Editing Openai/691a2d9f-c044-8012-bccf-942bfce6334d (section)

=== Assistant: 17-11-25 03:04 ===
17-11-25 03:04
GPT-5.1 Thinking

Ah, got you now. You’re not trying to reenact Vorbis’ mass suicide logistics; you’re talking about the structure:
* Go out with full supplies
* Use part of them to seed a cache further ahead
* Keep enough to come back
* Later expeditions (or a later generational ship) use those caches to push the frontier further

And in your version, the “caches” are comets the ship encounters along the way and retrofits.

So:

: 

No dead soldiers required. Clear.

Let’s separate two things:
# The Vorbis pattern without deaths (this is feasible in principle)
# Whether natural comets in ''interstellar'' space can actually be used like this (this is where physics kills the romance)

==== In purely abstract logistics terms, yes, you can do: ====
* Forward caching with return: - Mission carries X supplies - Goes to distance d, drops some fraction, and returns on the remainder - Next mission goes further using that cache, drops another cache, returns, etc.

This is exactly how real Antarctic expeditions and polar crossings were done, except with fewer dead soldiers than Vorbis’ ruthlessness:
* set up depots
* hop from depot to depot
* sometimes teams turned back after laying caches for others.

So as a pattern, your “non-lethal Vorbis desert crossing” is solid.

==== Here’s the hard stop. ====

Between stars, in the actual interstellar gulf, there are huge problems:

===== - Interstellar space isn’t full of nicely spaced rocks on predictable orbits. =====
* We’ve only seen two confirmed interstellar objects so far: ‘Oumuamua and Borisov. That gives you a sense of just how sparse this stuff is.
* The odds that a generational ship flying a nearly straight line to Alpha Centauri will pass near multiple comets you can retrofit are effectively zero unless you or someone else launched them there.

So unless we ourselves fire off “comet-like depots” along the line in advance, nature will not hand them to us.

===== In the true mid-gap, there is no dominant central gravity like the Sun forcing closed orbits. Objects are basically on free, straight-ish trajectories relative to the galactic frame. =====

So the idea:

: 

doesn’t really exist out there.
You either:
* have something bound to a star (still essentially in that star’s deep gravity well), or
* you have a free-flying interstellar object that won’t “loop back” around anything.

“Orbits that cross again further down the line” is a stellar system phenomenon, not a mid-gap one.

===== Even if you did find a comet at, say, 4 light-years out (which is already basically Alpha Centauri’s territory), a “return” for humans at any realistic sub-light speed is: =====
* centuries to millennia back home
* generations spent just shuttling resources out and in
* you’d be better off sending uncrewed logistics probes instead of human crews.

So the “go forward, seed comet, come back on remaining supplies” pattern makes sense inside a stellar system (Solar System, Alpha Centauri system, Kuiper Belt, Oort region), but not across most of the star-to-star gap.

==== Your non-lethal Vorbis logistics works best in these regimes: ====
# Inside the Solar System - Use comets / asteroids as depots. - Crew or robots go out, drop caches, and come back. - The generational or deep-space ship later follows a route benefiting from those depots.
# Inside the destination system (Alpha Centauri) - Once you get there with advanced tech, you can do the same thing: - seed local comets with resources - set up inner–outer logistics lines.
# For interstellar: forward uncrewed depots, not natural comets - Instead of hoping for naturally convenient comets, you send engineered depot craft: - tanks + reactors + vaults - maybe attached to or built from local rocks when available - These depots are fired along nearly the same trajectory as the future generational ship. - They are your “non-lethal Vorbis supply line” across the desert.

In other words, the pattern is right — the resource carriers must be artificial for the interstellar part, and comets are more like opportunistic mass sources when near stars.

==== If I rewrite your thought in a grounded, sci-fi-hard way: ====
* Generational Ship A travels outward.
* When it encounters a suitable body (comet/asteroid) inside a stellar system, it: - refuels from it - also leaves behind extra supplies and infrastructure on it
* Ship A either continues or returns using remaining fuel.
* Later ships use that retrofitted body as a depot.
* Over centuries, this creates a chain of seeded oases in the outer system(s), derived from comets/asteroids plus extra water/mass we deliberately store on them.

That scheme is coherent and doesn’t require killing anyone.
It just doesn’t solve the true “middle of the 4.3 ly gap” problem via natural comets. That part still needs fully artificial depots or just one ship carrying everything.

So: you didn’t miss the point; your pattern is right.
The part that fails isn’t the Vorbis logic, it’s our romantic hope that the interstellar gulf will conveniently contain re-usable stones in the right place and direction.

It won’t.
So we’d have to throw the stones ourselves.