Timeline for How to effectively slow down a ship about to shoot through the Solar System at 0.6c?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 22, 2016 at 19:26 | comment | added | TLW | A circle would not help. Or, to put it another way, halfway around the circle you are going in the opposite direction as when you started. Which means that you have to accelerate them more than if you simply stopped them. | |
| Jul 22, 2016 at 15:05 | comment | added | theinvisibleduck | I'll leave this one after this as there are undoubtedly a lot of holes that can be put through this suggestion, but using a circle, just like a particle accelerator does, then there woulnt be a limit as you reuse asteroids over and over. Considering the speed, using the Kuiper belt makes more sense, but as it has a diameter of .001 of a light year, you still would want to bring the speed down a lot (they would experience 720g if you didnt) before it gets there in order to not crush your astronauts as they turn, so move asteroids to slow them down as they approach or increase your radius. | |
| Jul 21, 2016 at 22:04 | comment | added | TLW | Let me put it this way: there are ~1.5 million asteroids >1km in diameter in the asteroid belt. If you used every single one of them, each one would have to slow down the ship by ~120 m/s. A slowdown of 120m/s in less than 6 microseconds as the ship whips by is not exactly survivable, even assuming you could attain it. | |
| Jul 21, 2016 at 21:50 | comment | added | theinvisibleduck | More of a matter of how many asteroids/magnetic fields and how strong the magnetic fields are. There is an innate assumption here that you would keep the deceleration in at a survivable rate. As for how a magentic field works across a speed differential like that, I have no idea. I know this idea is currently used in particle accelerators, just on a different scale (and of course, to accelerate a particle to close to light speed instead of decelerator it). | |
| Jul 21, 2016 at 19:58 | comment | added | TLW | Problem with this: the ship won't be near the magnets long enough to really be affected. And even if it was, you'd splat the passengers. 0.6c, remember? Your 100km long asteroid would whip by in half a millisecond. | |
| Apr 27, 2016 at 16:52 | history | answered | theinvisibleduck | CC BY-SA 3.0 |