| Forgiving the problem of time dilation and the consequences it has on the expectations of conscious things... You can't just accelerate 1g for 3 years. What are you burning? A chemical rocket can easily achieve 1g. For about 5 minutes. A nuclear rocket is great, you can get 1g easy enough, but you're shoving hot hydrogen out the back end to get that thrust. The Rocket Equation teaches us that to get arbitrarily close to c, you need an exponential amount of your ship's mass to be propellant. I recommend this website to everyone in this thread that hasn't read it yet http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/ Edit: moreover, the problem of an EM deflector, or any kind of deflector, is that no matter what, no matter what, you must deal with the kinetic energy of the thing that just hit your deflector. It will (a) slow your ship down, and (b) cost you more energy, e.g. from your generator, to deflect it than it imparted on your vehicle. The energy numbers here are staggering. We have trouble theorizing how a relatively uncontrolled terawatt rocket might work, but imagine a terawatt reactor on your ship somehow powering a terawatt EMfield in front on your ship. And then you have to worry about dust that's not charged and thus goes right through EM fields. |