What happens to all that debris?

Mostly this has been treated as a non-problem in the series with a few exceptions. One would be the Oyster Bay strkes where most of the materials were not going to escape the graitaional pull of the planets invovled (ok, Blackbird is sperate case).
Combat in a system, much of the debries is going to exit the system on ballistic paths and if not at speed to escape the system will cylcle back around---eventually. That would be a long time. in any case- with or without escape velocity- once it was beyond the normal maximum distance used by commerical craft to come out of hyper for system entry you are talking a reall reall really long time before it is going to be a potential danger of people. If the course take it (in an expanding cone..big smile) in a direction that would in 2000 years would arrive at an intersection with a then inhabited system- it's going be "a bit thin and spread out".

Sure, we see Abigale and others going after SLN ships after the Battle of Manticore to adjust their trajectories because they were going to hit someting but mostly it was to do S&R work and or stop the big pieces (full or very large parts) of ships for later reclimation.

Impeller drives plus particle shielding and "good enough" sensors for commercial and private in-system vessles to put a wedge between them and something that is going to hit it.

It's fiction, the problem and solutons are outlined. Live with it.

Brigade XO wrote:Mostly this has been treated as a non-problem in the series with a few exceptions. One would be the Oyster Bay strkes where most of the materials were not going to escape the graitaional pull of the planets invovled (ok, Blackbird is sperate case).

Well, no one is going to care about impacts on airless moons and gas giants. Unless there were domed habitats on those moons, of course, but we haven't heard about that in the case of Blackbird. Floating habitats in the atmospheres of gas giants are probably able to jink and get out of the way of big pieces. The rain of small debris could be dangerous. But again, we haven't heard about those in Uriel.

Combat in a system, much of the debries is going to exit the system on ballistic paths and if not at speed to escape the system will cylcle back around---eventually. That would be a long time. in any case- with or without escape velocity- once it was beyond the normal maximum distance used by commerical craft to come out of hyper for system entry you are talking a reall reall really long time before it is going to be a potential danger of people. If the course take it (in an expanding cone..big smile) in a direction that would in 2000 years would arrive at an intersection with a then inhabited system- it's going be "a bit thin and spread out".

Stellar escape velocities are in the order of tens of km/s. It's highly unlikely that a regular space battle happened at such low speeds relative to the primary. The only thing that would be moving at such slow speeds would be stationary infrastructure that gets destroyed, such as orbital forts, shipyards and space stations, moored ships, C&C repeater stations, missile pods, mines, etc. And usually those which are close to planets don't get attacked until the system is pretty ready to surrender anyway.

One exception we talked about in a previous thread would be national security. The combatants with important technological advances may want to retrieve or irretrievably destroy any big pieces of equipment before it leaves the system. But as you said below, there may be SAR operations and this can be done at that time.

Sure, we see Abigale and others going after SLN ships after the Battle of Manticore to adjust their trajectories because they were going to hit someting but mostly it was to do S&R work and or stop the big pieces (full or very large parts) of ships for later reclimation.

Impeller drives plus particle shielding and "good enough" sensors for commercial and private in-system vessles to put a wedge between them and something that is going to hit it.

It's fiction, the problem and solutons are outlined. Live with it.

A warship can take any path it wants in its territorial space. It has double wedges and military-grade particle shielding. It also has all of the information it needs from the system's traffic control. So Abigail's ship's experience may not match that of civilians. Civilians, on the other hand, will be forced to take a path that has been cleared of debris and minimises the chance of passing through a cloud of small particles from previous battles. This path will also minimise the time spent in close proximity to active SAR operations or any black sites that the system's government wishes to keep unknown.

Blackbird itself got it's facilites on it hit. The orbital facilities etc were also blasted and some of it may have shortly come down or it's trajectory put it on a ballistic course for Blackbird but by the time it got to hit there may or may not have been survivors.

I was using the 2000 year ballistic track to an inhabited system as wild ass example and low probability.
With the majority of any combat debris probably not having escape velosity for the system, what is going to happen is that EVENTUALLY the individual pieces are going to come back into the planitary portion of the system--and keep doing that till they eventualy are swept up by something like a planet (pulled into atmosphere), a ship's wedge or particle shielding etc.

In the S&R operation at Hypatia it is mentionted that they had placed beacons (with refectors when the power packs on the transmitters ran down) with the debris fields for the RMN ships destroyed etc. That was to make them able to be found again -for whatever- but that that book segmente was at the very outside end of the envelope for possible survivors and any future looking would have included recovery not rescue. No idea what would make the recovery of how big/small piece of wreckage would make economic sence from a private company perspective but it would be possible to calculate at least a wild ass guess at what point (and from where) some of the larger pieces would be comming back into the system on their ballistic trajectories. I'm guessing it could be up to centuries, particularly for stuff blasted off something under acceleration when it was destoryed or cripped. Way beyond my math skills

Brigade XO wrote:Blackbird itself got it's facilites on it hit. The orbital facilities etc were also blasted and some of it may have shortly come down or it's trajectory put it on a ballistic course for Blackbird but by the time it got to hit there may or may not have been survivors.

Were there any facilities on the surface of Blackbird? I've always thought that everything was orbiting it.

I was using the 2000 year ballistic track to an inhabited system as wild ass example and low probability.
With the majority of any combat debris probably not having escape velosity for the system, what is going to happen is that EVENTUALLY the individual pieces are going to come back into the planitary portion of the system--and keep doing that till they eventualy are swept up by something like a planet (pulled into atmosphere), a ship's wedge or particle shielding etc.

In the S&R operation at Hypatia it is mentionted that they had placed beacons (with refectors when the power packs on the transmitters ran down) with the debris fields for the RMN ships destroyed etc. That was to make them able to be found again -for whatever- but that that book segmente was at the very outside end of the envelope for possible survivors and any future looking would have included recovery not rescue. No idea what would make the recovery of how big/small piece of wreckage would make economic sence from a private company perspective but it would be possible to calculate at least a wild ass guess at what point (and from where) some of the larger pieces would be comming back into the system on their ballistic trajectories. I'm guessing it could be up to centuries, particularly for stuff blasted off something under acceleration when it was destoryed or cripped. Way beyond my math skills

I argue that the majority of the debris HAS escape velocity and will leave the system. That's indeed the case of the RMN debris at Hypatia. The ships were moving at a significant percentage of the speed of light when they were destroyed. I think the text also says explicitly so. The SAR was made more difficult because they were at such high velocity, which made it difficult for SAR birds to reach the debris field in the first place. Any and every ship was being used for the evacuation of the orbital habitats, pilots were extremely tired. So just the time that the SAR teams would have needed to reorganise after the SLN left would have placed the debris field pretty far.

Those pieces were not coming back to Hypatia. In fact, they had galactic escape velocity. Even a freighter with no compensator, limited to 50 gravities, reaches galactic escape velocity in under 20 minutes.

The only debris that one needs to worry about are those from Operation Buccaneer. Honor probably was very careful when demolishing the infrastructure at Sol, but the COs in Buccaneer were trying to do rushed jobs and leave before any RMN force appeared. They wouldn't have been as careful.

cthia wrote: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?

My point was at Cerberus she's already heading back to the planet post battle - and will be near there covering the newly captured transports for hours as they load the remainder of the escapes. Simply traveling back to the planet sweeps her ship's wedges through debris headed towards the planet; and then there are the hours stuck in orbit while the new transport are loaded that are basically idle time for her warships. So she could sweep some more debris without delaying her departure from the system by a single second.

As for OBS other's mostly addressed it; their net velocity was still heading out system. But I'll address the part I omitted from my previous post - the one type of debris that will overcome that base outward velocity. Debris from the missiles Sirius fired.

Even those pre-war single-drive missiles burn out at over 0.25c. That's faster than the base velocities of any warship is likely to attain within a star system (there just isn't enough distance between the planet and hyper limit to build up that kind velocity). And in the hour or so Sirius fled at emergency acceleration (seriously; safe accel then was considered 80% of max; she was at 99.5% of her max!) she'd built up about 1/10th of that. So if a missile happened to be perfectly aligned with the planet it's going to be a problem. OTOH the debris cone from it is going to be very, very, narrow because even the lateral velocity imparted by nuclear explosion is slow compared to the speed of light - so missile fire control would presumably be very careful to avoid perfectly backstopping on the planet.

Jonathan_S wrote:Even those pre-war single-drive missiles burn out at over 0.25c. That's faster than the base velocities of any warship is likely to attain within a star system (there just isn't enough distance between the planet and hyper limit to build up that kind velocity). And in the hour or so Sirius fled at emergency acceleration (seriously; safe accel then was considered 80% of max; she was at 99.5% of her max!) she'd built up about 1/10th of that. So if a missile happened to be perfectly aligned with the planet it's going to be a problem. OTOH the debris cone from it is going to be very, very, narrow because even the lateral velocity imparted by nuclear explosion is slow compared to the speed of light - so missile fire control would presumably be very careful to avoid perfectly backstopping on the planet.

We assume that every missile will eventually explode, either due to attacking the target or because of a self-destruct timer; so what is the biggest size piece that we expect to see after detonation? Perhaps the battle at Basilisk would be fought by people concerned about hitting the planet, but that would not be true in the final fight in HotQ (although there it would be rare for the planet to be in the direct line). But still let's consider the chance and how big an effect there could be. If everything remaining is gram size or less and it was expanding in a debris cone; then what would happen? Would it be fire in the sky hot enough to ignite things on the ground? Would anything make it to the ground? Would this be visible enough on radar to be able to interpose ships?

Brigade XO wrote:No idea what would make the recovery of how big/small piece of wreckage would make economic sence from a private company perspective but it would be possible to calculate at least a wild ass guess at what point (and from where) some of the larger pieces would be comming back into the system on their ballistic trajectories. I'm guessing it could be up to centuries, particularly for stuff blasted off something under acceleration when it was destoryed or cripped. Way beyond my math skills

Actually, I wouldn't expect to find much debris that would take centuries to come back. The difference between an orbit that takes centuries and one that never returns is quite small.

I'm getting some numbers I'm not sure of out of Universe Sandbox but I'll use them anyway as they're good enough for this. I'm speeding up Earth and seeing what it does.

The fastest I can push it without it escaping is 42,352m/s (YMMV--exactly where it is in it's orbit will change the exact values.) To put it in a 100 year orbit needs 41,865m/s, though. That's a mere 487m/s difference, less than one tenth of a second of a warship under acceleration. How much stuff will be in that very narrow window??

Wouldn't the debris which exited the system be dangerous to ships traveling in N-space, those traveling the long way around from waypoint to waypoint? Perhaps not while in hyper, but certainly if they exit hyper, purposely or forced.

Good thing the level of unclaimed litter floating about the galaxy didn't exist during humanity's early seeding of the galaxy. Generation ships didn't have the same level of protection did they?

I already stated upstream and in another thread that escape pods must have gone thru hell caught up in debris fields. The latest would be all of those Solly escape pods in UH. Hey, can we say Ajay?

cthia wrote:Wouldn't the debris which exited the system be dangerous to ships traveling in N-space, those traveling the long way around from waypoint to waypoint? Perhaps not while in hyper, but certainly if they exit hyper, purposely or forced.

Unlikely. There's no one in N-space further than roughly 10 light-hours from the primary, since there are only small ice rocks out there. I suppose there could be some mining operations in outer belts (like our Kuiper Belt), but we haven't heard about that in the HV. It seems like the inner asteroid belts are more than sufficient for now.

The exception is of course a wormhole terminus, but that's a well-known course which would be swept for debris constantly. The wedges on the ships doing that transit would alone be sufficient, if it weren't too risky to ask civilians to do that.

Good thing the level of unclaimed litter floating about the galaxy didn't exist during humanity's early seeding of the galaxy. Generation ships didn't have the same level of protection did they?

I already stated upstream and in another thread that escape pods must have gone thru hell caught up in debris fields. The latest would be all of those Solly escape pods in UH. Hey, can we say Ajay?

Escape pods do sound like they need to be armoured, indeed. If they are launched next to exploding ships, the ships' shrapnel could damage the pods.

As for N-space sub-light ships, I have to quote The Hitchhiker's Guide: "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space"

The chance of a ship running into shrapnel big enough to damage from an explosion from another system in the past are literally astronomically small.

For life pods, it’s more the xrays that are the real threat.