Spaceships hull armor…solid?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

Here are some papers on Whipple Shields. I am going to read them and learn from them. If people want to keep exchanging rhetoric in defense of their preconceptions, that is OK too!

"Status and Perspectives in Protective Design" Space Debris 2 (2000) https://link.springer.com/article/10...29884.04355.9a (can be dowloaded from a university library or other places)

"Hypervelocity Impacts and Protection" which seems to be some kind of technical report or working paper from the European Space Agency and is dated 2001 https://www.researchgate.net/publica...and_Protection (can be downloaded by anyone with a browser)

Okay, I read the second one (no, I do not spend my evenings in a universiy library) and I did not see a lot of the claims made being justified. At least there was some mention of velocities but the highest mentioned was 7 km/s which was probably about the limit for the hydrogen gas guns they mentioned. There have been some tests with railguns that produce much higher velocities.

In particular the expansiosn their pictures showed were more in the area of "mildly elliptical" rather than narrow and jet like. this may have been achieved by use of a very light outer layer which was not substantial enough to fully destroy the impactor. This strategy would be pretty impactor size dependant and not practical in combat.

Among other complications users would want their armered hulls to offer some protection from directed energy weapons and those very thin layers would not be very useful against a rapidly pulsed laser. A thin layer would probably stop only one pulse. A thicker ablative material might be more desirable.