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A sleeper ship is a hypothetical type of manned spaceship in which most or all of the crew spends the journey in some form of hibernation or suspended animation. As there is currently no known technology that allows for long-term suspended animation of humans, the term is usually only found in science fiction. One alternative may be cryogenic freezing of the crew, though that would not be true suspended animation.
The most common role of sleeper ships in fiction is for interstellar travel, usually at slower-than-light speed. Travel times for such journeys could reach into the hundreds or thousands of years, making some form of life extension such as suspended animation necessary for the original crew to live to see their destination. Suspended animation is also required on ships which cannot be used as generation ships, for whatever reason.
Suspended animation can also be useful to reduce the consumption of life support resources by crewmembers who are not needed during the trip, and for this reason sleeper ships sometimes also make an appearance in the context of purely interplanetary travel.
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Sleeper ships in specific works of fiction
In Lost In Space, The Robinson family boards a sleeper ship for the long journey to the new world where they will supervise the construction of the other end of a tunnel, connecting the new world with Earth and enabling faster than light travel through this shortcut.
The Nostromo in the film Alien, and the Sulaco in the film Aliens, are sleeper ships, as are all vessels encountered in the Alien franchise, although since space travel in the movies takes only a few weeks or months they do have some FTL capability.
In Iain M. Banks' book Excession, a large craft named Sleeper Service is portrayed as an eccentric artificial intelligence which travels from system to system, picking up humans for long term suspended animation and eventual deposit elsewhere (at its discretion).
In Freelancer computer game, a large group of alliance humans leave earth in five sleeper ships to colonise the Sirius Galaxy, these ships are named after their patron nations; The Hispania, The Rheinland, The Kusari, The Bretonia and The Liberty.
In the 1997 Harland Williams film "RocketMan", the characters make use of a sleeper ship for their journey to Mars.
In the Terran storyline for StarCraft, a computer game developed by Blizzard Entertainment, humans colonized the Koprulu Sector by a experiment sponsored by a rogue researcher who launched tens of thousands of persecuted modified humans targeted for extermination into space. Although they were intended to colonized on a different star system, their navigational computers failed, sending their ships careening towards the nethers until they crash landed on a few habitable planets.
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See also
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