Quote:
Originally Posted by Noclevername
The amount of precision you're talking about may not be possible. Probably, manuvering a spacecraft at solar-orbit speeds to pass through a ring would be as difficult or more so than matching orbits with a planet, not to mention the consequences of hitting the ring itself. That's assuming you can find a way to hold the rings precisely where they need to be without them going into orbit around the planets or the sun, as the case may be.
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So how about this. If these rings were say 2 large U shaped devices that were aligned together. This way they could be far enough apart to allow the ship to pass. All the different U devices on the highway would be connected VIA laser. Also the ship would have laser tracking along with radar, this allowing it to adjust is direction with plenty of time to get aligned with the gate.
Now the gates would have the ability to move and adjust as needed. All the really need to do is to move enough to get the ship going in the right direction. So if the orbiting body were to have moved 20 degrees from its original location at the time of the highway setup the rings would adjust for that.
Maybe that would not work and we would need to have a series of highways out there to be able to launch at any given time. Maybe the rings can start at an L point. So that would mean that we would need a tug of sorts to get the ship out of orbit. Probably a good idea to have a fleet of these anyway.
The question is can the U shaped devices still work in this matter or do the actually need to be one solid piece. I am still thinking that they will. But wanted to throw the other idea out there.
So with Radar and laser navigation and the ability for the rings to move and for the ship to maneuver, would this be more possible. If it is a solid ring, I would think that the inside diameter would be at a minimum of 5 times larger that the outside of the ship. Should allow for enough room. Don't we already do very precise navigation? We did land a probe on an asteroid softly without destroying it. That shows so ability to be quite accurate.