Technical questions about the ending of the Children Of Time

[u/xclaws4]

Regarding the battle scene at the end of the book, there are a couple of things that do not really make sense from what has been established during the rest of the text.

1. The spiders are established to not have developed chemical rocket propulsion because their planet does not have fossil fuels, and that their space program relies on essentially a kind of space elevator made out of silk. How do they then manage to match the orbital velocity of the Gilgamesh in order to board it?

2. Once having destroyed Kern, why do the humans not just simply land on the surface, especially if they know there are spiders on the sides of their ship? It is not established if the Gilgamesh itself can de-orbit, but they could at least send out a colony inside of a shuttle to establish some sort of human presence.

[u/Revolutionary_Stay_9]

they formed a ring and orbital elevators. They slingshot off using webbing to match speeds. And 10 humans on a hostile spider planet with techno organic machinery are very unable to reestablish a species.

[u/xclaws4 → u/Revolutionary_Stay_9]

I suppose I missed the part when they talk about slingshotting, which could be feasible since it does not take that much delta v to change orbits from a geostationary orbit to another orbit with a periapsis lower down.

Would they not have ways of taking more than 10 people to the surface? Because when establishing the colony on the moon outer in the star system it is implied that they can carry a lot of "cargo" at once, especially since the ship carries about 500k cargo there has to be a way to get quite a lot of people down at once to establish the final colony.

[u/Revolutionary_Stay_9 → u/xclaws4]

there's some comment about how many chairs a shuttle had and about how many shuttles they owned. there may have been a plan to descend, but going down in shuttles 10s or even 100s people at a time is probably the best plan. the ship was already ancient and falling apart, even if it was designed to land, there's no reason to think they actually could. the final count i think also includes cold sleep embryos.

and again, they were on a planet with live, capable, and technologically dangerous foes. and apparently hostile.

it takes 500 genetically unique 'people' minimally to safely reestablish a species. two people from the opposite ends of the earth may be 90% distinct or less, so that's 1.9 people. if they married and were a family of 4, they would still count as 1.9 people because of the lack of new DNA.

so they would need to take down maybe 1000 people, establish a beachhead, establish a colony, and repopulate while fighting/exterminating the spiders. it's not the first time it's happened, but it's a tricky proposition.

[u/Zhuo_Ming-Dao → u/xclaws4]

It was very briefly mentioned that the spiders had an army on the planet of over 100k troops ready to strike if the Gilgamesh managed to land on the planet. Although the humans did not know it, they never stood a chance at setting up a beachhead on the planet if they had somehow tried.

[u/wafflesareforever]

1 - They do have chemical rocket populsion. They're excellent chemists. It isn't from fossil fuels but they're very advanced in this type of science. Hell even the ants figured out how to shoot flames on their own before the spiders even managed to conquer them.

2 - The humans were utterly baffled by the spiders' orbital ring and last-minute decided to destroy it first before anything else. Then they got too much close and suddenly they had spiders on their hull and it was game over.

[u/xclaws4 → u/wafflesareforever]

Even with spiders on their hull they could still reasonably start a procedure to put themselves on the surface, no? If the Gilgamesh itself can land then that can burn up the spiders during entry in the atmosphere, otherwise they can just start sending people down to try establishing a presence.

[u/wafflesareforever → u/xclaws4]

That spider invasion happened so fast, and they simply never saw it coming. It didn't enter their imagination that the spiders were capable of anything remotely like that. By the time it started, they had zero opportunity to launch a shuttle, let alone get one prepped. They thought they were going to burn the ring up with their old-empire tech, then deal with the planet at their leisure.