Did the scientists of Palma intend to relive the Middle Ages

One thing we know about Phantasy Star III is that when you begin it feels like your taking place in a game that would be set in the middle ages, at least until you learn of the cyborgs. But as we know the kingdoms were based off ancient times. So what were the scientists thinking? Depending on where you look at the timeline, it takes place either 1000 years thus taking place with Phantasy Star IV, or 1000 years after Phantasy Star IV ends. So in so many centuries the people of Landen, Cille, and the others should have developed from living in a kingdom into a more modern style city much like the ones on Palma and Motavia.

On a sidenote just to not make another topic. Many of the worldships launched from Palma prior to its explosion, so my question is the domes of the Alisa III are pretty large, so lets just say that the domes are a bit larger then our Earths eastern side of the world, so where would the ships be developed on the planet, how large was Palma really, did they use all their natural resources, slowly destroying the planet just to make the ships able to travel into space.

And one more thing, what kind of fuel do the ships run on? If they're slowly floating through space to find a habitable planet then they must have enough resources to fuel the ship for over 1000 years. If its just floating and you have one random guy behind a steering wheel then when he sees a planet, takes the ship down to it and its uninhabitable and has 0 resources to get the ship back into space, what do the people of the Alisa III do? Ok enough ranting from me.

I think all the scientists, at least in Landen or Cille, died in the war between Orakio and Laya. At the very least, they must not have had the means to maintain the old level of technological civilization. They must have fallen so far that no one has the knowledge, or drive, to rediscover the old sciences.

I don't think the domes of the worldships would as large as half the Earth. They feel more like the size of a medium continent to me. They're still too big for 400 of them, like PSIII suggests, to have been constructed quickly on Palma. Maybe they were assembled from ships decommissioned after Mother Brain banned space travel. That would allow the actual construction to have taken place during the centuries between PSI and PSII.

I would guess that the ships have some kind of renewable power source, like solar energy. I mean, they have weather controls and presumably fake suns in the sky above each dome. That stuff's been running since the ship launch, a good 1000+ years. Unless we assume there's a reactor based on some fictional material that never exhausts, they have to be recharging the batteries with some kind of renewable source.

I agree with Thoul in that I don't think the domes would be THAT big. They did have to be built on Palm, after all; I'm thinking maybe the size of a smallish country, tops. I know it's one of the great debates in games like these about how much time *really* passes, but let's face it - even at early levels, you can walk halfway across a dome without having to heal that much. Whatever method you use to determine time/distance, I don't think that each dome could be the size of an entire planet.

The regression from the high-tech sci-fi atmosphere of PSII to the medieval world (but with androids and spaceships?) of PSIII does raise some questions. Regardless of which timeline you're following (English or Japanese), war does break out eventually (either right after they leave Palma or one thousand years later). War depletes resources, and as they're on a spaceship, they probably had a finite amount to begin with. The name "Devastation War" implies that there was a whole lot of destruction going on, and even without it, the original refugees weren't going to live forever. Survival would have been the top priority and they probably would have wanted to find a way to get by with as little as possible.

A renewable resource to power the ship and keep everyone alive makes the most sense. Whatever's out there in space, someone else can answer, I'm not a science-y type.

What if the resources to build the ship came from other star systems? I think each dome might be approximately half the size of the United States. As for resources each dome is its own world essentially so it would have its own vegetation and such. Phantasy Star has a much different physics than real life with superluminal travel and such, but that just adds to the wonder of the game.

Not that elaborated answer for both questions (as typing in a cell phone doesn't help much, but I can elaborate later if it leaves any doubt):

- The medieval setting is not unfathomable. PSIV society is also pre-industrial. After big catastrophes, it is usual to revert to feudalism or even more primitive forms of society. It is not rare in world's history, civilizations that reverted to primitive states and even impressive empires which were reduced to primitive iron-age societies. It is not far-fetched that scientists were mostly killed and the general populace blamed technology for their woes and abandoned the technologic cities and tools to decay. The pilots would opt to leave the things the way they were for their own safety.

As for the ships, there is always the possibility of keep building them after they were launched. They could have been smaller at the launch and grew capturing matter from other planets or from the space (particles).
The energy source, well, I'd say nuclear would do. If we were not so stupid, we could already have laptops with a battery life of 5000 years, but who would put a small reactor in the hands of common people?

I like the ideas of resources coming from sources other than Palma. For the most part, we're actually assuming these ships were built on Palma and from resources found there. That doesn't have to be the case; they might have been built elsewhere and brought to Palma by anti-Mother Brain factions. We know Tyler kept flying his ship even though Mother Brain had banned space travel. He probably wasn't the only one to do that.

I think the fuel source is something exotic, such as antimatter. Also, there could be a miniature man-made sun surrounded by solar panels as the fuel source for the ships. It is a difficult puzzle to contemplate upon because these events are thousands of years into the future where they would have materials, energy sources, and wavelengths unknown to us now. Many man-made materials that exist today, such as what artificial hearts are made from, were unknown only 100 years ago.

My thoughts on the matter:

The worldships: Where did they come from, and how big are they? My guess is, and this is only a guess, each dome is about as big as mainland Europe. As for how they came about, most likely they'd have to have been built in space prior to the incident that banned space travel. Most scifi I've seen has ships built in space simply because the stress of taking off would tear apart larger ships.

Medieval technology: I don't think there was any overt intent to go medieval on the Alisa III- we don't know what the other worldships we've seen are like. (Also note: As medieval as PSIII is, you can buy firearms and laser-based weapons. In PSIV, firearms and energy weapons are few and far between, unique, and not for sale in any store.)

What's powering these ships, anyway? Either antimatter/fusion reactors, similar to Star Trek, massive solar power collectors, or something entirely unfathomable to us. A better question would be, "how can they float on for a millennium without running into oxygen/soil depletion or resource shortage?"

So, how can they float on for a millennium without running into oxygen/soil depletion or resource shortage? The worldships are probably equipped with dropship collectors. Techna's the home of the Alisa III's pilots, so they'd have access to sensors. Even if they can't find a Palma-like planet to disembark onto, it's highly probably that the ship would find planets with easily mineable organic/radioactive/metal/gaseous compounds, and massive atomic furnaces beneath the domes break those down and refine those into things you'd need- soil nutrients and fertilizers, veins of metal, fresh oxygen, repair parts for the ship, and so on.

An old sci-fi story written and illustrated by John Byrne has a group of four explorers go into an antimatter universe.

One of the things they find there is a spaceship that has been traveling for a very long time (I think longer than human history) in search of a planet where its passengers could live (their original planet was destroyed).

Although all the passengers were originally put in stasis, a few of these people had been awakened by the ship in ancient times to serve as crew, while the rest remained "asleep". This crew was needed because the ship had been damaged or something.

When the four protagonists find the ship, it is no longer functional, smells as you would imagine it would after so many years of being a self-contained environment, and just floats in space. The descendants of the crew keep hoping they will find a planet, though. A scientist in the protagonists' group manages to repair the ship for them and they finally find a planet with similar characteristics to their original one.

Of course, after so many years, they have evolved to survive in the ship's conditions, and the perfect world for them now is not a good option for their metabolisms anymore. The leader of this people starts losing his mind, convinces himself this planet did not match their old world, and tries to go searching for another one, so, the people in stasis could finally be awakened. But then his wife reveals that there is no one left. The few passengers who were taken out of stasis to work as "crew" were really the only survivors of the accident that had damaged the ship. Only a few survivors and their descendants were trusted to know this secret, so the rest could still have hope of finding a planet for their whole species.

That was a long wall of text (sorry for that). I think the situation in PS III could be reversed if war continued. The ship would be in perfect order, with some beautiful environments, even. But all of its passengers would have killed themselves without any hope at all.

The side effect of too much Palmanian COSPLAY & LARP marathons by the great thinkers in their ivory towers.
Then again, Palma was in the middle ages in PS1--it wasnt too far a cry away from PS3. Heck, they even had Medusa.
Using a lightsaber to fight what appear to be plasma-rifle armed stormtroopers is believable, but using a sword?