Colic. They’ll all die of colic.
If you’re a vampire, you better bring at least one box of earth from Earth.
Which brings up the question of where in space the “vampire line” is: the point at which the sun would be just another star in the sky. Or are vampires only sensitive to the Earth’s sun?
Hah! You asked for it: I remember a story from one of those Tales From the Crypt-type comic books about a vampire who stowed away on an intergalactic transport and began to systematically eliminate all the crew/passengers (he cut their throats rather than bite them so there wouldn’t be any undead competition). Since the sun never rose, he was very successful. Until he finished off his last victim, the pilot, who had set the controls of the ship on an impact course with a big old star. Burn, baby, burn.
And they’ll need to land first, to be set up to film the first landing of humans on the world.
This was what I came in to say. You’d likely want your starting tech level to be steam powered. Robust, rugged machinery that doesn’t need high precision tools to maintain. Then you’d have centuries of already completed R&D to evolve the tech base as you build infrastructure to support it.
A few hundred people seems way too low to maintain let alone develop an Industrial Revolution level of technology.
You’re gonna need lots and lots of fuel to power your steam engines, meaning lots and lots of people.
I don’t know, maybe you could initially aim for an Aztec/Maya level of technology. It was sufficient for them to be able to create food surpluses allowing specialization without the use of draft animals.
There is a series of science fiction stories by Rob Garitta about a colonized planet by name of Zaonia. As the Atomic Rockets site (Interstellar Trade - Atomic Rockets) describes it:
Rob Garitta’s Planet Zaonia is sort of like the Duchy of Grand Fenwick in space. It is a tiny interstellar colony with backwards technology which manages to become a galactic trade powerhouse by innovative use of “obsolete” tech.
Because Zaonia is extremely paranoid about becoming dependent on foreign imports and thus becoming reduced by trade imbalance to an impoverished “third-world planet” or even a colonial possession, the Zaonians maintained strict laws against any tech they didn’t have the means to independently build for themselves. Even when this meant that they could only maintain a civilization roughly equivalent to the turn of the 20th century United States, in a galaxy of interstellar polities. The series of novels details the clever use by the Zaonians of such utterly obsolete tools as slide rules, analog adding machines, logarithm tables, nomogram charts, legal documents on hard-copy paper confirmed by hand-written signatures signed in real time, etc. The Zaonians confound the expectations of those who attempt to subdue them using economic warfare by simply being too primitive to sabotage.
Brilliant!
One thing that occurs to me, is that artificial wombs might not actually be useful. The premise behind assuming that they would be is that living organisms (at least, individual organisms, not populations) can’t survive for the centuries it’d take a ship to reach its destination, but that a machine can. But an artificial womb isn’t just any machine. It has to be similar enough to a real womb that a zygote can implant in its inner surface, and it has to be able to provide something that mimics a growing half of a placenta. A device that’s similar enough to living tissue to do both of those things would likely also be similar enough to living tissue that it would degrade with time, as well.
You might be able to get away with bringing the machines that make artificial wombs. But who knows how large or complicated those might be? I wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be even more difficult than microchip fabs.
Yeah, well the world is hollow and I have touched the sky — ouch! OUCH!! My temples!
They’d most likey be the same machines you use to make everything else. Including copies of these tools themselves. Really, all this comes down to, “What is the minimum toolset we need to rebuild modern society?” So what if we need three, four, five, layers of tools to build the tools to build the tools…so long as we have the information, the rest is just putting in the work.
But modern technology is complex enough that all of the tools to build the tools might end up being bigger, heavier, and more difficult than a bunch of humans and beasts of burden.
I’m blanking on a cite but there have been various survival/prepping sites devoted to the absolute minimum machine tools needed to jump-start industrial civilization. The fundamental tools from which everything else can be tooled. I would imagine a lot of overlap with the needs of a colony that had to be independent from square one.
I think that bamboo has been mentioned earlier. In spite of being invasive, would taking bamboo to cultivate be of any use? It grows pretty fast (well, comparatively speaking) and has a lot of uses. Some parts of it are edible by different species. It can produce useful fibers. Bamboo structures are not the worst thing to have. Plus, you can use it to fish for those strange mud things in the creek.
That’s a plot point from A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge.
According to some people (most of whom probably have perpetual munchies) every single thing necessary for humanity can be made out of hemp, and do it better than anything else.
A 2000 AD Future Shocks story had a space vampire defeated by the spaceship’s cook, with a cruet full of garlic salt.
Clever. And tasty.
Isn’t bamboo a source of water? I’ve seen YouTube clips where the native hacks into a stalk between two knuckles and drinks their fill.