Speaking of things they must have, but haven't shown or talked about, where is the ship's laundry?
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Destiny must have self repair.
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Having waded through this quagmire, I see that there are points both for and against Destiny being designed with the ability to repair itself. Personally, I believe that there is a repair system...and that we've seen a small part of it.
My personal speculation - and let me be clear that that's all it is - would be that there were a veritable army of repair robots originally, as others have suggested. Perhaps many of them were still operational when Destiny first arrived in the galaxy she was traversing when our story began in Air. But then the Blue Aliens set their sights on the ship. They obviously managed to do some pretty significant damage to her at some point. When that first happened, the robots swarmed out of the ship to do their repairs. Most of them were still out there the next time the BA caught up with her, and their fighters were able to clear them off the hull. They wanted to damage the ship enough to take it, and having the robots fix her up every time they managed to breach the shields simply would not do. Perhaps Destiny, damaged as she was and without her army of repair bots, would have simply remained in FTL and gotten the frak out of Dodge before activating any more. But then she had to stop for an incoming wormhole, and then the new passengers needed to make a few stops to avoid dying...Destiny hasn't had the chance to do anything about the situation, or is expecting her passengers to deal with it now that they're aboard.
In other words, IMHO, there was a system, and now it - like so many other things - is broken. Perhaps when they finally have control of the ship, they can fix that, or fix things themselves. Either way, their arrival has changed Destiny's priorities.
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Yeah, self repair does make a lot of sense for a ship that is millions of years old and still in operation.
One thing I really wonder about, is the apparent Ancient philosophy of avoiding the use of robots and such. You assume it would be easy for them to build one, but that little robot in the crate was the very first Ancient robot we ever saw. Unless, that one girl bot who built replicators was the thing that turned them off of the whole idea?
Maybe Destiny wasn't launched. Maybe it ran away.
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Originally posted by kwlafayette View PostIn short, all damage that we have seen is superficial, and does not in any way affect the long term viability of Destiny.
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I have been pondering on the materials required to make something that is functional a million years later. Oxidation, reactive-ness, acidity, uv, heat - there are a lot of forces at work. Heck my 20 year old Mercedes has ABS crumbling, and metal rusted or oxidized. The material science of the Ancients and other races must have been very advanced. Testing to ensure all this would have indeed been interesting (e.g. 5m years, -100 to 300C, vacuum to 30 ATM, radiation, uv, chemical, liquid, etc). But then our current phones would have been just as magical to our ancestors.
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Oh, my, another extremely interesting old thread, full of really good points! Questions are raised. Answers may be needed. Can't.... resist! P-}
Life Support has never been in use, or so we've been told. It never broke, but exhausted a key component. How? With no breathing things on board? Air leaking thru the shields is one thing, but the scrubbers were chock-full with muck, presumably scrubbed from the ship's air. Did something or someone foul the air beyond the designed limits? Why not just vent such air? Did something else fail that forced the scrubbers to act beyond their capability? Hard to say. Hard to believe it's just a plot hole, too.
As a side note, the Seed Ships do look and act as more modern versions of Destiny, with their bigger "batteries" and faster FTL that allows 'em to perform their more complex & time-consuming tasks and still keep ahead of Destiny. Were they launched in advance, or to be "in advance", even if launched decades after? Translating from Ancient can be tricky!
The Ancients were exceptionally good at Engineering. They were also exceptionally overconfident. And yet...
Shouldn't something as vital and all-encompassing as a self-repair system, even if it was non-operational, be prominently mentioned in the ship's Database, like, in the main menu of every Console, at the same level as Shields, Weapons, Navigation, or Life Support?
Option 1) Micrometeor/Gamma-Ray/Lucky-shot damage surgically destroyed the relevant records, indexes, references, and backups.
Option 2) The ship's AI is actually rogue and hides such information for unfathomable reasons.
Option 3) No such system (whatever its name or make) exists.
Option 4) Crap UI design? Really?
Destiny has been extensively damaged. So much so that every single system is on its last 'straw', down to the last working part of everything. No redundancy left. Parts of the energy distribution network are in fact offline. Yet the mission goes on. Seems the Ancients really knew how to build 'em back in their time!
But, why not add some sort of smart repair (nano)bots to the sturdiest ship of all time? As just another redundancy layer? Entropy may be the answer. Repair bots would be complex machines, subject to wear and tear themselves. Even with scavenged parts from fallen comrades, their failure rate would be much higher than that of the ship's hull, or the FTL engines, thus unavoidably becoming so much deadweight. So the Ancients saved themselves the expense/mass/headache and instead made the ship sturdier!
Last but not least, Destiny's damage seems to come from rather brutal battles it's sustained. Sure? On closer look, I'd rather guess the only real enemy that's managed to truly dent the ship is time, in vast amounts. Engines that redefine space-time itself (aka the fabric of reality) don't just rust. Shields that withstand all kinds of stellar energies won't buckle under just any attack. We've seen what happens to matter that hits the FTL "cocoon". Destiny is only reachable thru the Gate, or when star-sipping, and we've seen how much luck the Blue Aliens had with their attacks. Unless its crew makes the mistake of weakening the shields...
Had Destiny met advanced Aliens, on par with the Ancients, or, say, Ascended Beings, they could have stopped it, boarded it, repaired it, reprogrammed it, or... just let it pass, poor thing. Odds are such an encounter never happened.
Which leaves... hypervelocity particles/meteoroids, gamma-ray bursts, novas, supernovas, pulsars, quasars, black holes, gravity waves, dark matter, interdimensional shenanigans... all low-odds events, which still have taken their toll along the megayears.
If only Destiny could talk!
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