Generation ship design project

[AstroChara]

Just to add a couple things to the mix:

a) Re lasers - optical phased arrays - particularly those based on PQDA technology might allow the entire front of the ship to act as a laser emitter firing a beam as wide as the whole front of the ship (this rather than specific individual emitters firing overlapping beams or the like). It might also make the system more resilient in that damaging part of the array would still leave the rest intact while repairs are made to the damaged bits.

Power requirements might be challenging - how much energy would a laser protection system need to emit anyway?

Related random thought that just came to me - perhaps the laser system (or other onboard lasers) could constantly energize a plasma cloud ahead of the ship to help vaporize potential impactors rather than try to shoot them down directly.

b) Although we don't make a big deal of it (and perhaps should make more of one) - we've long said that shielding is a major limiting factor for both the speed and maximum range of OA ships - even up into transapient levels. From the sound of things so far, that element is likely to be one we want to keep. Note that this is not arguing that OA ships have to be 'slow' in the later timeline - just that they don't (usually) do hyper-relativistic speeds where time dilation becomes significant. But with biostasis tech this isn't generally a big deal.

My 2c worth,

Todd

a) Good point regarding PQDAs. I imagine you might also want it to light up any incoming projectiles as well. I'm not sure how much power would be required; not much luck checking research papers for heat capacities for the dust grain elements, and we don't even know how common the bigger sand grains/pebbles/boulders are, though in the latter cases lasers might not even help.

Regarding the plasma idea: I'm not sure how one could keep that plasma contained for extended periods in vacuum, while said plasma is receiving even more energy from the dust particles.

b) Shielding being a major limiting factor for speed and maximum range of interstellar vessels in Orion's Arm seems reasonable — alongside other factors (like cost and stuff breaking down) of course.

I'd mused about it on Discord before to check people's opinions, but I believe we might want to also look into the pre-Federation interstellar colonization (again), because we have missions flying at pretty fast speeds (0.2c, even 0.3c) as well as going for really, really distant locations (as far as Iota Horologii, at 57 ly) somehow. Back when I was working on this and chatting with Rynn, I was informed that the main limiting factor was cost of the mission — you need more fuel to go faster, and the likes.

I can make a thread for discussing about this topic, if people are interested.