253 Mathilde is an audio drama series I've been making, which takes place in the 22nd and 23rd centuries on a generational asteroid ship which has been underway for about a century. Unlike most stories with that premise, nobody has forgotten they're in space nor reverted to a primitive state... it's neither dystopia nor utopia. There is conflict about whether to keep going or turn around and head home. None of the people alive at this point signed up for the mission, they were born into it... but those who did sign up are still in living memory, and they're still in regular contact with Earth despite the 7 months needed to get a reply to a question from the Oort cloud.
I put a lot of effort into making this as realistic as I can, and went into some detail about it on the "Making of" documentary. 253 Mathilde is a bigger asteroid than you'd probably really want to pick as your spaceship, but I needed it to have a little gravity. The timeline of launching a crewed asteroid in the early 22nd century is incredibly soon, but I made it plausible via help from alien visitors who are centuries ahead technologically and see the project as a way to get themselves home.
Season 2, which takes place 22 years after season 1, makes the speed of travel a bit less realistic with constant accelerations of 0.1 G which have gotten asteroid up to 0.75 C. With this season I'm getting into the issue of how the exploration of a new star system would be conducted. Decelerating an asteroid to enter the system is slow and wasteful. Flying an asteroid through a system at relativistic speeds would be a recipe for lots of energetic explosions and not much observation time. So my proposal is a tiny deceleration pod, designed for one person, which is paired with a fuel tanker orders of magnitude larger. Thanks to the low mass, it's able to bleed off the 0.75 C in a matter of 6 weeks to enter the system while the asteroid itself continues onward. Of course, that makes the pod a one way mission and opens up some ethical issues.
Another issue of season 2 is relativistic kinetic weapons and the dark forest theory, but with a bit of a different take on it than Liu Cixin's.
Season 3 will deal with passing the point of no return, where you're traveling so fast that you no longer have enough propellant mass left in your asteroid to slow down if you wanted to.
253 Mathilde
Re: 253 Mathilde
This is really cool. I listened to the trailer. It reminds me a lot of X Minus One from the 1950s. Great job!
