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Originally Posted by clu2415
Do you mean the tidal stresses from the gravity wells? A pulsar’s radiation emission? The radiation emitted by a black hole’s accretion disc?
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"Yes." :)
Anything potentially lethal to the ship's pilot Lensman, which can be reduced at least in part by the shields.
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Neutron stars (including pulsars) have a ridiculous magnetic field strength—and then there’s magnetars which are even higher! There could be an induction hazard from moving a metal object through that field.
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As an aside, in one of the Lensman novels, a speedster was built out of just about entirely non-ferrous materials, in order to minimize its detection signature for the setting's "electros". Of course, a sufficiently-strong magnetic field can warp the way electrons behave in ordinary matter, to the extent that you can levitate a frog in the right lab; and I'm pretty sure neutron stars can have much stronger magnetic fields than that.
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Neutron stars also have such intense gravity that they bend the light from their far side. You can observe 3/4 of their surface from one side!
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The version of the speedster I'm toying with can hit 324 Gs of acceleration, and can cancel 99% of what's felt with inertial compensators and artificial gravity, so could be able to get surprisingly close to a source of high gravity. (And that doesn't count being able to hit FTL when the Bergenholm generator is activated; as long as the ship's overall vector of momentum is pointed away from the mass, it should be able to escape.)