With new technology comes new ways to snoop on your significant other. Some things never change!
I know it can be hard to keep track of lots of new characters at a time, so that should help a bit. And speaking of cast members, I am going to begin gradually updating the Cast Page with character bios. More updates on that whenever I make some actual progress.
This one's a response to a really important question that KimLuster asked on the previous update, and which I didn't really give a very good answer to. It's something that I hadn't given much consideration. What happens when one of these super fast spaceships hits a space rock, and how do you avoid them?
Well, the first part of the question is straightforward enough, and kinda scary. The equation for calculating impact energy is ke = ½ mv^2. So, if a spaceship traveling at 1,250 kilometers per second smacked into a 5kg (bowling ball sized) space rock, then by my calculations that would result in about 3.9 trillion joules of energy, equivalent to almost exactly 1 kiloton of TNT. For comparison, the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima was equivalent to 15 kilotons. That's pretty devastating.
It's not easy to speculate what kind of damage that would do to a futuristic spacecraft, because there's no telling what kind of exotic materials they'd be built out of. Modern “bunker buster” missiles and even futuristic satellite-delivered kinetic penetrators all fall under the “millions of joules” category, not trillions, which is a millionfold disparity. I'm guessing there wouldn't be anything left of your spacecraft after something like that. You'd be vaporized… which is actually good news, because your debris field would be dispersed enough that it would probably not be much of a threat to Earth after all.
Fortunately, collisions with objects that large are not very likely. It's true that our satellites and even the International Space Station get hit by micrometeoroids on occasion, but low earth orbit is a relatively high density micrometeoroid environment, and also there's a ton of manmade space debris orbiting around up there. Once you get out into open space, it clears up quite a bit. Modern space probes don't have any kind of impact avoidance systems on board; they just make sure to plot a course initially that avoids any big asteroids or known meteor streams, and accept that it's an almost-zero probability that they'll run into anything larger than a pea. Probes do run into dust grain-or-smaller particles all the time, and these do contribute to wear and tear. These along with cosmic ray impacts can cause electrical or software malfunctions or even disable entire instruments.
If a space rock does cross your path, even at 1,250 kilometers per second, your sci-fi spaceship should be able to detect it well ahead of time (space is very empty, so it would be hard to miss). Avoiding an impact is easy: Just accelerate a tiny little bit and it'll slightly raise your trajectory, at which point your path and the rock's path no longer cross. No fancy sci fi gizmos required there, though it may make you spill your coffee. This kind of thing would probably happen a lot, because you'd even need to avoid dust-sized particles. At 1,250 kps, a grain of dust packs several thousand times more energy than a sniper's bullet. You probably couldn't safely just plow through them the way a modern space probe does.
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