Re: [GZG] The Great Premeasuring Monkey Dance

On Thursday 07 May 2009 18:02:46 Tom B wrote:
> Problem: Do unarmed civilian ships that lack fire control radar smack
into
> asteroids? Wouldn't asteroid belt racers (or other fast civilian ships
that
> don't NEED firecons) be able to see things anyway?

Realistically, 'asteroid belt racing' would be rather boring unless
you tried very hard to make it otherwise.

So far, none of the probes sent through the asteroid belt by
NASA have had any real ability to detect and avoid asteroids,
and they didn't hit anything. I seem to recall that the closest
any came to anything sizable was in the order of hundreds of
thousands of km, but I can't find a reference for that.

Civilian ships would probably very rarely go anywhere considered
dangerous. Possibly, serious collisions with very small but fast
rocks/sand grains may be considered unlikely and therefore too
expensive to try to avoid. That's what insurance is for...

-- 
Be seeing you,			       http://www.glendale.org.uk
Sam.			    Mail/IM (Jabber): sam@glendale.org.uk 
_______________________________________________
Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@lists.csua.berkeley.edu
http://lists.csua.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gzg-l