The Stars Our Destination

[Rupert]

Originally Posted by cptbutton

* I haven't examined it carefully enough to run the numbers, but I suspect Cherryh has the common scale error problem of just not understanding that space is really really big, much bigger than you thought even though you knew it was really, really big.

Such a thing only has to happen once (and probably from the dragged along debris, not a ship itself) to make everyone really paranoid about it. A collision like that with a station would produce secondary fragments that would create a major shipping hazard for some time, and potentially wreck a lot of other orbital infrastructure.