RE: Asteroids in Space (was: RE: FT Taskforce and Fleet Actions)

On Tue, 7 Aug 2001, Bell, Brian K (Contractor) wrote:

> Indy, 
> 
> Very nice. I appreciate your numbers.
> 
> However, something as small as a marble could cause a major 
> problem when you start approaching Oerjan speeds.

Yep.

> At a movement rate of 30 (and I think that this would 
> be approached if jump points are fairly far out), would be
> 30,000km/15 min. or 33.3km/second. Even at this rate it 
> would take over 52 days to cross an AU (~150,000,000km).
> So I would expect speeds to be much higher (constant
> acceleration/deceleration).

OR the jump points will have to be moved in closer. People
might have to adjust their PSBs accordingly, depending on
what they want to accept. It's very easy to forget just how
BIG space is, and just how FAR apart things are. I should
dig up my astrolab from way back which illustrated this
emphatically by setting Jupiter equal to a basketball or
something similar and showing how far apart the various
objects in the solar system are wrt one another - or if
you're road-tripping through West Virginia and stop by the
Green Bank radio observatory, they've laid this out on their
lands already. A few cities have also done this (Boston, I
believe, and possibly Denver or Seattle?).

> At this speed even a marble sized rock could present enough 
> of a danger to not be ignored. 

Yep. Hence K'V weaponry.  ;-)

>How many marble sized 
> asteroids are there in the belt? Even in 2100, will we have
> mapped ALL of these?

Nope. And we never will.

> And how will it keep updated as the
> gravitational effects of planets, other asteroids, comets,
> and ships effect it (let alone a collision that would send
> it off at a new velocity and course)?

Never be able to.*  THerefore the easiest solution is to assume
that ships are composed of alloys that can *take* this kind
of punishment in day-to-day space travel (after all, we ARE
talking about ships surviving MT missile hits, where MT missiles
are supposed to have the destructive power equivalent to nukes ;-).

* - K'V weapons being fired in a given solar system will add
to the chaos of this as well ;-)

In addition, if you are going to concern yourself with marble-
sized objects in the asteroid belt, you have to start concerning
yourself with marble-sized objects EVERYWHERE in the solar system -
and there are a damn good many of them scattered about (space isn't
as empty as the average person thinks ;-). Then you have all these
comets swinging in and out of the solar system, leaving their little
debris chains (case in point: this coming weekend is the peak of the
famed Perseid Meteor Shower, which has been going on all this week -
see http://www.skypub.com/ for further details). 

> Now if you are relying on active sensors that have a range
> of 72mu to identify something as large as ships, at what 
> range would it detect a marble sized chunk of rock that is
> not radiating EM (yes I know that detection and identification
> are different, but what is the size of the characteristics 
> that are measured to identify a ship)? How quickly would 
> you be able to react? How quickly could a ship maneuver? 
> How fast would you be willing to go?

Dunno. That'll be up to the individual player(s) to decide.

I say, and I speak only for me, there comes a point where you
have to ignore the reality and accept some PSB mechanic that
allows you to do this. For me, marble-sized meteoroids aren't
worth bothering over. I assume ships are built capable of
withstanding these impacts. I abstract these out, much as the
3rd dimension of travel is abstracted out of the FT movement
system. Makes life so much easier.  :-)