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What happens to all that debris?

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What happens to all that debris?
Post by cthia   » Fri Jul 10, 2020 10:41 am

cthia
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So,

"What on Earth" happens to all the debris caused from space battles? There must be countless tons of debris emanating from the wreckage of warships, torpedoes, probes, and... who knows what else? What happens to it all? This stuff is dangerous. It is certainly dangerous to our current space station which isn't fortunate enough to be protected by any HV technology. But yet, not everything in the HV is protected either. IINM, Grayson's orbital farms are vulnerable. Yachts, busses, and smaller ships should be vulnerable too. Crew working in space must account for many casualties. And what about pieces that eventually make it inside the local planet's atmosphere? Atmosphere breathers should be downed much too frequently to simply brush aside, pardon the pun.


NASA tracks more than 500,000 pieces of debris.


From the NET...

If there is a greater than a 1 in 100 chance of a known piece of debris colliding with the International Space Station (ISS), the astronauts perform a debris avoidance maneuver in which the ISS’s orbit is raised to avoid collision.


Simply a small bolt traveling at speed can smash a helmet and kill. Some debris may be composed of specialized metals that could survive reentry, certainly long enough to bring down air breathers and wreak havoc on a modern space-bred society. High Rises must be quake and debris proof. Do local weather reports include the chance of raining debris? Debris storms have just become much more dangerous than hail storms. Oyster Bay simply didn't produce the only cracked shells roaming around unchecked.

At any rate, what days are trash collection in space?

.
Last edited by cthia on Wed Jul 15, 2020 7:56 am, edited 2 times in total.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by cthia   » Fri Jul 10, 2020 11:16 am

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Excerpt...

How dangerous is space debris?

'Extremely' is the answer. Being hit by a 'sugar-cube' of space debris is the equivalent of standing next to an exploding hand-grenade. And the problem is only getting worse.

This week, the International Space Station (ISS) made its latest move in a long-running game of cat and mouse with pieces of space debris. For years now, the ISS has been dodging collisions. Some of the latest manoeuvres took place in April 2011 and January 2012. What may not be so obvious is that many of its "near-misses" are due to fragments from a single event in 2009 that shocked the aerospace community.

On 10 February that year, the defunct Russian military communications satellite Kosmos 2251 struck the solar panel of Iridium 33, a commercial American communications satellite. The panel shattered and Iridium 33 tumbled out of control. Kosmos 2251 disintegrated.

The catastrophe created more than 2,000 pieces of space debris with sizes greater than 10 centimetres, and potentially hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments that cannot currently be tracked from Earth. To put the trackable debris into perspective, about 10% of all known space debris accumulated over the past 55 years comes from the 2009 Kosmos-Iridium collision.

Fragments as small as a single centimetre have the potential to destroy whole satellites because of the speed at which they are travelling. This is because the energy of a collision is overwhelmingly determined by the speed at which things strike each other. (Who else remembers that half-mass-times-velocity-squared equation of kinetic energy?)

Typical orbital velocities can be tens of thousands of kilometres per hour. In the case of Kosmos and Iridium, the collision speed was 42,100km/hr.

The reason Kosmos-Iridium shocked the aerospace community was that it was a definite step towards a nightmare scenario that had been proposed in 1978 and is known as the Kessler syndrome.

-snip-

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Jul 10, 2020 11:54 am

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cthia wrote:"What on Earth" happens to all the debris caused from space battles? There must be countless tons of debris emanating from the wreckage of warships, torpedoes, probes, and... who knows what else? What happens to it all? This stuff is dangerous. It is certainly dangerous to our current space station which isn't fortunate enough to be protected by any HV technology. But yet, not everything in the HV is protected either. IINM, Grayson's orbital farms are vulnerable. Yachts, busses, and smaller ships should be vulnerable too. Crew working in space must account for many casualties. And what about pieces that eventually make it inside the local planet's atmosphere? Atmosphere breathers should be downed much too frequently to simply brush aside, pardon the pun.
Some of it is heading out of the system at well over escape velocity; so isn't likely to be problem.
Some of it would have to get cleaned up.

The good news is that in the honorverse, thanks to impeller powered ships, delta-V is almost free so you don't have the problem we've got today where the cost to play garbage collector is simply impossibly high. (Plus for stuff you don't care to recover you don't need to worry about matching velocities and capturing it. You can just stick a wedge or sidewall into it's path and let it harmlessly vaporize itself. When a larger freighter's wedge can cover an area 90,000 km^2; and harmlessly rid it of any debris garbage cleaning isn't the headache it is today.

Also even the structural steel of freighters seems to be tougher than the armor on WWII - and odds are even any debris moving fast enough to punch through is going to spall itself over a giant cargo hold rather than hitting anything vital. They're a far larger target than any of today's spacecraft - but they're also far tougher and have their critical areas far more separated. As for hitting a warship's hull armor... And at least while underway a warship uses its sensor to look for debris or micrometiorites that are too large for its rad shields to handle and blasts them with its chase PDLCs. (Or now for modern ships might throw up a buckler wall instead)

So it's a problem, but most inhabited systems worth fighting over will have enough impeller powered ships / small craft left after the fight to sweep the most dangerous debris. It's just one of those boring routine, but important, jobs that haven't had reason to clutter up the books.
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by Duckk   » Fri Jul 10, 2020 1:39 pm

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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by cthia   » Fri Jul 10, 2020 5:24 pm

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Jonathan_S wrote:
cthia wrote:"What on Earth" happens to all the debris caused from space battles? There must be countless tons of debris emanating from the wreckage of warships, torpedoes, probes, and... who knows what else? What happens to it all? This stuff is dangerous. It is certainly dangerous to our current space station which isn't fortunate enough to be protected by any HV technology. But yet, not everything in the HV is protected either. IINM, Grayson's orbital farms are vulnerable. Yachts, busses, and smaller ships should be vulnerable too. Crew working in space must account for many casualties. And what about pieces that eventually make it inside the local planet's atmosphere? Atmosphere breathers should be downed much too frequently to simply brush aside, pardon the pun.
Some of it is heading out of the system at well over escape velocity; so isn't likely to be problem.
Some of it would have to get cleaned up.

The good news is that in the honorverse, thanks to impeller powered ships, delta-V is almost free so you don't have the problem we've got today where the cost to play garbage collector is simply impossibly high. (Plus for stuff you don't care to recover you don't need to worry about matching velocities and capturing it. You can just stick a wedge or sidewall into it's path and let it harmlessly vaporize itself. When a larger freighter's wedge can cover an area 90,000 km^2; and harmlessly rid it of any debris garbage cleaning isn't the headache it is today.

Also even the structural steel of freighters seems to be tougher than the armor on WWII - and odds are even any debris moving fast enough to punch through is going to spall itself over a giant cargo hold rather than hitting anything vital. They're a far larger target than any of today's spacecraft - but they're also far tougher and have their critical areas far more separated. As for hitting a warship's hull armor... And at least while underway a warship uses its sensor to look for debris or micrometiorites that are too large for its rad shields to handle and blasts them with its chase PDLCs. (Or now for modern ships might throw up a buckler wall instead)

So it's a problem, but most inhabited systems worth fighting over will have enough impeller powered ships / small craft left after the fight to sweep the most dangerous debris. It's just one of those boring routine, but important, jobs that haven't had reason to clutter up the books.

Even debris heading out of the system can be a problem, for someone.

Debris fields can emanate from an explosion in a °360 path in many velocities. It could take a lot of ships sweeping up the debris, especially if ALL of it, even the debris headed out of the system is collected. Man's intransigence towards keeping his environment clean irks me.

At any rate, what about the battles where there won't be a chance at cleanup for a while, like Cerberus? It would be some time before trash collectors can pick up the garbage Honor left, indeed before they arrive in system and even see any garbage. Poor souls left on planet?

At the end of the battle in the Basilisk System, I suppose Hamish's Fleet had some cleanup to do, after it tended to Honor's wounds. It's just that I can't see debris being so accommodating.

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by Jonathan_S   » Fri Jul 10, 2020 7:32 pm

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cthia wrote:Debris fields can emanate from an explosion in a °360 path in many velocities. It could take a lot of ships sweeping up the debris, especially if ALL of it, even the debris headed out of the system is collected. Man's intransigence towards keeping his environment clean irks me.
They can - but with starships that frequently engage in combat at velocities far higher than the shrapnel from an explosion can manage often the debris fields will form expanding cones. Bits exploded with the ship's base vector are moving faster than those perpendicular to it, which in turn are faster than those exploded opposite it. But even those final bits are still heading in the same direction the ship was; just somewhat slower than it had been.

cthia wrote:At any rate, what about the battles where there won't be a chance at cleanup for a while, like Cerberus? It would be some time before trash collectors can pick up the garbage Honor left, indeed before they arrive in system and even see any garbage. Poor souls left on planet?
Honor's ships could have swept the worst of it before they left. They had to go back to the planet anyway to load the rest of the escapees into the newly captured Roughneck transports. The flight there takes them through the debris heading most directly for the planet; and after warships and their wedges plow through there debris within a couple hundred km of each ship is not longer a problem.
And then while waiting for people to be shuttled up from the surface they've got a little more time to use wedges of the captured warships to mitigate the worst of the remaining debris headed towards the planet. And the small stuff or stuff not on a trajectory to hit the planet soon can be ignored or left to someone else to deal with.
cthia wrote:At the end of the battle in the Basilisk System, I suppose Hamish's Fleet had some cleanup to do, after it tended to Honor's wounds. It's just that I can't see debris being so accommodating.
Given how long both ships had been accelerating for the hyper limit that debris is headed out into deep space where it won't bother another system for centuries, if ever. The base velocity is too high for exploding starships to overcome. Even when operation Plumbbob accidentally turned a nuclear test into a manhole cannon powered by nuclear explosion the nuclear propelled shot was only estimated to be moving about 60 km/s - an honorverse warship is moving faster than that after less than 15 seconds of acceleration. The debris from Fearless's exploded fusion reactor core or the vaporization of Sirius aren't headed back toward the planet and the ships weren't running towards the terminus. After a couple hours (so sooner than anybody can show up to help Honor) it'll all be far enough past the hyper limit that no arriving ship will encounter it; so no longer a pressing problem.
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by cthia   » Sat Jul 11, 2020 2:06 am

cthia
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Jonathan_S wrote:
cthia wrote:Debris fields can emanate from an explosion in a °360 path in many velocities. It could take a lot of ships sweeping up the debris, especially if ALL of it, even the debris headed out of the system is collected. Man's intransigence towards keeping his environment clean irks me.
They can - but with starships that frequently engage in combat at velocities far higher than the shrapnel from an explosion can manage often the debris fields will form expanding cones. Bits exploded with the ship's base vector are moving faster than those perpendicular to it, which in turn are faster than those exploded opposite it. But even those final bits are still heading in the same direction the ship was; just somewhat slower than it had been.

cthia wrote:At any rate, what about the battles where there won't be a chance at cleanup for a while, like Cerberus? It would be some time before trash collectors can pick up the garbage Honor left, indeed before they arrive in system and even see any garbage. Poor souls left on planet?
Honor's ships could have swept the worst of it before they left. They had to go back to the planet anyway to load the rest of the escapees into the newly captured Roughneck transports. The flight there takes them through the debris heading most directly for the planet; and after warships and their wedges plow through there debris within a couple hundred km of each ship is not longer a problem.
And then while waiting for people to be shuttled up from the surface they've got a little more time to use wedges of the captured warships to mitigate the worst of the remaining debris headed towards the planet. And the small stuff or stuff not on a trajectory to hit the planet soon can be ignored or left to someone else to deal with.
cthia wrote:At the end of the battle in the Basilisk System, I suppose Hamish's Fleet had some cleanup to do, after it tended to Honor's wounds. It's just that I can't see debris being so accommodating.
Given how long both ships had been accelerating for the hyper limit that debris is headed out into deep space where it won't bother another system for centuries, if ever. The base velocity is too high for exploding starships to overcome. Even when operation Plumbbob accidentally turned a nuclear test into a manhole cannon powered by nuclear explosion the nuclear propelled shot was only estimated to be moving about 60 km/s - an honorverse warship is moving faster than that after less than 15 seconds of acceleration. The debris from Fearless's exploded fusion reactor core or the vaporization of Sirius aren't headed back toward the planet and the ships weren't running towards the terminus. After a couple hours (so sooner than anybody can show up to help Honor) it'll all be far enough past the hyper limit that no arriving ship will encounter it; so no longer a pressing problem.

Honor couldn't spare the time to worry about collecting any garbage at Cerberus. She had to collect her people and get out of Dodge before sunrise.

Still brilliant Jonathan. I didn't consider the net vectors of any debris fields created. However, that goes vice versa. Most of the ships destroyed in the HV are enemy ships headed "in-system."

Didn't Honor's adversary, name escapes brain, reverse course and was headed back towards the planet in OBS?

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by tlb   » Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:03 am

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cthia wrote:Didn't Honor's adversary, name escapes brain, reverse course and was headed back towards the planet in OBS?

The Q-ship did accelerate back to Honor's ship, but that still left them both with high velocities away from the planet (in effect he just put on the brakes a bit to let her catch up to him). After the battle it still took the damaged Fearless a long time to kill that velocity and head back.
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by cthia   » Sat Jul 11, 2020 9:31 am

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Point taken, tlb. It's like running backwards while atop a fast moving train. Good catch.

I still don't think most situations will permit garbage collection in a timely fashion. For instance, having ships destroyed then someone hypering into a system while debris is heading out of a system should cause problems. It takes a moment or two to shake the cobwebs out of one's head. Is the sweep for debris, large and small, an automated process?

Also, how does a missile avoid all the garbage during battle? I know that a shutter(?) or something protects it's sensors against the smaller pieces -- dunno how that is managed against the speeds a missile obtains -- but there must be cases missiles are traveling thru veritable mine fields of garbage.

And, let's not even consider the debris fields escape pods must encounter.


****** *


Reprint because I missed an opportunity at humor. At Cerberus,

Honor didn't need to get out of Dodge before sunrise.

Honor needed to get the HELL out of Dodge before sunrise.

:lol:

Son, your mother says I have to hang you. Personally I don't think this is a capital offense. But if I don't hang you, she's gonna hang me and frankly, I'm not the one in trouble. —cthia's father. Incident in ? Axiom of Common Sense
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Re: What happens to all that debris?
Post by fallsfromtrees   » Sat Jul 11, 2020 2:45 pm

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cthia wrote:
Reprint because I missed an opportunity at humor. At Cerberus,

Honor didn't need to get out of Dodge before sunrise.

Honor needed to get the HELL out of Dodge before sunrise.

:lol:

Actually she needed to Dodge out of HELL
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