Building Your First Interstellar Colony

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Establishing your first interstellar colony is relatively easy, compared to your first interplanetary colony. But it all depends on the destination solar system and its worlds.

The first interstellar colony is the sign that the empire is truly space flight capable. In most cases also even FTL capable.

This topic assumes you have all basic manufacturing setup in your home system. Capable of producing at least basic spacecraft with gravity drive technology and wormhole FTL drive technology. Read Building Your First Moon Colony if you have not built up your home system to produce these base spacefaring technologies.

Home System Infrastructure

It is critical that your home system has access to eludium. This allows the manufacturing of gravity drive technology, which is not only cheaper to produce but also much easier to operate than conventual rocket drives.

Access to lumenite will allow for wormhole FTL drive technology, which lets spacecraft travel instantly between solar systems. While this makes interstellar travel much much easier and faster, it is actually not a requirement if hour long sublight speed deadheading is considered tolerable.

Spacecraft Blueprint Acquisition

A spacecraft is the ideal way to travel the galaxy. A spacecraft will greatly benefit from having a full crew, a sizable cargo hold, adequate Sensors, and above mentioned drive technologies are recommended for an interstellar voyage.

The designer can be used to create a spacecraft blueprint. But the designer is not easy to use for everyone, so it is possible to aquire spacecraft blueprints designed and published by other players.

Recommended spacecraft blueprint exchange designs:

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Some of these spacecraft blueprints might even be editable if you want to try and modify one later.

Spacecraft Construction

To manufacture a spacecraft the spacecraft blueprint first has to be saved onto a storage media device, such as paper, disk, or thumb drive.

Construct a spacecraft factory and set the select your above chosen spacecraft blueprint. The spacecraft will require some basic construction materials and a lot of different modules.

To produce the needed modules their patents first have to be researched. Research can be done at a university, but some patents might be hidden until their prerequisites have been researched first. For example the gravity drive module patent will be hidden until the rocket drive module patent has been researched.

Once all the needed patents have been researched, construct an airport repair shop to start manufacturing of the modules.

Exploration of New Solar Systems

First step in making an interstellar colony, is of course exploration and locating of suitable worlds to colonize.

Exploring new solar systems is simple and just requires that a spacecraft enters it. But to get a system survey of the solar system the spacecraft has to be equipped with sensors.

Exploration is not impossible without senors, but it requires landing on a world and manually foraging the resources to learn their quality.

Suitable Solar System

Any solar system with at least one world can be colonized. But not all solar systems have anything useful to contribute to the greater empire.

Solar systems with a habitable world can produce an officer, so those are always useful for a fledgling empire.

If the home system doesn't contain any good sources of cryozine or ioplasma, those are always good resources to try and aquire.

Colony Construction

The interstellar distance between solar systems is so great that cities can't automatically share commodities between them. This means that all construction materials needed to start a colony has to be either be brought there by spacecraft or manufactured in the new solar system.

It is therefore preferred to make each solar system totally self-sufficient. Making them able to manufacture construction materials, tools, medical commodities and food.

While making a self-sufficient colony in a harsh environment is possible, it is easier to start out by colonizing a habitable world first. This can even be done without bringing construction materials from the home system, since starting from scratch with a stone mine is easy.

Jump-started Colony Construction

Bringing the necessary construction materials to a new solar system will help jump-start the colony's development.

Primarily metal and hammers are used in all simple construction on a habitable world. But to start a harsh environment colony or build advanced buildings, more advanced construction materials and tools are required.

Here is a list commodities that are good to bring:

• Metal
• Mechanical Parts
• Textiles
• Plastic
• Electronic Parts
• Computers
• Hammers
• Shovels
• Wrenches
• Sewing Needles
• Glue Guns
• Soldering Irons

Place an airport terminal construction site and a broker construction site, these will function normally even while under still under construction. Land the spacecraft at the airport terminal's site and offer to sell the commodities for free on the Trade communication channel, the broker and/or airport should then respond with offers to buy them for free.

If the spacecraft is able, bringing passengers will also greatly increase colonization speed. Passengers can be transported in passenger berthes or cryo berths.

Broker Shipments

Once the new solar system has been colonized there might be new or better resources that would be better used in the home system. Commodities can be send from one solar system to another using shipments.

Shipments are simple fire-and-forget one-way commodity packages. A broker is setup to schedule the shipment, it will then fetch the commodities from any connected buildings to fill the order. Once the shipment order is filled, the shipment will be send at an hourly interval. When a shipment is then received by the recipient city, it will try to store the commodities in empty warehouses and other buildings, if no storage is found the commodities are simply discarded.