Founders and Quartic Orbiters

The first of the divisions, Founders contend with the extremely ambitious task of carrying the other machines across the deep blackness of space safely. Through the strain of launch, the decades-long cruise barreling through the void at unimaginable speed, and the heat and hardship of bleeding off all that speed to achieve orbit, the Founders must not only  keep their payloads intact, but nigh untouched.

To this end, Founders are composed of shielding, rugged computation systems and sensors, some chemical fuel with small rocket engines, and various parachutes and sails for speeding up and slowing down. Weighing in at 400 kg (880 lb), they are the result of a design tug-of-war between two extremes: a fleet of many small, disposable spacecraft and one huge, all-important spacecraft. Small spacecrafts have the advantage that the failure of many or even most of them may not compromise the mission, and they require very light parachutes and propulsion sails, since less material has to be spent supporting the flat material. A single large spacecraft, meanwhile, requires very little radiation shielding and armor for its size, since its bulk does much of the work, saving precious mass for other uses. As usual, the optimal solution lays between these extremes, but in this case, closer to the smaller end: each Founder carries only two payloads.

Given the enormous cost of accelerating and decelerating mass to and from such high speeds, they are as light as possible. Still, their payloads comprise only 10% of their mass, the rest loyally serving to protect and transport them. And loyalty it is, for Founders break away in stages as their mission progresses, reducing themselves ultimately to space debris. This sacrifice of such a heavily designed craft for such tiny cargo means that the choice of payload is pivotal. As the robots can self-replicate, a minimal amount of material is needed compared to the colossal task ahead, yet each part of the system must be present for it to work at all. As such, each of the 20 sets of Founders in the Initiative, destined for 20 planets, has some redundancy.

First and foremost, each planet will receive four Quartic Telecommunications Orbiters, severe overkill given that the Initiative could work with just one per planet. However, these Orbiters are instrumental, ferrying messages to and from Earth and allowing the Bases below to communicate to others far away. Despite their importance, they orbit far beyond the reach of any machines that could repair or maintain them. Thus, they are marvels of engineering, crafted to the limit of modern technology, designed to last 350 years each. Their designs are tough yet mechanically uncomplicated, having precious few moving parts and overengineered from shielding to wiring to structural supports. After unfolding in space, an Orbiter's only moving parts are its gyroscopes keeping it oriented; its small rocket nozzles, set of radio transceivers, and radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) require no moving parts. These high-end overseers constantly watching the more humble machines below are quite literally higher powers to them; hence their name, a pun on the mathematical term for a variable with an exponent of 4.

All other payloads are smaller than Quartic Orbiters since they, unlike them, must include a way to land on the planet instead of simply entering orbit. For this, the other payloads come in their own landing pod. Each is shaped somewhat like a flattened bullet, fit for reducing their temperature to a mere scalding one as their high-speed parachutes slow them down. With yet another stage eating precious mass, the final delivered mass is made even smaller, a mere 15 kg (33 lb) per pod. This makes the choice of what to send down ever more precious.

Tapping into the advantage of a swarm of smaller spacecraft versus one larger one, the risk of mission failure can be somewhat minimized. For a successful colonization, the machines need to perform the fundamentals of what allows them to replicate: They must locate resources, collect them, process them into intermediate products, and finally manufacture more machines, all while acquiring enough power, keeping safe from the elements, and maintaining the machines delivered long enough for replacements to be made. To this end, only a skeleton crew of machines will arrive —  with redundancy, of course —  bearing the full grandeur of the Initiative in their memories until they acclimatize. As a final safeguard, no Founder will carry two landing pods with identical payloads, and no two Founders will have the same combination of payloads, making the loss of an entire core function unlikely.