- #71
Strato Incendus
- 182
- 23
Alright, thanks again for your many ideas!
Right now, I’m actually considering going back to the original idea of having some damage be caused by a tiny dust speckle that collides with / pierces the ship. In particular, while the shielding at the front and back of the ship protects it against speckles of this size, during the rotation of the ship (which it needs to perform in order to start braking), it would be more vulnerable to such speckles for a few seconds.
The main question is really:
How tiny does a speckle of dust, hitting the ship at 0.125 c, have to be so that it only pierces some ship walls, without destroying the entire ship due to impact?
The resulting leaks should be so small that air or water can’t even escape the ship particularly fast. This would give the crew some time to react, while still clearly being an urgent problem.
Also, whenever water pipes are pierced by such a tiny speckle, I wonder whether the water jets coming out of those tiny leaks would be able to cut through things, given the pressure on the pipes relative to the extremely narrow diameter of such a leak.
The commander tries to make the rotation movement safe (which the ship performs by rotating around its vertical axis) by firing a broadside of the deflector lasers right before initiating the rotation. This clears the path ahead of the ship for the next 1 million kilometres. 0.125 c equals 37,474 kilometres per second. So the ship has about 26 seconds until it has covered a million kilometres while traveling at this speed.
A million kilometres equals 3.3 light seconds. Assuming the ship’s sensors work at light speed, a speckle of dust a million kilometres in front of the ship would be detected by those sensors with a 6.6-seconds delay.
So if rotating the ship around its axis takes about 20 seconds, this delay could create a temporary blind spot, during which the sensors might fail to detect an incoming speckle of dust. It could then pierce a few of the rings, as well as the aft sphere and a few of the sub-tanks within it, within the short time window during which they are exposed to what’s directly in the line of the ship’s trajectory of motion.
Right now, I’m actually considering going back to the original idea of having some damage be caused by a tiny dust speckle that collides with / pierces the ship. In particular, while the shielding at the front and back of the ship protects it against speckles of this size, during the rotation of the ship (which it needs to perform in order to start braking), it would be more vulnerable to such speckles for a few seconds.
The main question is really:
How tiny does a speckle of dust, hitting the ship at 0.125 c, have to be so that it only pierces some ship walls, without destroying the entire ship due to impact?
The resulting leaks should be so small that air or water can’t even escape the ship particularly fast. This would give the crew some time to react, while still clearly being an urgent problem.
Also, whenever water pipes are pierced by such a tiny speckle, I wonder whether the water jets coming out of those tiny leaks would be able to cut through things, given the pressure on the pipes relative to the extremely narrow diameter of such a leak.
The commander tries to make the rotation movement safe (which the ship performs by rotating around its vertical axis) by firing a broadside of the deflector lasers right before initiating the rotation. This clears the path ahead of the ship for the next 1 million kilometres. 0.125 c equals 37,474 kilometres per second. So the ship has about 26 seconds until it has covered a million kilometres while traveling at this speed.
A million kilometres equals 3.3 light seconds. Assuming the ship’s sensors work at light speed, a speckle of dust a million kilometres in front of the ship would be detected by those sensors with a 6.6-seconds delay.
So if rotating the ship around its axis takes about 20 seconds, this delay could create a temporary blind spot, during which the sensors might fail to detect an incoming speckle of dust. It could then pierce a few of the rings, as well as the aft sphere and a few of the sub-tanks within it, within the short time window during which they are exposed to what’s directly in the line of the ship’s trajectory of motion.