[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by whswhs

The trick with inertialessness is that collision with a particle never inflicts damage. You just stop dead in space.

The same is true of beam damage: if you're free and not restrained by a tractor it just bats you away (or did, until the invention of "primaries" so intense that the resistance of the interstellar medium slowed you down enough to be damaged). Indeed, what I'm doing here is demonstrating, from the equivalence of the interstellar medium encountered at high speed to a neutral particle beam. that the immunity in question holds up to half a million d6 damage per second.

So what you have to be doing with those fields is not blocking out damage, but shoving the particles to the side so that you can move forward.

I seem to recall reading of them being smashed or annihilated, but it has been forty years, so maybe you're right.

If the particles themselves aren't free, then they can't move aside faster than light. If your frontal surface is at a 45° angle, then it has to shove them sideways one km to move forward one km; so you can't move faster than light either. You need a more acute geometry to get multiples of c.

120 parsecs per hour is about 3.4 million times the speed of light. A speedster a metre wide to hold a recumbent pilot would have to be 1,700 kilometres long….

Though I don't think Smith had worked out the details,

You don't say!

for all that he talked about spherical and other shapes of interstellar craft.

I think teardrop-shaped superdreadnoughts &c. came from assuming that the resistance of the inert medium would work out equivalent to aerodynamic drag.