Questionable Questing

The technology for, say, colony ships...is simply very far off. The FTL itself isn't even a mature enough technology that they're confident they could shroud a whole sufficiently sized ship in the warp bubble or whatever.

... I don't get how that'd work. If you've got enough of a scientific and industrial base to develop FTL spacetravel I'd assume you'd possess the technology needed to build colony ships or something along those lines.

Heck, I'm pretty sure that theoretically we could build a colony ship right now. It'd be a massive resource sink and it wouldn't be FTL but it might just barely be feasible.

Don't quote me on this though, I'm probably wrong.

Maybe subluminal colony ships, but maybe your FTL technology needs decades of refinement before you can send a ship with enough people, seed samples, initial food, ETC to viably set up on another planet by way of FTL. Perhaps they haven't even found any planets they wouldn't have to set up a load of self contained biosphere compounds on, meaning they may as well just set up on the moon or mars or some shit.

A ship capable of independent colonization of another body needs to be able to carry thousands of people (for genetic diversity) and everything they need to get set up. You could alternatively divide the work between a lot of ships, but that risks losing vital parts of it, and requires you to coordinate all of it.

So they end up in a weird limbo where their FTL only really enables them to set up satellites around exoplanets and such which send data that, barring manned FTL satellite servicing ships, will not return to earth for years. The stars have been opened up to them, but none of the technology is mature enough to truly lay claim to them yet, or jailbreak humanity from Terra in any economically viable manner.

Oh wait derp I didn't read the comment you posted right under your initial post.

Yeah this'd be a feasible idea if the actual FTL mechanism was borked/needed refinement. Like you posted in the first place.

Oops.

Heck, perhaps their engineering isn't even up to the task of making an FTL craft that can reenter an atmosphere without breaking the fuck out of it's drive, or even reenter in general.
Either way, tis the story of humanities absolute babysteps as an interstellar species.

Wait I thought we were talking about enormous manatees.



I kid I kid...

Yeah that is a fun concept. I like.