You are in charge of settling Forest World (RAR!)

[Knife]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VBCxWcAPXw&t=1439s

Watched this a few weeks ago, thought it might be relevant. He advocates the colony ship actually making space infrastructure first throughout the system before ever going to the target planet. Also interesting he envisions a 'mother ship' that housed the crew, equipment, and a few medium ships that then spread out in the system for various functions upon arrival.

[Adam Reynolds]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VBCxWcAPXw&t=1439s

Watched this a few weeks ago, thought it might be relevant. He advocates the colony ship actually making space infrastructure first throughout the system before ever going to the target planet. Also interesting he envisions a 'mother ship' that housed the crew, equipment, and a few medium ships that then spread out in the system for various functions upon arrival.

Indeed, it is likely that anyone with the ability to travel to a new solar system would not have much of a problem living in space almost exclusively, which makes the need to settle the new world more about the desire to live on a planet than about the necessity of doing so.

Also, those videos are fairly interesting overall. Thanks for directing me to them.

[madd0ct0r]

Loads of tree roots already bust up bed rock. A hundred foot Douglas fir on a couple of feet of soil has roots that go somewhere. Ivy is known to ruin walls simply from its surface suckers.

Microscopic roots get into cracks and voids. They chemically weather the rocks through sucking moisture, sometimes changing the rock minerals stability and the complex organic chemistry often breaks rocks down slowly. Hell, rainwater can do it, so tree root saps are dynamite by comparison.
They pyschially weather the rocks as these root threads grow and swell, pressing against the sides of the crack and causing localised stress concentrations at the tip. Chunks of weathered rock pop out the top face or cracks rip a little deeper into the rock before stopping.
Finally and eventually, the tree falls. It either rips up its base, tearing up entire layers of rock sheet around it, or it snaps at the trunk, leaving behind a complex web of roots to decay, turning into a highway system for organic acids and finally just open cracks.

The band of transition from soil to badly weathered rock to lightly weathered rock to bedrock is often meters thick.


For the mega trees, I don't see their roots punching much deeper into the rock, maybe a variety has specialised acid digestors to sink a large diameter tap root under the trunk, but I find it easier to imagine a spreading root mat, gluing itself to the surface of the rock under all the sediment, acting like a giant pad foundation against overturning. The churning Zor describes could be as simple as the front edges of the root mat getting under any loose rocks and the bulging mat behind the carrying those lumps outwards. Rocks Going downhill move faster than uphill so the overall movement is towards the edge of the continental shelf.

I wonder if mega trees are robust enough to survive if they are carried into deep water by a landslide?

[Knife]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VBCxWcAPXw&t=1439s

Watched this a few weeks ago, thought it might be relevant. He advocates the colony ship actually making space infrastructure first throughout the system before ever going to the target planet. Also interesting he envisions a 'mother ship' that housed the crew, equipment, and a few medium ships that then spread out in the system for various functions upon arrival.

Indeed, it is likely that anyone with the ability to travel to a new solar system would not have much of a problem living in space almost exclusively, which makes the need to settle the new world more about the desire to live on a planet than about the necessity of doing so.

Also, those videos are fairly interesting overall. Thanks for directing me to them.

Your welcome. He has quite a few, though takes one or so to get used to his speaking impediment.

[madd0ct0r]

Im Still thinking about these trees.
The ratio of branch spread to trunk height Zor states is weird. Even the biggest trees I've found in my area don't spread much outside of a sphere centered at mid trunk height.

So how do the megatrees do it?

One option I have is that the trees are very broad diameter hollow trunks and very broad diameter hollow branches, maximising the structural section to weight. Hollow box girders basically. Bamboo is good real example. Perhaps the broad canopy is a rain collection device and the freshwater pool inside the trunk is used to drive the pumps of the trees heart?

A second option is as the branches grow they drop down roots which anchor back into the seabed. These won't won't thick enough to carry meaningful weight but act like guy ropes to the spreading branches and top of the trunk. Enough roots along a branch and they start to merge into a structural fin, so your trunk stops looking like a small circle in plan, and more like a star or asterisk. There's a tree in se Asia that does this, you can see it in the pictures of the overgrown temples there.

There's an interesting lifecycle option.- a tree grows tall and fat and then falls over. Two new trees grow from the end of the one trunk, until the entire U shaped structure falls over. Then four grow at the corners of a nice wide foundation base.. This is inspired a little by coppice trees like hazel, where lots of whip thin shoots merge into a massive trunk later.

A fourth option looks reducing bending stresses in the crown and trunk. In this shoots from the top side top side of the branch grow back towards the trunk and wrap tightly around it, forming a structural truss. I can't think of a real word example. It's a good place to introduce a symbiotic vine or similar.