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I brought up Saturn V's to give people a sense of the mass we're talking about, not because I thought the probes would be actual Saturn V's (and I don't think w
by bnralt 4y ago
I brought up Saturn V's to give people a sense of the mass we're talking about, not because I thought the probes would be actual Saturn V's (and I don't think we'll be sending 1.5 million of them to a single star).
As I said, the reason I talked about landing on planets is because you mentioned rare metals, and I don't know how _reliably_ they could be found if you're only looking at asteroids. But maybe that's not an issue.
- YurgenJurgensen 4y agoThe problem wasn't that you thought they would be actual Saturn Vs, the problem is that you think the mass of a Saturn V is remotely enough to send a probe to the other side of the galaxy. Designs for intra-galactic probes typically include meters of shielding because of how nasty hitting even a grain of sand is at interstellar velocities, and in your case this is even worse, since said shielding doesn't have to stand up to a century of ablation, it has to hold up for a million years. You're exceeding the mass of a Saturn V on shielding alone, and the tyranny of the rocket equation still applies. Building bigger means building everything else bigger.