Travel broadens the mind. So goes the old saying that is ten times more true today. Mind-broadening is what we do -- it's our business, our reason for existence, and the reason we pour so many Earthly resources into the mechanisms of space travel. That's not to say that space travel is enjoyable. It's not. Like most vehicles, space craft are designed around their limitations, and we really only care about the destination, not the trip. Once someone figures out how to let everyone sleep through the whole thing we'll all be better off.
I'm kidding of course. The experience counts for something, even if it's difficult. My first space voyage -- the hyperbolic clipper that took me to Mars -- was a relative pleasure cruise compared with what was to come. I had my own cabin, coffin-like though it was, with a (sort of) door that I could close. The ship had facilities specifically set aside for recreation, and micro-gravity games for us all to learn. Pyramid for the hard-core athletes, where two teams of four try to get balls into goals at the corners of a tetrahedron. I tried it once and the padding was not enough. For the less serious, or for those who just wanted to find temporary bunkmates, Belly-ball was a nice distraction. I forget the complicated rules but you ended up squishing your abdomen up against that of strangers a little too forcefully for my taste.
Mars to Jupiter was a short transfer orbit: high accelerations and a dead coast. The long powered boost phase meant G-couches that were remarkably uncomfortable and took up a lot of room. They collapsed, but not nearly enough, so my personal space was largely dominated by a lump of useless furniture. Thankfully there was a well-appointed gym and I spent the last part of the flight (after the first five weeks when I got exercise a different way) running a treadmill in a traction harness. That was, for me, much more pleasant than just floating about.
That was cramped, smelly and uncomfortable, and it was sheer heaven compared to interstellar travel. My first reaction to seeing our starship docked at the Callisto station was shock at how small it was. It looked like a tiny pencil next to the long haulers and clippers, and this was going to take us to the stars? And then, like everyone, I broke out laughing. It looked like a dick.
Of course the phallic shape follows from the design constraints. Up front is a hemispherical shield that ablates to protect us from super-luminal matter. Behind that a long, slightly more narrow cylinder of cargo and living modules. And at the end a series of slightly larger spherical tanks for reaction-mass and consumables. The structural framework only adds to the whole erect-organ effect. To add insult to injury the loop drive itself is a ring: a ring about the same circumference as the length of the ship, set about two-thirds of the way back. A yoni for the thrusting lingam.
Sperm probably aren't packed so close together. The 56 of us spent the entire trip crammed into a space about as big as a school bus. It was crisscrossed with handholds which allowed spaces to be divided with curtains, but frankly there was no place to get away from anyone. So my experience has been that space travel involves progressively smaller and smaller, stuffier and stuffier spaces. Fortunately the interstellar voyage was relatively short, but that doesn't mean it was less eventful.
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