“The Janus Voyage” Pg 07

by admin on January 5, 2012 at 12:01 am

As Mercy finally get out into space in the current story, don’t forget to pop over to the Blog page for a nice bit of Trekker news, and an all-new, full-color illustration of Mercy in action!

Comments RSS

Discussion (3) ¬

Paul

January 18, 2012, 2:56 am | # | Reply

Saturn’s rings are made of highly reflective ice – that’s why they are so impressive. Looked at up close, though, they are mostly empty space. The ice particles continually bump into each other, sticking together in clumps and breaking apart again.

Your ‘ring o’ rock’ might work as a crude artificial orbital habitat. Asteroid mining must be a real pain when you never know if you’re going to get 20 tonnes of rock up your backside. Diverting promising asteroids to orbit around a planet would be one way of cutting down your insurance rates. And sticking them all together would be a way of cutting down on the ‘orbital junk’ problem.
Paul

January 15, 2012, 1:54 pm | # | Reply

I’m going to have to call shenanigans on the “ring o’rock”. That configuration couldn’t possibly be stable unless all the rocks are actually held together by carbon-fibre cables that are too small to be seen.
- admin
  
  January 15, 2012, 11:17 pm | # | Reply
  
  Will have to please “no contest” to the shenanigans charge here. I was thinking of a variation on the belts of material around Saturn. So, these rocks aren’t meant to seem like they are connected, just “grouped” in this formation. But it does look from this drawing as if they could be a solid mass. And either way, I have no idea if it’s a plausible phenomena. Help, anyone?