Quote:
Originally Posted by Astromancer
The Solar System's Oort Cloud is known to extend halfway to Alpha Centauri, and at the point you'd meet their Oort Cloud. If it's a hazard, then it must have useful supplies of matter.
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But you can't pick the matter up. You're making something like 1% of lightspeed, which has cost you an enormous amount of fusion fuel and reaction mass.
If you want to hop from Oort object to Oort object, speeding up and slowing down, you need to be able to replenish your fuel readily, which means hauling along the machinery to process lumps of ice miles in diameter, which rather adds to your mass, and requires more fuel, in an vicious spiral.
If you nonetheless want to do it by hopping, you aren't going to make 1% of lightspeed, which is about 2000mps. You're going to do it at the kind of travel speeds used within the solar system, of about 50mps. This means the journey, rather than taking a bit over 400 years, takes about 15,000 years. At that point, you aren't travelling between stars, you're colonising interstellar space. This is not a friendly environment.
There's a reason that interstellar travel isn't really a hard-science SF concept. You need some radically different physics to make it practical.