Guide talk:Columbus series

Background

• The United States leveraged its leading role within the Western Alliance to influence NUN funding for an "epic Human odyssey" to deliver an international crew to other local systems for hands-on exploration of those exoplanets. Because the ships would be operating outside the legislatively-mandated authority region of the ISA, a special NUN office was established to oversee all aspects [hence the UNSS prefix].

• Fusion-powered ion drives are still suspect to some, because of the rather public over-propulsion failures of the TAU program and the complete vehicle losses of the preceding Galileo and AFP-1 projects. Yet, it was a scientifically foregone conclusion that fusion must be developed in order to overcome the power/mass ratio issue that existed as limits with fission-powered ion drives.

• An international redesign of a fusion-powered ion drive was undertaken.