The bomb fairy.

If you have a string of bombs spaced a second apart on a trajectory,
is there a reason that you can't simply ride the stream with an orion, and
constantly accellerate to 0.1C at ~1G?
I assume medusa wouldn't work quite so well, due to problems with
detonations in the millions.

This almost certainly requires fission-free bombs.

How hard can an (uncrewed) orion sustain accelleration?

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Ian Stirling wrote in
:

If you have a string of bombs spaced a second apart on a trajectory,
is there a reason that you can't simply ride the stream with an orion,
and constantly accellerate to 0.1C at ~1G?

For one thing, the bombs couldn't be spaced out on "a" trajectory - if they
are all in the same orbit, the first bomb would boost the Orion *out* of
the orbit and it would miss the second and subsequent bombs. The bombs
would each have to be placed on slightly different trajectories, with bomb
1 being on the Orion's current (coasting) trajectory, bomb 2 on the Orion's
predicted post-bomb-1 trajectory, bomb 3 on the predicted post-bomb-2
trajectory, and so on.

So your predictions of each bomb's effect on the Orion's trajectory must be
highly precise, and therefore so must be your prediction of the Orion's
position relative to each bomb at the time of detonation. It seems to me
that one second between bombs does not allow sufficient time to track and
correct dispersions that inevitably build up on such a scheme. You could
probably eject the first bomb from the Orion and hit the second one fairly
precisely, but you'd be slightly off-center for the third bomb, and
completely off for the fourth and subsequent.

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JRF

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