How can a large fleets maintain formation in interstellar space?
Earth is under attack, the empire has gathered thousands of battleships each has a displacement of 500,000 metric tonnes and 20 motherships with a displacement of over 15 million metric tonnes now heading towards Earth as we speak. They are groups in a tight formation around a shield generator which put up a powerful force field the size of our moon orbit and can keep out asteroids and incoming missiles. I suppose traveling at subluminal speed across large distance of space, these fleets would be attracted to each other gravitationally and hence such a tight formation is disastrous. Is there any way to overcome this problem and still maintain a tight formation around the shield generator? The emperor has restricted the budget so there can only be 1 shield generator for the entire fleet, propulsion are antimatter-matter engine and ion drive (no FTL). The plan is to overwhelm Earth defences at one go, second wave commencing at later time is the finisher but no shield generator.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/140208. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
0 comment threads