Colonizing the Rim, Longshot style

The so-called ‘Longshot’ expeditions were baseline humanity’s first and most distant steps out of the Solar System. Piggybacking on Posthuman technologies, the longshots and the infrastructure around them are generally acknowledges as the height of collaboration between baselines and their hyperaccelerated descendents.

Each longshot expedition was unique, but all had the following features:

Several thousand Earthborn colonists in hibernation; ranging from 2,580 (39th expedition) to 58,573 (85th expedition), though more normally the ships carried between 5 and 25,000.

Frozen ova as well as a broad selection of plants, animals and microbial cultures, both natural and artificial.

Several general-purpose fabricators with blueprints for essentially everything required by a new colony along with many additional blueprints covering most technological artifacts.

A number of utility ships and machines for use before the fabers were set up, as well as SSTO and orbit-to-surface drop craft.

Ample faber feedstock, again to tide the initial colony over until infrastructure could be properly set up.

An entire host of disposable probes and a full set of scientific and survey sensors.

Later longshots also added one or more shortjump-capable ‘runabouts’, with the most lavishly-equipped ones even having their own interstellar-ranged subcraft.

The Posthumans provided their own additions as well, taking the form of autonomous von neuman machines that erected posthuman machinery and artifacts as well as doing whatever exploration tasks the posthumans deemed necessary or interesting. There was no communication after the longshot had arrived though, the constructors were distinctly subsentient.

It was not until later that the existence and scope of the feral drone/Ailife problem became apparent; many longshot colonies were forced to improvise weapons to defend themselves in the succeeding decades. Thankfully, the unsophistication of the active Ailife around the start of the 22nd century meant that even scientific and utility gear like weaponized sounding rockets and microwave power transmitters were sufficient.

Another issue was that once a longshot was launched, it was cut off for good, or at least until a later ship could lay a communication relay out to the destination – something that wasn’t to come for a generation or more. The posthumans did maintain some form of contact with their creations, though even that was limited by the early first-generation FTL technologies they were using.

This led into another issue normally overlooked by those who expanded outward on second-generation FTL; most Longshots lacked any form of reality-editing technologies outside of the FTL drive in the longshot ship itself, which was irrepairably ruined by the long transit distance. While the last few longshots were able to bring delta dust technology with them and eventually circulate it through the Rim in the 22nd century, for most longshot colonies there was no going back.