Editing Openai/691a2d9f-c044-8012-bccf-942bfce6334d (section)

===== Alpha Centauri is a point on the sky with some RA/Dec direction. For your “oasis chain” to be meaningful as interstellar infrastructure, you’d want comets whose outbound asymptotic direction is within a very small angle of that target. =====

Because small angle errors blow up over light-years:
* At 4.3 light-years, a 1° angular offset corresponds to roughly 4.3 × tan(1°) ≈ 0.075 light-years of lateral miss which is ~4 700 AU off to the side. That’s huge.

So “close to straight route” means:
* you want fractions of a degree alignment if you want something that stays anywhere near your corridor on interstellar scales.
* We simply do not track comet orbits in those terms (as “heading toward star X”), and nobody maintains a list like “these comets’ orbital asymptotes point within 0.1° of Alpha Centauri.”

Even if some comet incidentally does that, we haven’t tagged it that way.