[Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I don't see the difficulty. The scaling of Spaceships that allows you to build a sM+34 object just by moving your decimal point far to the right will let you build an engine to propel it too.

I think the problem is that as your orbital habitat gets bigger the distance that it has to move in order to dodge gets bigger, but the time you have to dodge in doesn't get any longer, so you need higher velocities and therefore greater acceleration. A habitat that is SM+34 is about a million metres across. If it gets, say, 100 seconds to dodge in it must apply 200 m/s² to dodging, which is about twenty gee. Whereas as ship of, say, SM+13 only needs to dodge by 300 metres in the same time: 0.006 gee is sufficient.

Give an SM+13 ship half a gee of acceleration to dodge with and then it can dodge in 11 seconds. An SM+34 habitat with half a gee needs 633 seconds.

Originally Posted by Anthony

At 0.99c, in the reference frame of the target, it takes light 500s to cross 1 AU, and it takes the impactor 495s, so you have only 5s warning. This generally makes detection not very viable. However, the impactor has the same problem: you probably don't know the target's position with more accuracy than 'orbiting that planet', so if you've got 5 km/s delta-v available for course correction, you need to know the target's position something like 1,250s before impact, which means you need to be able to detect the target (and distinguish it from possible decoys) at 250AU.

It's an orbiting habitat the size of a minor planet, with no drives. With a bit of public-source intelligence it ought to be possible to predict its position for a year in advance with a precision better than one kilometre.