starship-design: Quiet List

[A West <andrew@hmm.u-net.com>]

Seeing as the list has been a bit on the quiet side recently..

I've not seen anything about collisions - the journey would last at least 5
or 6 years, and in that time a ship might hit an interstellar micro
meteorite or something...  You would need some impressive equiptment to see
(& avoid or destroy) objects a millimeter across, and if that were to hit
you, it'd just go straihgt through if you were travelling at 0.9c...

Also, on a not-entirely-realted topic, I've seen a couple of people say
that the future of space travel is commercial, and the best source of money
I can think of would be to mine a near earth asteroid, and maybe create new
alloys of stell etc by producing them in space - but how would you make
enough money in this? If an asteroid is a couple of kilometers cubed, then
there would probably be a few trillion dollars of metals in it - the
trouble being that if I flooded, say, the nickel marker with 10 times the
world's yearly output, then prices would plummet to next to nothing.  I
would think that most the money you could make would be by making a blast
furnace in space, and then making new alloys with differents structures
which you cannot produce in much gravity..
any ideas?

Oh, and http://huizen.dds.nl/~shealiak/sd/calc/calc.html is not working
anymore - I was just understanding it too :) Has it moved somewhere, or is
it permamently down?

Andrew West