Onno Meyer wrote: > > Hmm... true. Spaceships 5 gives guidelines for how much of a hazard > > interstellar gas is at various fractions of lightspeed; but I have no > > idea how much of a hazard it would be for a warp bubble ship. > > I don't think the rules can be made applicable, since damage > seems to go up with the square of velocity.
IOW, it's probably proportional to the ship's kinetic energy. I wonder if they include a relativistic spike in there? Anyway, it's a moot point for the warp bubbles, where any danger is unlikely to come from kinetic energy (unless there's some sort of "gravity gradient" that the interstellar gas must pass through in order to enter the bubble; but I'd rather not go there), and more likely to come from "atmospheric pressure" type effects as whole light-seconds (-minutes? -hours? -years?) worth of interstellar gas end up cohabiting a bubble that's not much larger than the ship itself. I think I should be looking at "crush depth" formulae for this. > > The first issue is whether or not dangerous speeds are attainable in a > > year or so; if they are, armored hulls would be necessary for all > > interstellar journeys. > > The bubble must provide some mitigation, so why not make it > full protection? That was my initial instinct; but if I allow for the notion of dangerous speeds, I also potentially allow for a non-arbitrary factor that draws out the lengthier interstellar travel times so that one doesn't end up with ships capable of traversing multiple galaxies within a couple centuries. -- Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
