The Ares Program was a CCR (Conlegium Caelum Romanum) spaceflight endeavor that succeeded in establishing a Roman power base on the surface of the planet Mars. Founded as a counter to the Mayan Itzamna Program, Ares was started in 1960 once news of the Mayan space launch to Mars was reported. Though their rivals were met with failure, the Roman program managed to land a man on the Red Planet's surface by early July 1970.
As a far more ambitious program than its predecessor the Artemis Program, Ares hoped to immediately found a city and begin a rapid expansion across the planet's surface. The main advantage it had was that detailed plans were developed throughout the 60's in regards to the future of the project, and so each stage could rapidly go from one to the other with very little lag time in between.
Unlike a mission to the Moon, going to Mars came with problems that had never even been considered by humans before. These challenges included: long periods in the confined zero-gravity space ship, psychological trauma from isolation from Earth, and complete separation from Earth and its facilities. Whilst the Mayan program failed to completely account for these issues, the Romans had the perfect solution to the problem, an entirely unique vessel dubbed the Aeneas, the first fully functional interplanetary starship.
History
Itzamna Program
Started February 1957, the Itzamna Program was an extremely ambitious attempt by the Mayan Conglomerate to surpass the Romans in their decades long Culture War. Having already failed to colonize the Moon first, and falling behind Roman satellite technology, the Mayans believed that something which they believed required only extensive access to resources would put them on equal ground with the Romans. Unfortunately, the technical difficulties of traveling to another planet were far greater in number than they had originally anticipated, resulting in the total failure of the Itzamna flight.
The Itzamna's engine was its finest component. Utilizing controlled bursts from a fissionable fuel activated by a neutron laser, its engines were the most advanced piece of equipment built at the time, surpassing even anything that the Romans had built. The only defect inherent in this system was that the Mayans lacked the computational technology to properly control the mechanism, and if the neutron exposure was not carefully controlled, relative to the actual rate of fission of the material, it risked reaching critical mass and destroying the ship in a nuclear fireball. This fortunately did not happen.
What did go wrong however, was the life support system failed. This used a honeycomb like machine which contained a series of catalysts that could turn carbon dioxide back into oxygen, with the addition of perfectly distilled water. This last part was especially important as any impurities in the water would rapidly built up in the system and render it useless. It was exactly this issue with ended the mission and brought about the death of the entire crew. In both transport and storage of the water, minute amounts of their container flaked off into the water, slowly making it harder, eventually to the point that it overwhelmed the system.
Although another mission was planned for 1965, public opinion against the mission as well as lack of confidence from the engineering teams forced a complete cancellation of the program. With the Mayans now completely focused on the Moon, the Romans had free reign to travel to Mars on their own accord.
Aeneas
The Aeneas was the finest piece of engineering in all of history up to that point. Named after the legendary Trojan descendant of Romulus, the ship was seen as a beacon of a new era in Roman history, ushering in the glory of the Space Age. Though the program was not a driving force of the space age in itself, it was certainly a sign of things to come.
Construction started on the Mars Colonizer in December of 1967. Each component was built at different locations around the Empire and finally brought to the Space Elevator in Somalia to be transported to space for final assembly. In order to facilitate the final stage of construction, the Caelefactio was built. This structure was the first shipyard ever built in space, and still remains the largest facility of its kind. Given all of the pieces, the Caelefactio was capable of constructing the entire Aeneas colonizer in only 5 months.
The first part to look at is power generation. All energy used by the Aeneas came from a T-T fusion reactor that was fueled by a 10,000 metric ton supply of Tritium. As this supply can last it a year and a half of continuous operation, the reactor uses up around 0.8 kg of Tritium per hour. The maximum practical power output of the Aeneas' fusion reactor is therefore 10 GW, with it frequently operating at around 5-7 GW output. To generate thrust, some of this energy is used to electromagnetically accelerate lead ions out through four thrusters. Considering that about 60% of the power being produced is dedicated to propulsion during the acceleration phase, the thrusters are capable of accelerating the 200,000 metric ton vessel by 5.5 ms-2. This allows the craft to reach its maximum safe velocity of 0.1% the speed of light in about 15 hours. Unfortunately, for safety reasons, on the first flight the Aeneas operated well below this velocity, which explains the long time it took to actually reach the Red Planet.
The high operating velocity and acceleration rate of the Aeneas' thrusters put it in the class of interplanetary drive. Any ship's propulsion system that can reach a velocity of 0.05% light speed in a day or less, receives this classification. However, the Aeneas was the first ship to ever achieve this in human history. This in itself has made the Aeneas, and its propulsion system in particular, one of Rome's Seven Wonders of Engineering, serving as the model for which all other interplanetary drives have been based on. The technology is a closely guarded secret, something which is reflected in its secretive method of construction.
The next most impressive part of the ship is its operating system, meaning the control computers. At the ship's center is a rudimentary artificial intelligence generated by a one ton piece of equipment which holds over 120,000 processors. Each of these units can perform 400 million calculations per second and 100 TriQuadis (50 MB) of random access memory. The AI, dubbed Aeneas, can solve virtually all standard problems that the programmers have foreseen might happen to the ship, as well as being able to run all day-to-day systems. In the event that something which it was not programmed to handle occurs, it will first alert the ship's crew, then postulate a potential solution based off the data that is stored in the ship's 20,000 PenteQuadis (10,000 TB) hard drives and give this to the crew to help them resolve the situation. It can also answer any questions to which it has relevant info in the data banks to, as well as play most existing Roman strategy games to entertain the crew.
Separate operating systems exist to oversee the other more complex systems on board the ship, including but not limited to: the fusion reactor, life support and radiation shielding. This allows the AI to deal with primary issues like ship trajectory, medical emergencies or intraship communication.
Finally, the life support and habitat systems on the ship are one of its most integral component types, accounting for over half a third of its volume and nearly 25% of its mass. Using technology obtained from the Inca, the Aeneas is completely self-sustainable, able to support a crew of at most 40 people. There are dedicated systems for carbon and water recycling, tasks which are performed with very little measurable waste, and food growth through Inca therapeutic cloning stations. As long as energy, and nutrients in the last case, are supplied, these systems can go on running for decades, though the ship only contains enough resources to run them for half of one. Far away from home, the Aeneas has been outfitted with the most advanced medical gear of Earth, allowing its medical bay to treat things from blisters and cuts, to heart trauma and cancer. In the entire service record of the Aeneas, not a single person has died onboard. Though given no one above the age of 40 has been aboard, this is a rather likely reality.
Back to Superpowers, Space Timeline or Timeline