OK, planning a game, and my astrophysics is non-existent, so I thought I'd ask.
The objective is a very fast moving object/Ancient Big Dumb Object that is moving across interstellar & system space at a noticable fraction of the speed of light (lets say 0.05c) . It has no jump drive, so you can jump ahead of it and wait for it to arrive, but it's hard to ramp up a manned ship to the same speed as it to dock with it.
Now.... if you knew the object was travelling through a solar system (and you have had years to predict and calculate this), and the system had some usefully positioned planets and gravity wells - would it be feasible to take a high thrust ship (like an A3 Fast Trader with Thrust 4) and use powered slingshots around the planets to increase its speed to one that approaches a velocity fast enough to match the object speed and trajectory, and dock with it, and then decelerate down, all within say 6 weeks or so (I'm assuming cargo space gets turned into extra fuel and supplies to extend the operating time)?
I'm happy with the thought in narrative terms - there's an a window of opportunity, theres some drama, there is a built in time limit, but does it make any sense in terms of physics and science?
Mucho gracias
Steve
The objective is a very fast moving object/Ancient Big Dumb Object that is moving across interstellar & system space at a noticable fraction of the speed of light (lets say 0.05c) . It has no jump drive, so you can jump ahead of it and wait for it to arrive, but it's hard to ramp up a manned ship to the same speed as it to dock with it.
Now.... if you knew the object was travelling through a solar system (and you have had years to predict and calculate this), and the system had some usefully positioned planets and gravity wells - would it be feasible to take a high thrust ship (like an A3 Fast Trader with Thrust 4) and use powered slingshots around the planets to increase its speed to one that approaches a velocity fast enough to match the object speed and trajectory, and dock with it, and then decelerate down, all within say 6 weeks or so (I'm assuming cargo space gets turned into extra fuel and supplies to extend the operating time)?
I'm happy with the thought in narrative terms - there's an a window of opportunity, theres some drama, there is a built in time limit, but does it make any sense in terms of physics and science?
Mucho gracias
Steve