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Old 10-06-2019, 12:10 PM   #3
DataPacRat
 
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Niagara, Canada
Default Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Curmudgeon View Post
I don't see any sensors listed.
Buried in the small stuff: SM+31 Enhanced Sensor Array: Array Level 32, good enough to auto-detect a SM-10 piece of space junk at 50,000 miles, or a SM+15 rock at 7 AU.

(Also potentially relevant: Self-healing at 1.5M HP per day. So a typical SM+15 rock of 3M tons would typically do 630,000 dDMG on impact, 284,667 dDMG after armour, not enough to disable a full-sized system, and healed right up in four and a half hours.)


Quote:
You can probably slow the habitat down or speed it up enough to generate a miss for a 5-mile diameter impactor aimed at the very end of the habitat, OTOH, if the impactor is targeting the habitat dead amidships, you probably aren't going to be missed, and a 5 mile diameter impactor, even at the speed of most objects in our own solar system would be an extinction level event for Earth. I don't see the habitat faring better. And on the gripping hand, unless your hostiles strap their own Captain Kong onto the impactor with a steering mechanism, they're going to have a hard time targeting an orbiting planet much less a habitat.
I'm trying to work out a threat profile starting from, say, 100 light-years away. Some posthuman culture gets hints that the cylinder backup project exists, decides to change that, and launches some relativistic impactor to nip the thing in the bud, before it even gets to be ten thousand years old. A few launch-lasers powered by the local solar-power Dyson Swarm sends the thing on its way, and they forget about it to focus on their most recent internal fight about which software license is the One True Way. A bit over a century later, the impactor has tried to nudge its course to give it the best chance of hitting its target, and we open up with only a light-month or so left to go... how well will the impactor have jiggled its target point by this point? How much more jiggling can it still do, and how well can it see its target to know where to aim, and how far has the target moved from its earlier estimates? ... and so on.
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DataPacRat
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