Fundamental Obstacle to long term high speed space travel?

[mcs_seattle]

Among many obstacles, isn't a pretty fundamental one that of avoiding or building a rigorously shielded space craft from relatively small rocks/asteroids? Say, you can get a space craft moving up to 100K mph, do you just rely on luck to avoid smacking into some random asteroid? It wouldn't even have to be all that large of an asteroid to have a pretty high energy impact.

 

[grooble]

In star trek they have a deflector dish. I don't know what a real life parralel of that could be.

 

[tohaki]

AEGIS/Spy-1F/ESSM? <img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" />

 

[grooble]

I always wondered why the deflector dish could stop particles and rocks that were going faster than light but it couldn't stop sub lightspeed torpedos.<br /><br />And why did the crews always get shaken around when the ship had inertial dampeners (which stopped them getting splatted up the walls from extreme acceleration) ?

 

[drwayne]

Simple answer:<br /><br />Dramatic license.<br /><br /><img src="/images/icons/wink.gif" /><br /><br />Wayne<br /><br />p.s. According to various "technology" resources, the navigational deflectors and the shields were different systems <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p>"1) Give no quarter; 2) Take no prisoners; 3) Sink everything."  Admiral Jackie Fisher</p> </div>

 

[cuddlyrocket]

The particles and rocks weren't going faster than light, the ship was. Photon torpedoes travelled at high warp speed.<br /><br />The inertial dampeners weren't instantaneous. Shake the ship violently enough and the crew would move noticeably before the dampeners cut in.

 

[nacnud]

To stop your asteroid ship from being splated by small rock place a sheild of ice infront of the craft, say a few 10s of km.

 

[nexium]

Even at a million miles per hour, the shield needs to cover a large area; as some of the possible impactors have horizontal speeds which can allow them to miss the shield, but collide with the ship. Can we expect all the ice chunks that result from the impact to evaporate in the minute the ship will travel 16,666 kilometers? The usual thinking is to use multiple film shields up to a million miles ahead of the ship. Film vaporizes pea size and smaller asteroids, but is useless against bigger projectiles. Fortunately bigger asteroids are typically fewer than one trillion per cubic light year in deep space, we hope. (That is an average spacing of 2.19 billion kilometers) <br />The front shield can have a radar set which detects bigger than pea size objects on a collision path (warning the ship by radio link) The ship then has perhaps one minute to move horizontally out of the path of the incoming asteroid. Very high accelleration is needed to move the ship sufficiently to avoid a possible collision. These methods become unworkable at more than about 1/10 the speed of light and threats will occur aproximately ten times as often at 1/10 c compared to 1/100 c as the speed of the asteroid is typically much less than 1/100 c. At ship speed of 1/10 c and faster (with respect to likely impactors) we likely will be powerless to avoid an occasional disaster. Neil