Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
It won't take much to deflect the ionized ISM. Unfortunately, a meaningful fraction is not ionized (estimates seem to range from 10-25%) and won't care about shielding, nor will dust.
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My reading suggests that a metre of highly-hydrogenized armour (call it Wood or Ice in Spaceships terms; maybe something like pykrete) is a handy way to turn the neutral ISM atoms into separated protons and electrons, and my back-of-the-envelope-figuring from SS5p40 suggests it won't ablate too much from dust on the time-scales I'm interested in.