kzt wrote:lyonheart wrote:Hi PeterZ,
I suspect part of the mission planning would be to minimize collateral damage, and options such as approaching the anchorage from the angle of the nearest inhabited planet, so impacts would be away from it or any other inhabited planet or space habitat that might be affected.
Of course this is all speculation, but it all might be moot if the radius of the RD's wedge is more than 700 meters from the RD, since that's wider than any SD, so there would be no debris!![]()
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I think the wedge will catastrophically fail with a 150 ton object hitting a 6 million ton object. There is an upper limit to what it can handle. And 4000x1 is almost certainly well about it.
If the wedge is the only thing that intersects with the parked SD, then what's the problem?
The drone slices along the ring of parked SDs with its wedge cutting incompletely through the SD's width but nearly completely along the entire length. The damage would be more expensive to repaid than to simply build from scratch. Since the wedge wouldn't pass through another field, there wouldn't be the feedback into the nodes. The wedge would simply turn lots of matter in few large/connected pieces into a lot more pieces of unconnected matter.