Generation ship design project

[AstroChara]

From past discussions, OA presumes (although not all that obviously) that inflight 'shielding' actually consists of multiple cooperating systems (mass, lasers, magnetic fields, plasma, perhaps other things). We should probably make that more explicit.

There is also this page - LINK - that was updated not that long ago and seems to be based on somewhat different conclusions re impacts on a mass shield. Maybe - perhaps the numbers actually line up with what is being mentioned here in the last few posts.

Interstellar shielding generally being multiple systems sounds realistic to me. I do believe that even the very first missions would want to leverage every single technologies they have at disposal that could help and doesn’t cost too much to use.

Regarding the Interstellar Shielding article; indeed we did update it earlier, removing water ice as a viable shielding option due to its extremely high expected erosion rate, and probably also changing other entries. I haven't given it a proper read however so I am not sure what other parts may require update. I'd like to note that the author of the article, to my understanding, currently agrees with Luke Campbell’s method for calculating dust erosion of shield which finds very high erosion rate and such, so indeed this article should be updated.

EDIT: Regardless of what I mentioned here though, I don't really find fast interstellar travel to be unlikely at all — at worst ships might have to stop on a bunch of interstellar bodies to extract materials for repairs and such. But getting up to speed is one of the more well thought-out aspect of it, and I don't believe it'd be a big issue to get up to say 0.1c. An interplanetary society would also have plenty of opportunities to experiment with getting equipment to last decades or centuries, plus the repairing. And us not knowing the abundance of mission-ending big boulders is hardly a reason for ruling out fast interstellar. It's probably possible to constrain the number of at least some sizeable objects based on "extinction" of distant stars (that's not caused by dust), and for now I think the lack of concern about those affecting research into distant stars is probably good enough for us to say that there's no suffocating amount of interstellar pebbles out to end any interstellar mission.