Very interesting idea! I feel like this sort of technology fits the Mwee based on what I know about them.

Remember that a body is simply a clone without a mind. You'll need backup implants to record the memories and consciousness of the crew members and a way to write that data to the new clone.

Reformation on a Mwee ship (and in the M'ress pics) is based on transporters, which create a quanta by quanta accurate copy of a person complete with a mind. A state record of each crewperson is kept on file and regularly updated, and people who expect to get eaten a lot have real time feeds recording their memories so they don't lose anything when they are killed. Mwee embassy scanners are used to take a quick record of someone who is to be eaten who is new to the embassy and most mwee have implanted scanners that do the same so they can eat people outside the embassy. The only time people die for good in that setting is when they want to or on the very rare occasion where a Mwee or mwee hanger-on eats them with the intent of killing them, which happens in one story.

So does no one die in these settings? Sounds like one of those dystopian transhumanist horror-ish settings, immortality leading to decay and corruption and various existential psychological crises.

:D

My settings with similar reformation technology underline them as prohibitively expensive and tightly regulated for special circumstances, as for the health of society a semblance of a natural life cycle is necessary. Infinite expansion and growth is never sustainable, so if no one dies, then it's necessary for no one to breed either. Save by tightly controlled eugenic breeding controls.

Not that tightly controlled access to immortality doesnt have it's own problems of course; the near-immortal nobles on Holy Terra, epitome of a corrupt self serving tyrannical upper class, are prime examples. Immortal for being born into a privileged elite, while the permanent underclass dies young.

Between the two, I pick limited access, as I like having access to themes of death in my narratives and having a fixed, static, stagnating population of individuals doesn't appeal to me.

To get around limited access for the sake of less privileged characters, there's always black markets! Considering some of the best reconstruction technologies come from the criminal mad scientist Annabelle Marie, there's plenty of black market facilities.

Duck Tales. (A-woo ooh!)

Incidentally, immortality is a subject I've discussed at length in the past because I once considered trying to professionally write a story about werewolves (then dropped it because freakin' Twilight came out six months later!).

The short version is that werewolves are presumed to be immortal, as they do recover from injuries and every one they've ever known stayed fit and healthy up until the very end, but the lifestyle comes with so many perils that it's rare for one to even make it into his fifties.

In other words, immortality is not a guarantee at eternal life. It's a guarantee that, when your death inevitably does come along, it will be something you wouldn't even wish upon your worst enemies.

Calls to mind (and I realize I could've just started with this) the scene in the Hellsing anime where Luke Valentine states his admiration for Alucard as "the first great pioneer of immortality". . . Right before they both shoot each other in the head.

In a setting like the one Anne described, I imagine the nobles would spend a lot of time trying to pull the plug on each other, and capital punishment among the Mwee would be carried out with a proverbial Alt+F4 command.

Post-scarcity societies (such as the Culture and to a lesser extent, my Commonwealth) eventually reach a point where people only die permanently during wars (and only in big ones, or ones that take out the backup faculties) or when they choose to. Generally people don't choose to live forever. They just get tired of living. One of the more ubiquitous races in my sci-fi setting, the mrish, usually choose to live 200-300 years, then make a pilgrimage to the racial homeworld, get their affairs in order and choose to die. The mwee are in a similar situation as their medical tech is about the best around, and they likewise self-limit their lives. Most races make up for these long lives by having less kids so their population doesn't grow explosively. Stagnation isn't really a problem with over 6,000 member races interacting with each other and the occasional pan-galactic war (and so far, two intergalactic ones).

Wars can and often do start because a species chooses not to limit their birth rate, and also chooses not to built large, efficient space habitats like Culture orbitals. Combining fast growth with a refusal to live anywhere but idea planets is a recipe for war when they bump up against cultures that don't want to give up worlds in their systems.

There are also races who choose to use life extension and functional immortality tech on a limited basis, such as exceptional individuals who want to work on a project or projects for their entire lives. The most populous race in the Commonwealth is the xsir, a sort of crab/insect race, and well less than 1% of them live more than fifty years.

I like that a lot! You seem to have a good grasp of your concept, I respect and admire that. I hope to see more stories about the Mwee ship and her crew :3

Mwee and how their reformation system works has been written up for many years now, heh.

That makes it even more commendable. I love seeing artists, hell anyone for that matter make good on a concept they've worked on for years.

Good for you!

The 'new bodies for crew lost in action' should point to loss of ship's mass, shouldn't it? Send out an away team, they get blown up, nothing to bring back because you gotta run away from Grabbons, that's a loss in mass.

...I think the flow needs some redraw in places, though I get the general idea. :P

That is a fair point, I should amend that to "but whose remains were recovered". There's also at least one typo.

What they need to do is use a halo drive to convert light into matter by stealing energy from the biggest eaters in the universe, black holes.

It's difficult to build a structure around a black hole. Quantum singularities can be used for that but it's cheaper to just build enormous solar arrays around a star, eventually developing them into Dyson statites. That works for big colonies, smaller ones in this setting are easily powered by fusion power or antimatter/total conversion power plants. One version of Star Trek lore is they use huge solar arrays to power their antimatter generators for making starship fuel, by the way.

A halo drive works by firing a beam of light at two orbiting black holes. On the right path the light beam is bent by one of the holes and returns massively boosted in power, enough to be used to accelerate a ship via conventional physics up to a good percentage of light speed or to be used to generate matter-antimatter, the anti- part of which can be returned to the holes if desired. There's no need to build any structures near the hoels themselves.

Of course there's always star-mining; a system's star contains more metals than all its planets put together and an array of mirrors is basically all you need to start said star-mining. But I imagine ships of your caliber can jsut take interstellar hydrogen and fuse it up to the required elements.

A statite system sounds lower effort than tracking down two orbiting black holes, can eventually be upgraded to a Dyson shell (we'll assume a Dyson sphere is impractical). And there is no shortage of materials in asteroids and assorted planets. The Culture can and does blow up stars and the Commonwealth has done it in time of war but they otherwise leave them alone as much as possible. 83

You don't need to track down a pair, though as far as we can tell they should be common; making one works just as well Star mining is non-desctructive; it's how you CAN get a Dyson sphere by mining metal from the star. This is done by focusing the star's own light you make it eject plumes of material which can be mined before the metals returned to said star. Though it COULD be used, in theory to shrink a star to a red dwarf, which would allow trillions, rather than mere billions, of years of usable energy from it. Nature is very wasteful and a large-scale galactic remodeling make moral sense.

Where does all this come from? I thought I was reasonably up on megastructures and stellar engineering but I've never heard of half of this stuff.

Whelp, Issac Arthur's the guy you wanna listen to for star mining, he avoids most of the technical details. A good episode is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzuHxL5FD5U

There are discussion papers on this, but they tend to be a bit dry. On the other hand they hang math on it, which I always like over surface explanations.

Is that seriously the guy's name? Might as well skip the middleman and name him Isaac Heinlein Clarke. 83

Can't do that; he's already got three greats in his name already. Issac was born to two physicists, the Arthur relates to... well you know. I skipped his middle name, Albert, after the einsteinian great. He's also been in the army. He's an interesting guy with some neat perspectives, especially on the Fermi paradox.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Arthur

The halo drive's been worked on for some time, one of its lead proponents just released a paper and he gives the basic gist of things here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqL9CkNxXw

Of course I suggest checking out the paper which explores the limits of the idea and the use of non-black hole bodies.

I realize it is for flow chart simplicity but the "crewmen digested by predators" and "crewmen that elect to have there bodies recycled" seem to be creating mass from nothing. Perhaps if it had a "total crew biomass" pool in addition to the ships matter reservoir.

But anyhow very cool.

If a crewman is digested by a pred on board the mass stays on board, and crew that elect to have their bodies recycled are returning it to the communal mass pool (presumably they are also reformed, which means it's a zero sum exchange.)

nerd <3

As a lover of worldfluff, I adore this, and I like that you have paid attention to conservation of mass (and how much of a PITA it would be to generate mass/matter from energy, etc etc.). This is a delight!

Making things out of pure energy is expensive. I just had an argument yesterday about the Voyager series finale, which I have many problems with, one of which is the magic armor (meters thick) they conjure out of nothingness and plate over the whole ship. That mass has to come from somewhere. 83

Wow! This is...surprisingly legit for something created to justify reformation in Star Trek vore fanart! (Not that that's a bad thing lol)

In fact, I'm left wondering why, in-canon, Starfleet didn't invent something similar, seeing as
1. this doesn't use any tech Starfleet doesn't already have (they can capture consciousness and turn base matter into other things, otherwise replicators wouldn't exist and when Kirk says "Beam me up, Scotty" he would be brain-dead on arrival)
and 2. The Enterprise goes through red shirts like they're going out of style, to say nothing of the unfortunate souls wearing them

It wasn’t done to preserve drama and keep people from asking why characters ever got sick or aged. Once death is a momentary inconvenience a lot of angst is lost. It’s very useful in a vore setting or post-scarcity setting like the Culture but it has to be baked into the setting or it causes a lot of issues.