7 ms·
I think a collision at > 0.1x light speed with pretty much any molecule would cause a loss of the vehicle
by anoncoward111 8y ago
I think a collision at > 0.1x light speed with pretty much any molecule would cause a loss of the vehicle
- jacobush 8y agoNot with a big graphite shield - single molecules should just ablate it. However should you hit be unfortunate enough to hit one of those dust specks which are out there... big kaboom. The whole thing is also a case for building spacecraft with as small a cross section as possible, less chance of hitting something large.
- anoncoward111 8y agoThank you!!! So basically a frisbee traveling at light speed :)
- jacobush 8y agoI guess you think of flying saucers... :-) A long spear is an even better shape, though.
- nerdponx 8y agoEither way, I think this makes for some cool world building and speculative fiction.
- ben_w 8y agoA relative speed of 0.1c would make every fully ionised helium atom into an overly wordy description of 18.64 MeV alpha particle radiation. Low density regions of interstellar medium can have as few as 10e-4 particles per cubic centimetre. At 0.1c, that density works out as 3e10 particles/m^2/s. At that density and energy per particle, 0.0895 W/m^2. Low enough you wouldn’t care. Molecular clouds, on the other hand, can be up to 10e6 particles/cm^3. Most of those molecules are hydrogen, so they don’t hit as hard on average… but that’s a rounding error compared to the density, so let’s say about half a gigawatt per square meter. TL;DR — go around the molecular clouds until you invent a Trek-like navigational deflector.
- drfuchs 8y agoWhich they needed because it’s tricky to dodge stuff at warp speed: "Faster than light, no left or right: course-corrections can fracture the hull."
- ben_w 8y agoThey need a navigational deflector well below warp speed, and that line in Voyager was contradicted by what was shown on screen in various episodes.
- cfadvan 8y agoTo be totally fair, FTL implies time travel, and even sub-light (but hefty fractions of light) lead to staggering time dilation effects. None of this is ever touched in most sci-fi and certainly not Star Trek. Everyone is sipping around at high multiples of lightspeed, yet no one ever remarks that they constantly arrive before they leave. They use impulse drives to go at high fractions of c, yet they never return to an Earth many thousands of years in their subjective future. It’s a great series, but it’s not hard sci-fi, just a great storytelling mechanic.
- krapp 8y agoTrue, but no one ever claimed (or should claim) that Star Trek was "hard" sci-fi. At best, it sometimes tried, depending on the writer, to make nods to actual science. The original series seemed to have input from actual engineers and scientists, which is why you have the nacelles separated (to protect from radiation) and Bussard collectors, but then as time went on, it sort of became magic particles and subspace and not even bothering with the pretense.
- anoncoward111 8y agoHow big of a boom are we talking when I go through a molecular cloud at 0.1c in something like, let's say, the space shuttle?
- 8bitsrule 8y agoNot a problem for a vehicle that just disappears in one place, and re-appears at the destination. Call it a distributed probability modulation drive. Just don't get entangled in the math.