain Wlodek volunteered to be the captain of the Planet D space station, as he believed that to be the best planet, while Captain Theodoros volunteered to act as the captain of Planet E. Both men took their families with them. They had formed a rivalry over the last sixty or so years, and the two good colonization candidates gave them an opportunity to continue trying to outdo each other. As it seemed to be what was best for the colonies Johanes didn’t object and on the second anniversary of the ship’s entrance into the System the two ships set off for the two planets. They timed their arrivals to be at the same time, and one week after the anniversary the two planets received their first official colonists on their surfaces.
With the three colonies now being able to trade with each other, all fifty of the new generation of ships were split up between the three locations, the two planets getting fifteen each and the asteroid colony getting twenty. Without any ships left, the Trappist Traveler spent the next three months building another seventy five. After all, there were five more worlds and giving each of them the same thing in the beginning only made sense. When the ships were finished they loaded up with the parts for the other elevators and set out to the other planets.
First was planet F. As the one landmass in the unfrozen area wasn’t on the equator a platform had been designed to act as the beginnings of a floating city. The ships that had gone down to the surface had to land on the island then construct a floating platform off the coast along with several boats. Once they were finished with both of those, the island already having the towers at its center, they used the boats to haul it to an equatorial position in the exact center of the hotspot and anchor it there. The ocean floor was over fifty kilometers deep at that location, and there appeared to be a vast ocean under the ice sheet, one which might hold life, but that would be a matter for the biologists one they were finished setting up the elevator.
With the platform anchored to the ocean floor, attached to the ground via robotics subs which carried concrete down their with them, the wires were sent down. Building the platform had taken so long that the station was already complete, so after anchoring the two together and verifying that the elevators worked properly, everyone decided to take a break.
While the five hundred colonists were selected for the new colony the two groups were given a vacation. Most of them chose to tour the four colonies, hoping to decide which one they would settle on once they were finished building elevators. The colonists suggested that Johanes be put in charge of Planet F’s space station, as the other two captains had been given a planet of their own, but Johanes turned them down. For now, the ship would remain his home. He wanted to finish the colonization of the various worlds before he settled down anywhere.
The first world soon picked a name. The original asteroid base chose the name of Hermes, the Greek messenger deity, as they were overseeing the transceiver that communicated with Sol. This got the other three worlds thinking about their own names.
Once Planet F was settled and given its fifteen ships, with First Officer Dorian Clement acting as its Captain, the ship was ready to place elevators on the other worlds. Choosing their locations would be easy, though. The crew couldn’t be expected to work outside when the temperature was far to hot or cold, so robots were sent down and the humans only traveled to the surface so that they could pilot the ship and guarantee that they kept a clean signal with the humanoid robots they were piloting. On B and C the elevators were placed at the cold spots, and on G and H the elevator would be built at the hot spots.
It was suggested that they also place one at the cold spot of H so that they could build a data center there and maximize their power efficiency, but Johanes rejected the idea. If they gave H, arguably the worst planet, a second elevator, all of the worlds would want one, including the three main population centers. All three were building pressurized city areas on the surface, with F expanding the platform to build these locations. This made its expansion much slower, but meant that they didn’t need to worry about soil conditions or elevation changes when building.
By the end of year five, most of the people had been brought out of cryonics, and only a few thousand were left. About five percent of people had moved to Planet F, about fifty percent had moved to Planet D, and about forty three percent had moved to Planet E. The others were mostly people who remained behind at Hermes or had chosen to prospect or conduct research on one of the other worlds. Even the initial five hundred for each world had moved around, with H only having 379 people and B having only 57. All worlds, however well populated, had all of the manufacturing equipment of the Trappist Traveler, and many had even built specialized equipment to make even more advanced technology that the ship hadn’t used.
The last of the raw materials had been given to whichever world seemed to need them the most and all but a few kilotons of hydrogen fuel had been removed from the ship to fuel the cargo ships which now traveled around the system. Only a few hundred crew remained behind and when they were done thawing out the last of the colonists they would be leaving as well. The ship would need to be parked somewhere so that it could be preserved as a museum for people to visit. For that purpose, Hermes had dug out a pit which the ship could land in. All of their mining for the last year had focused on the area of the future museum and when they were finished they covered the walls and floors in reinforced concrete. After a month, all colonists had disembarked and the ship was running on a skeleton crew of only one hundred people.
There had been talks of keeping a crew onboard, refueling, and launching for another promising system, with the ship becoming a gardener, seeding human life across the entire galaxy. That idea was tabled, however, because of its age and condition. Not that it wasn’t space worthy, but it was over five hundred years old. Since it had been built, Sol had no doubt learned to build much better and more efficient ships. The opinion of most people was that the ship should become a museum and, in forty years, when they had received hundreds of years of tech upgrades from Sol, they could build a new ship that was even better. If, at that point, people wanted to head for another star system they could do so.
The ship was landed in the museum area, burning at about four percent of earth’s gravity against the world’s only slightly greater gravity to minimize its speed. Soon it touched the bottom of the six hundred meter deep, seventy five meter radius pit and the ship was shut down, being placed on the backup power of a bank of nuclear batteries. They produced enough power to keep the internal batteries charged and spin the inner cylinder as long as you didn’t try to accelerate too quickly, as well as kept the life support on.
Johanes finally disembarked and went with a few dozen of his remaining crew to his new home of Freya. All of the worlds had been named after a deity or mythical figure whose name started with their letter designation. Freya, or planet F, was named after the Norse goddess of family. The Norse mythology had been chosen because the colonized area of the planet had a similar climate to the Norse area of Earth.
Planet B had been named Beelzebub, due to it’s extremely high heat and the hell imagery associated with that. Planet C had went a similar route, going with Greek instead of Judaic influence and naming their planets Cerberus. Planet D had likewise went with a Greek influenced name and chose Demeter, goddess of the Harvest, as they were hoping to be the breadbasket of the star system.
Planet E had trouble choosing a name, as there weren’t many major deities to choose from with a name starting in E, but eventually a characteristic of their society made one name stand out. Planet E had abandoned the idea of small, efficient housing like Planet D and the other worlds used, and instead promised people a higher quality of life if they moved there. This lead to them recruiting fewer people than Demeter, but the people they did recruit tended to be more skilled. These people were all having private domes built for them, but before they were finished they were being housed in domes which were larger, and therefore more expensive than the domes of Demeter, while having the same number of occupants. Planet E had invested all of the money it could raise into building automated factories and robots to do all of the labor of building new domes, and the speed at which they could make domes had just surpassed Demeter’s rate even though the domes were larger and many contained grass or simple plants. For this reason they had named their world Euporie, after the Greek goddess of welfare and abundance.
Planet G, with few names to choose from, picked Ganesha, the Hindu god of arts and science, as they were planning on devoting themselves to cultural and scientific development, especially in searching the frozen ocean for life.
Planet H had chosen their name even before they colonized the world, but didn’t make it official until after Demeter had chosen first. They were Hephaestus, as their only path forward was of scientific and technological development, using the massive data centers they were already constructing.