Setting
The trilogy is set in the future, when the human race is literally reaching for the stars. The entire Solar System has been linked together through accelerator chains, and the "Big 5" nations of Earth have set in motion a plan to colonise the galaxy. This is known as the Terran Expansionary Phase. It lasted ninety years from 2120 to 2210.
The first step was to launch probes into outer space. The probes reported any Earth-sized planet they encountered during their centuries-long voyage. Each probe was followed by a survey ship ten years later. The ship's mission was to map the planet and if it was habitable, it would signal Earth and then, while waiting for the colonists to arrive, terraform the planet.
This is the second step in the phase. The survey ship mined materials from asteroids and used them to build a robot factory in space — a process that could take decades. The resulting robots built more space factories that in turn produced better robots. They also built large satellite dishes to collect data sent from Earth containing the latest technological advances. Then the actual terraforming took place. The robots landed on the planet and built cities while also launching more probes and survey ships further into space.
Once Earth received news of a habitable planet, the third and final step took place. Ten giant passenger discs, each carrying two hundred thousand colonists in stasis, were towed into space. Next came the engine unit, which was linked to the front of the discs, and then the colony ship was completed and ready to go.
During the 2190s fifty colony ships were launched from the EEC's Ceres base, among them the Snowball 9, which carried the first colonists for planet Eden on the Eridani A system. For the next three years, the accelerator chains beyond Pluto fired ten-ton blocks of ammonia ice at the traveling ship. The Snowball 9 caught the ice blocks with hooks and piled it around the passenger discs, forming a hollow shell that would cover most of the ship and would serve as a shield until it was needed to fuel the fusion engines on the later part of the trip. This ice shell gave the Snowball series its name.
After receiving the last ice block, the crew put the ship in autopilot and went to hibernate with the passengers, leaving the ship's maintenance to robots. Except for a brief period of activity to start deceleration, the crew slept for most of the trip, waking up one year before reaching Eden. The plan was to continue deceleration while consuming the last of the ice shell, and then put the ship in orbit around the planet, delivering the passengers down by gliders that would be retrieved by hooks to be reused.
Read more about this topic: Snowball (game)
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“The mind cannot support moral chaos for long. Men are under as strong a compulsion to invent an ethical setting for their behavior as spiders are to weave themselves webs.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“We believe that Carlyle has, after all, more readers, and is better known to-day for this very originality of style, and that posterity will have reason to thank him for emancipating the language, in some measure, from the fetters which a merely conservative, aimless, and pedantic literary class had imposed upon it, and setting an example of greater freedom and naturalness.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A fit abode for a poet. Stage setting at least correct.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)