Editing Openai/691a2d9f-c044-8012-bccf-942bfce6334d (section)

==== 3. Survivor: v3.0 “Solar-Oberth Depot Corridor” concept ====

After pruning and mutation, the core organism looks like this:

: Civilization mines ice and volatiles from outer system bodies and packages them into big, nuclear-propelled depots. These are sent inward, dive close to the Sun, and use perihelion burns plus the Oberth effect to slingshot onto high-speed escape trajectories roughly toward a target star. For a few decades or centuries, their nuclear “tail” performs small course corrections until their outbound vector sits inside a tight corridor. After that, the depots go cold and coast inertially through interstellar space. Later, interstellar ships rendezvous with a few of these moving depots along the outbound corridor, tapping them for water, reaction mass, and shielding, significantly reducing how much they must carry from the origin system.

Key properties:
* No exotic physics.
* No multi-millennia continuous reactors.
* No need for a dense mid-gap chain.
* Depots are guided projectiles, not static oases.
* The “corridor” is sparse and probabilistic, not a perfect highway.
* Starships are designed with the knowledge that they can hit one or two massive waypoints en route.