3 ms·
The craft in Interstellar WAS a long cylinder, not toroidal. And I think it’s plenty resilient. The heaviest structure is on the outside, perhaps several meters
by Robotbeat 5y ago
The craft in Interstellar WAS a long cylinder, not toroidal. And I think it’s plenty resilient. The heaviest structure is on the outside, perhaps several meters thick. It’d take a pretty huge space rock, easily detectable with radar and almost on the order of something hazardous to the Earth, to puncture straight through 10 meters of rock shielding and steel structure.
- motohagiography 5y agoI stand corrected, I had interpreted that Cooper Station was a toroid and not a cylinder. Indexing on not getting hit at all seems more plausible than being resiliant to impact, unless our eventual interstellar travel involves some kind of space distortion that avoids collisions with anything below a certain mass/energy. Mental reference for effects of impact was something like this: https://bigthink.com/hard-science/heres-the-damage-a-tiny-speck-of-space-debris-can-do-at-15000mph/ https://bigthink.com/hard-science/heres-the-damage-a-tiny-sp...
- Robotbeat 5y agoOh sure for actual interstellar travel. I was thinking interplanetary speeds (~10km/s) not interstellar travel speeds (~30,000km/s). In the film, they’re cheating by using a wormhole so never travel at those near relativistic speeds.