Re: Protecting starships traveling at 95% light speed or more

On Mar 9, 8:54 pm, d...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (David DeLaney) wrote:
Matt Browne SFW <matt.h.bro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





On Mar 1, 4:27 pm, IsaacKuo <mech...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The impactor problem is not made easier by going
slower.  The mass of the defensive shields depends
almost entirely upon the expected amount of mass
the starship will pass through.  This doesn't depend on speed.

Depending on the style of defense, it can actually
be easier to go faster.

I'm not sure I'm following this. Let's say our slow starship travels
at 600 km/s and does that for more than 20000 years. So it will pass
through a significant amount of mass. The slower the ship travels the
smaller the magnetic deflector shield it requires, which will make the
starship much lighter and simpler to accelerate. So for this style of
defense slow is easier, right? Another question related to this: How
long will the Voyager 1 probe survive in interstellar space? Is has
little or no defense at all.

Remember, though, that the amount of force produced by a magnetic field on
a charged particle? Is (nonrelativistically) proportional to the -velocity-
of that particle through the field. If your magnetic field's going very slowly
through the charged particles, it can't deflect them very much (though by the
same token there's a longer time over which that smaller deflection works on
them, before they get near the actual ship). So you can't just say "a slower
speed means a proportionally smaller magnetic field is needed" - you have to
actually do some math for it.

But it's so much more fun to bullshit your way through life and
completely ignore messy things like reality. That's why you get so
many wackos posting bogus fantasies here. If they wanted to actually
do any of the hard work, they'd become engineers.

.

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