The devilish dangers of dust clouds

[redwalker]

Dust clouds are a neat way to make space travel interesting. They might be suffused with strange energy fields that distort sensors and make jump drives useless. They might hide suns within their depths.

I'm many years past my Physics minor, and I never studied astronomy, so I have no idea whether a dust cloud could be thick enough to hide several suns. As a literary device, it's cool -- E.C.Tubb used it to good effect -- but I don't know if it's physically possible.

I do know that Sol's asteroid belt is nowhere near dense enough to allow for high-speed hair-raising chases like in The EMpire Strikes back. However, other solar systems might have sufficiently dense belts.


The point is -- a fictional universe is weird enough to allow strange shipboard environments that require careful navigation, without normal sensors, and that element of danger can be played up for thrills and drama.

Edit:
A little websurfing suggests that a proto-solar-system would be an ideally obscure and dangerous region, in which pirates could hide and deadly games of cat-and-mouse could be played out. The region would be dense, filled with dust, with a proto-star at the center.

The remnants of a multi-star system that had exploded could also be cool. Several dwarf stars in the middle, surrounded by the wreckage of destroyed planets, torn apart by gravitation.

 

[Gadrin]

I do know that Sol's asteroid belt is nowhere near dense enough to allow for high-speed hair-raising chases like in The EMpire Strikes back. However, other solar systems might have sufficiently dense belts.

The point is -- a fictional universe is weird enough to allow strange shipboard environments that require careful navigation, without normal sensors, and that element of danger can be played up for thrills and drama.

The remnants of a multi-star system that had exploded could also be cool. Several dwarf stars in the middle, surrounded by the wreckage of destroyed planets, torn apart by gravitation.

perhaps something like the rings of saturn ? I haven't seen any up close and personal photos about the density there, but have heard "from the size of house to golf ball" concerning the makeup.

newness of it all may have something to do with it as well. Some huge rock breaks up could scatter debris for miles, meaning your nasty environment is there.

In another RPG I have a section of space called the Hourglass Nebula which a supernova remnant/cloud that's expanding. It blocks off a significant portion of space such that spacing guilds explore it for "pockets" for navigation and hidden planets/systems. I've relocated at least one pirate outpost in a hidden world in there. The only thing I'm unsure of is the radiation from the blast having spreadout over the area it encompasses, but a handwave solves that problem.