Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin
It needs to change its' movement in an unpredicatable fashion with a frequency that is shorter than the amount of time impactors have to adjsut their courses.
So if that relativistic doomsday machine has to commit to one particular course a month befre impact change your orbit more often than that.
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Fair enough. Anyone up to sketching out one or two sample attacks, so I can get a better idea of the range of what to watch out for? :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Daigoro
Can you give it a heavy counterweight that it releases? Or have it break into two or more pieces? That should give it a quick jump out of the way, but it's one-use only, and it would take some time and effort to reset.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ericbsmith
That was my thought. Use a spin tether and have the station either be in two halves or have a large counterweight. If it needs to move quickly you simply disconnect the tether and the two halves go flying off in opposite directions at high velocity.
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Mm. Tricky. My initial vision for this station is a can of pop, the size of Egypt if you rolled up that country into a tube. Sure, with advanced tech you could build in a line to split the thing in half when you wanted - but you'd lose all the important stuff inside if you did.
I'm already positing fairly strong nano-stringies just to keep a moderate level of gravity with the diameter in question. To convert the thing into a pair of sub-habitats, then the outer edge of their rotation would be the same as the outer circumference of the original cylinder, implying a much smaller overall hab.
Still, having a rock ready to release is basically the same as having a mass-driver engine installed; maybe I should take another look at having some emergency one-shot propulsion that uses up fuel. I suspect high-thrust is more important than overall delta-v, if the goal is just to jog the place out of the way of a large rock before it hits... but I'll have to dig through the SS books and run some numbers to be sure. :)