[TML] Asteroid Deflection

[Jerry W Barrington]

On 7/14/08 2:55 PM, "Rob Davenport" <rgd at travellercentral.com> wrote:

> 
>> From: Leon Wu <Leon.Wu at newswire.ca>
>> Subject: Re: [TML] RTT Supplements
>>> 
>>> Thanks, so far nobody's thrown rocks at me over it...
>> 
>> Near C rocks?
> 
> ...which reminds me - I caught parts of "Deep Impact" on late night TV
> last night (hadn't seen it), and I looked up some stuff about
> asteroid/comet deflection:
> 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_deflection_strategies>
> 
> and had two thoughts:
> 
> 1)  What about jump drives (in the far future obviously)? Could one or
> more be attached to an incoming rock (a non-near-C type rock probably) and
> just jump it (or as much of it as possible) somewhere else? Never mind
> about a misjump, in fact that'd probably be preferred. (Induced misjump?).

As Tom said, *catching* the rock is the hard part.  You've got to see it
coming a long way, zoom out to it, turn around and catch up to it, then do
whatever your strategy is before it hits.  And of course, how much jump
drive does it take to even mis-jump a large rock?

Possibly a simpler strategy is to just ram a ship into it.  Of center, of
course.  Since the collision is near-c, there'll be one hell of an
explosion.  Probably pushing it off intercept.  Possibly fragmenting it too,
but if the explosion is powerful enough, the fragments should all be pushed
away from intercept.  And near-c is well above escape velocity for the
system, so the pieces all go away.

> 2) At the bottom of the above article it has a section called "Gaming",
> which I found meant "Computer gaming".  Doesn't Traveller deserve
> mentioning for the near-C rock "issue"? And/or any science fiction that
> deals with it? :)

Thing is, while near-c rocks are a theme of TML, they *aren't* a theme of
Traveller.  In fact, that's a large part of the issue.