Loren Pechtel wrote:Jonathan_S wrote:And in the case of Cerberus I'm sure Honor felt some responsibility towards the prisoners that, for whatever reasons, refused to cooperate with her prison break and opted to remain behind.
She'd have cleaned up enough battle debris to make sure the remaining prisoners, and the farms that fed them, weren't going to have random chunks of ships raining down on them.
I don't think cleaning up was either necessary nor feasible at Cerberus. The peeps were heading for Cerberus, if it's going to hit I don't think she had enough time to sweep it. If it misses it's beyond escape velocity, it heads off into interstellar space. Ships basically always are either orbiting something or moving above escape velocity, there's almost no chance of leaving debris in a star system.
A ship destroyed in orbit could make a substantial mess but fusion bottle booms are portrayed as basically erasing the whole ship. (I disagree with that.) It shouldn't have left anything that can survive atmospheric entry and thus poses no threat to the planet.
Just because something is moving at above escape velocity doesn't mean that its trajectory out of the system can't intersect with something important like a station or planet.
In this case the Peep forces were about 3 minutes from coming to a stop (relative to the planet) at their attack position just over 7 million km beyond the orbital and lunar defenses controlled by Camp Charon when Honor's ambush was sprung.
Still, even with the low acceleration of their transports, three minutes of deceleration remaining would place their velocity at dozens of times the escape velocity of the system. But their base velocity was mostly towards the planet and who knows what kind of side velocity might be added from the rapid destruction of their warships by Honor's energy mounts.
Yeah, at their probable velocity you're probably looking at around 3 hours or so for any debris still moving at roughly the ships' base velocity to cover the 7 million km or so to the planet. I don't think we know Charon's velocity around its star, but in that time Earth would have displaced about 1/3rd of a million km. But even if the ships were aimed directly at where the planet currently was the debris would only need to be deflected less than 3 degrees to be that far off it's line.
Most of the debris would miss, but with a large cloud caused by the destruction of multiple warships you might not was to trust to "most". Not when you've got a few hours to do cleanup and it'd be quick and easy to corral any pieces large enough they might have survivors and then run a wedge a few times through the area any remaining debris on course to the planet would be traveling. (The stuff not aimed at the planet could presumably be left to fly out the far side of the system)