High-speed shieldless spacecraft requirements
In my Sci-Fi universe, I want humans to, initially, have two traits to their spaceship building:
- Really good drive systems, at least compared to other races.
- Complete and utter lack of any sci-fi "Deflectors"
From everything I know, this leads to a ship needing a heavily armored prow to withstand any sort of extended mission. Any sort of satellite debris hitting the ship when entering orbit needs to be absorbed and/or deflected, and the occasional errant object in interplanetary travel needs to be able to be withstood as well. And that's before we even get to military ships.
The question I have is What is required for a "High-speed" spacecraft without shields? What is a reasonable "Speed Limit" for such vessels, keeping potential damage to a minimum? Being able to withstand impacts is great, but if you have to replace and repair the front of your ship after every trip, it's not really that useful (Although a courier vessel could take advantage of such a scheme).
To be entirely clear, I do not want alternate deflectors, or EM fields, or whatever. These ships operate like a celestial snowplow - If it's in front of them, it gets run over.
Additionally, the ships are not "Torch Drive" ships that are continually thrusting. They accelerate up to travel speed, coast towards their destination, and then slow down on arrival. I expect trips to take weeks or months. High Fractional-C velocities are, frankly, unwanted. At even 5-10% of light speed, the energies involved are enormous.
This is also for sub-light travel, not faster-than-light. FTL is accomplished in a completely different method, where such things are not something that needs to be worried about. Generally speaking, this is for travel within a system.
1 answer
Shape the ship! Make it like a needle, with a very long (mile long) prow. Various materials are harder than diamond (See Here), I would suggest something like #1, carbyne, at 200 times the strength of steel and much harder than diamond.
This shape won't deflect anything much bigger than your ship, of course: But you should be able to see those large objects, things larger than your ship, in plenty of time to change course. You probably also don't want to run into anything more massive than about 5% of your ship's mass.
Your prow can be a combination of shock absorber and physical deflector that comes to a "sharp" point (relatively speaking; perhaps a dome a few feet wide), it is a cone ramping to wider than the width of your ship. It clears the way of any small debris, like satellite size or big rock size; such debris tumbles down the spear point and past your ship.
This is to keep you from running into things small enough that you cannot see them in time to change course. Your sensors, of course, will be mounted near the tip of this prow. Since you are traveling at sub-light speed, there should be plenty of time for you to see very large things and avoid them.
One more feature you can add is that this prow is not even attached to your ship; it is an independent path-clearing piece of equipment that you launch and then follow behind. In the event it does ram into something large and stops; your follow distance can be many miles (even a thousand miles), far enough that the cleared space cannot be filled with anything damaging after the cone passes, but long enough that, should the cone hit something big, your ship has plenty of time to react and not crash into the mess created; by stopping or veering off for safety. Given the hardness of the cone (which you can increase by sci-fi hand-waving), chances are it shattered or penetrated into anything it did hit; which should be very rare. But for safety, let it do its work separated from the ship itself.
0 comment threads
0 comment threads