Generation ship design project

[Rynn]

And of course my proposal would only work if everything performed its function flawlessly - if the robot ships couldn't create a sustainable habitat at the destination, the people in the ship would probably starve to death on arrival. And so on.

IMO the "ship" in "generation ship" is a misnomer. Core to the idea of a generation ship is that you have an industrial economy sufficient to maintain a transplanted biosphere sufficient to sustain a population large enough to work the economy, all within a closed system. That's not a ship, that's a mobile habitat. Hell a better mental framework would be a mobile, closed, city-state.

Nothing like that should require that the inhabitants build a habitat as quickly as possible on the far side. An ark of this kind would be more than capable of continuing to act as the habitat it always has while the citizens work to gather fresh resources for the first time in generations.

But yeah, the real kicker is less the rocket science (that's the trivially easy part, relatively speaking. and more the design of social, economic, ecological systems to survive centuries in a closed system. Asking how to design a generation ship is little different to asking "how can we create a sealed underground city that, when we open the doors in a few centuries, still has a thriving population".