We can NOW aim well enough to hit a small mirror on the moon with a laser.Triggerhappy wrote: It's damn well near impossible to aim at s small pice of rock traveling at you long enough to vaporizer any part of it.
Aiming at a rock is easy.
We can NOW aim well enough to hit a small mirror on the moon with a laser.Triggerhappy wrote: It's damn well near impossible to aim at s small pice of rock traveling at you long enough to vaporizer any part of it.
True. Nearly forgot about this one.Dinosawer wrote:We can NOW aim well enough to hit a small mirror on the moon with a laser.Triggerhappy wrote: It's damn well near impossible to aim at s small pice of rock traveling at you long enough to vaporizer any part of it.
Aiming at a rock is easy.
Flatfingers wrote: 23.01.2017: "Show me the smoldering corpse of Perfectionist Josh"
its nice that you can use lasers to find those things out in the first placeTriggerhappy wrote: Rocks come in different materials - the same amount of energy fired at it with a laser can do anything from heat it up slightly to shatter it into a lot of small dust that is now coming at you. You won't even know what the mass of the rock is and where to fire to set it off course.
I thought about that too! But I thought "Well, you're already trying to move it into another direction. And you don't know how much energy you need. So how would you know how much energy you would need for the laser spectroscopy?"Cornflakes_91 wrote: laser spectroscopy isnt hard to do and takes a fraction of the time the rock could possibly need to reach you.
(in addition that rocks dont have that variable of a composition, theres a couple of general classes of asteroids)
Flatfingers wrote: 23.01.2017: "Show me the smoldering corpse of Perfectionist Josh"
you mean in the same size regime of the dust thats already going to sandblast you all the time anyway?Triggerhappy wrote: a lot of small dust that is now coming at you.
He had enough. He's already dead!Cornflakes_91 wrote:you mean in the same size regime of the dust thats already going to sandblast you all the time anyway?Triggerhappy wrote: a lot of small dust that is now coming at you.
the smaller the rock the more of them are out there. exponentially.
if a med sized rock is such a common occurence that you have to desing a station to actively avoid them you are going to get many many many grain sized impacts you cant avoid.
you already have to be able to just eat sand coming at you with that speed, so the sanded rock is a definite upgrade.
besides the very very serious overkill and order of magnitude difference (aka bullshit) of you accidentally blasting a rock to pieces in the first place
heat of melting/vaporisation varies, yes, but not by orders of magnitude for things that are solid in the same temperature range
Flatfingers wrote: 23.01.2017: "Show me the smoldering corpse of Perfectionist Josh"
Boy, I am never dead.JanB1 wrote:He had enough. He's already dead!
Yet, this is not what this station is meant to do. It is not meant to shoot at asteroids. Its there to dodge them. Reasons why shooting them is dumb coming right up.JanB1 wrote:Well, we TURN the station with the help of gyroscopes and don't NEED to MOVE it, because we move the asteroids instead of the station. That is our point.
A lot of mechanical energy. That you recuperate. Along with saving on lasers and everything needed to deal with them. (Targeting systems, turret mounts, power lines, and a lot of them to cover several approach vectors to the station too.JanB1 wrote:Yeah, yeah, recuperation factor is nice, and lasers don't recuperate any energy they fired. But how much energy do you need in the first place?
Sure, a one meter rock. You need to lock onto it and fire a precise shot, unless you want a LOT more power demand firing several shots. Even in the future, it would be difficult, most likely, to target and fire on a rock traveling at you with any speed comparable to what it takes to simply and quickly shift two arms of station out of the way, while losing very little energy on the asteroid itself. Good luck locking onto, and hitting, a rock traveling in a retrograde orbit for example, in, eh, 5 seconds. All that is skilled by twitching the station out of the way in a short time.JanB1 wrote:Again, we are talking about the far future where we have space stations like this idling somewhere around, and we're talking about MILIseconds. I think it's not THAT hard to aim at a piece of rock for a few milliseconds.
Wait a second...what size of rocks are we even talking about here? I'm assuming >1m?
You would not have time to make a lot of short bursts, and then wait to see what effect it had after each hit.JanB1 wrote:And that's why you use pulse lasers. You fire small burst until the desired effect is reached.
A rock, that you just spotted, traveling at you, FAST.Dinosawer wrote:We can NOW aim well enough to hit a small mirror on the moon with a laser.
Aiming at a rock is easy.
What kind of detection array do you use that can tell you the rock's exact size and mass? Must be very expensive and fragile...Cornflakes_91 wrote:its nice that you can use lasers to find those things out in the first placeTriggerhappy wrote: Rocks come in different materials - the same amount of energy fired at it with a laser can do anything from heat it up slightly to shatter it into a lot of small dust that is now coming at you. You won't even know what the mass of the rock is and where to fire to set it off course.
laser spectroscopy isn't hard to do and takes a fraction of the time the rock could possibly need to reach you.
(in addition that rocks don't have that variable of a composition, there's a couple of general classes of asteroids)
then you know what it is, and you already know how large it is by looking at it with your detector array.
so you know its mass and composition good enough.
and why wouldn't you know where to hit the rock to get it off course? orbital mechanics aren't hard, especially for an asteroid defense package computer which is built to calculate that
Time. The issues is time. A station can dodge in 5 seconds. That... process sounds like it could take a while.JanB1 wrote:I thought about that too! But I thought "Well, you're already trying to move it into another direction. And you don't know how much energy you need. So how would you know how much energy you would need for the laser spectroscopy?"
Right, so would you rather shatter the rock in several parts, all traveling at you now? Instead of dust?Cornflakes_91 wrote:you mean in the same size regime of the dust that's already going to sandblast you all the time anyway?Triggerhappy wrote: a lot of small dust that is now coming at you.
the smaller the rock the more of them are out there. exponentially.
if a med sized rock is such a common occurrence that you have to design a station to actively avoid them you are going to get many many many grain sized impacts you cant avoid.
you already have to be able to just eat sand coming at you with that speed, so the sanded rock is a definite upgrade.
besides the very very serious overkill and order of magnitude difference (aka bullshit) of you accidentally blasting a rock to pieces in the first place
heat of melting/vaporisation varies, yes, but not by orders of magnitude for things that are solid in the same temperature range
a. Why the hell would you be so stupid as to put a station in a retrograde orbit when asteroids are around? There is literally no reason ever you'd want to do that that could ever outweigh the sheer stupidity of doing that.Triggerhappy wrote: Sure, a one meter rock. You need to lock onto it and fire a precise shot, unless you want a LOT more power demand firing several shots. Even in the future, it would be difficult, most likely, to target and fire on a rock traveling at you with any speed comparable to what it takes to simply and quickly shift two arms of station out of the way, while losing very little energy on the asteroid itself. Good luck locking onto, and hitting, a rock traveling in a retrograde orbit for example, in, eh, 5 seconds. All that is skilled by twitching the station out of the way in a short time.
^thisDinosawer wrote:a. Why the hell would you be so stupid as to put a station in a retrograde orbit when asteroids are around? There is literally no reason ever you'd want to do that that could ever outweigh the sheer stupidity of doing that.Triggerhappy wrote: Sure, a one meter rock. You need to lock onto it and fire a precise shot, unless you want a LOT more power demand firing several shots. Even in the future, it would be difficult, most likely, to target and fire on a rock traveling at you with any speed comparable to what it takes to simply and quickly shift two arms of station out of the way, while losing very little energy on the asteroid itself. Good luck locking onto, and hitting, a rock traveling in a retrograde orbit for example, in, eh, 5 seconds. All that is skilled by twitching the station out of the way in a short time.
(because guess what, asteroids can easily be too larger for your station to dodge)
b. Did we forget how to build telescopes and radar? 5 seconds is in no way a realistic number. Several hours, days and even weeks more so.
c. Something that is moving toward you is not a moving object, its position does not change (it just becomes a larger target over time) and thus aiming at it is dead easy because you don't even have to factor in sideways motion.
(Yes, orbits are curved, but that's not noticeable at all at the scale we're talking about)
d. In any realistic orbit the speed something moves towards you is gonna be very low (because gravity just works that way), not high.
Flatfingers wrote: 23.01.2017: "Show me the smoldering corpse of Perfectionist Josh"
"Its not there to be reasonable or economic"Triggerhappy wrote: Yet, this is not what this station is meant to do. It is not meant to shoot at asteroids. Its there to dodge them.
So, you want your station to move out the way in 5 seconds.Triggerhappy wrote: A lot of mechanical energy. That you recuperate.
Because your giant nuclear power plant equivalent is cheaper?Triggerhappy wrote: Along with saving on lasers and everything needed to deal with them. (Targeting systems, turret mounts, power lines)
That is not how orbital mechanics work.Triggerhappy wrote: and a lot of [lasers] to cover several approach vectors to the station too.
That thing is coming straight at you.Triggerhappy wrote: Sure, a one meter rock. You need to lock onto it and fire a precise shot
So, look at the numbers i outlined earlier for the energy needed and lets assume very generous 90% efficiency at driving and recuperating. (Probably a lot lower because such ridicolous power density systems lose a lot of efficiency)Triggerhappy wrote: while losing very little energy on the asteroid itself.
Its sure as fuck easier than putting the power equipment to supply a fair chunk of the USA into the stationTriggerhappy wrote: Good luck locking onto, and hitting, a rock traveling in a retrograde orbit for example, in, eh, 5 seconds. All that is skilled by twitching the station out of the way in a short time.
"Lot of small bursts" = a couple of salvos 30microseconds long eachTriggerhappy wrote: You would not have time to make a lot of short bursts, and then wait to see what effect it had after each hit.
A radar array.Triggerhappy wrote: What kind of detection array do you use that can tell you the rock's exact size and mass? Must be very expensive and fragile...
By using a stupid properly pulsed laser that doesnt dwell for 5 seconds but only for a couple of microseconds or a milisecond or two in extreme cases.Triggerhappy wrote: And what if the asteroid is spinning, so you shooting it off course just results with the energy being spread out over the surface of the damn thing?
"Waste power" *points at loss calculations*Triggerhappy wrote: So, you spot an asteroid 5 seconds out from impact. You want to measure its mass, composition, waste energy testing it with a laser, and then try to precision-burn it out of it's path without shattering it?
Go ahead, calculate the costs for a fixed size laser package you can mass produce and sell to everyone and compare it to gigantic multi kiloton mechanical systems needed to jerk the station around.Triggerhappy wrote: You wouldn't know it, because this asteroid defence package sounds very expensive for a storage station.
Distance 300km, 5 seconds at a retrograde earth orbit.Triggerhappy wrote: Time. The issues is time. A station can dodge in 5 seconds. That... process sounds like it could take a while.
Again, materials dont vary by that far.Triggerhappy wrote: Some rock will shatter. Other will melt. Guessing wrong can be fatal.
1: you mean like a crane? The things that are usually used for such purposes? with much higher precision and much lower infrastructure cost?Triggerhappy wrote: Further advantages of crowbar station:
1 - Docking with the station becomes significantly easier - stop somewhere nearby the station, and it will maneuver any container you want right by your ship.
2 - If said containers are fuel tanks, you can transfer fuel between any two containers on the station, simply by shifting around some containers
3 - Rotation without gyros and engines.
4 - Its a station that can dodge. Without using fuel. Precision railguns, impact missiles, and non-pulse lasers are helpless against said station. ( everything else though will kill the flimsy sucker )
Humor missed much?Dinosawer wrote:Welcome to another episode of 'Trigger does not get sizes nor physics nor astronomy'
I think they could be friends, regardless of heat output and practicality :cTriggerhappy wrote: I drew a dream I had today.
Will make a full reply later.
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