Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
Unless you have some sort of active management system, a habitat would probably destabilize within a thousand years or so regardless of the size as artificial structures need repairs since they cannot depend on gravity to keep everything together. For example, even a relatively small asteroid impact (~10 m radius) would imbalance the spin gravity system by subtracting mass from somewhere, which would result in the entire system decaying within a few days without load shifting (0.2 rotations per minute is still a rotational velocity of more than 20 km/s). Since a 10 m radius S-type asteroid masses ~10,000 metric tons, it would hit with an average energy of ~400 kilotons of TNT, probably fragmenting off a few billion metric tons of stone armor.
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I suspect that such external astronomical events would be the main reason to switch from passive management to active intervention. (Another such possible trouble could be a Carrington-level CME.) How far could a SM+31 Enhanced Sensor Array, with an Array Level of 32, pick up any such bodies? My notes on detecting a SM-10 piece of junk is that at 50,000 miles, the modifiers to the roll are -10 (SM), -46 (extreme range, 50,000 miles), +32 (telescopic vision), +10 (in plain sight), +24 (silhouetted against deep space), for a total of +10, automatic detection. A 10-metre rock is, what, SM+6 (SM+4 for dimension, +2 for sphere shape), meaning rolls to detect it are 16 higher than that; so it would be auto-detected at, what, 20 million miles out? (Even further, if the station takes extra time for a scan: 150 million miles, with the +5 bonus for a half-hour scan.) Even at orbital velocities, an AU and a half seems a good enough distance to launch a staged series of countermeasures. (Though I'm still poking around with numbers to figure out if any of the reaction engines would let a Gaea move far enough to avoid such a strike, after detection.)