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Old 10-06-2019, 10:33 PM   #21
DataPacRat
 
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Default Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?

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Originally Posted by (E) View Post
What about using the robotic miners as tugs?
Scale issues. A SM+12 robo-miner/tug is around the size of one of the Pyramids; the station is around the size of the entirety of Egypt.


In case it might affect anyone's thought processes, I'm planning for the plot to be set a long time after this station was built, after several pre-industrial civilizations have risen and fallen internally. I want to heavily lean on the tropes of exploring the unknown, at several scales: not knowing what will be found inside the station, outside the station, and possibly even within the main characters if I can manage that level of subtlety. If I can get away with it, a more physics-compliant version of Dungeon Crawl Classics.
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Old 10-06-2019, 10:51 PM   #22
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Default Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?

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Originally Posted by DataPacRat View Post
Scale issues. A SM+12 robo-miner/tug is around the size of one of the Pyramids; the station is around the size of the entirety of Egypt.
True, but I did note the was up to a billion tons of robo-miners, so if a large percentage could be used at once it might help (slowly). But equally there could be a number of reasons why it wouldn't work.
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Old 10-07-2019, 05:15 PM   #23
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Default Re: [Spaceships] How should a large station... duck?

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
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/s˛ 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.

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
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.
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