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

=== Assistant: 17-11-25 05:19 ===
17-11-25 05:19
GPT-5.1

Yeah, “we don’t need all of them, just a few good hits” is actually the right strategic instinct.

You’re just skipping one quiet but crucial detail:

: 

Let me unpack why.

==== Rough geometry: ====
* Distance to Alpha Centauri: ≈ 4.3 light-years ≈ 270,000 AU.
* Suppose your ship has a “useful corridor” radius of, say, 50 AU (which is already huge).

To have a depot end up inside a 50-AU wide tube at 270,000 AU:
* Allowed angular error ≈ 50 / 270,000 ≈ 1.85×10⁻⁴ radians
* That’s ≈ 0.01°, or about 0.6 arcminutes.

That is insanely tight if you just “lob” chunks ballistically with no correction. Tiny launch or modelling errors become thousands of AU off course by the time you’re mid-gap.

So pure “spray and pray” doesn’t work at interstellar distances.

But…

==== The trick is: ====
Your “bags” are not passive artillery shells. They’re more like:
* standardized ice blocks / tank clusters
* each with: - a tiny guidance computer - star tracker - maybe a small course-correction thruster package

Then the flow looks like:
# You launch 30 blocks along roughly similar outbound trajectories using: - nuclear tugs - solar slingshots
# Over decades / centuries, each block: - runs occasional micro-burns to stay within the target corridor - corrects for initial error, solar perturbations, etc. - some systems fail: engine stuck, guidance dead, shielding failure.
# After sufficient time, maybe: - 3–4 are still within a useful intercept corridor, - the rest drift off as irrelevant debris in deep space, which no one cares about.

So your 10–20% effective hit rate is realistic if:
* each block is cheap and standardized,
* guidance is autonomous and low-energy,
* you accept that a majority are “lost causes” and don’t matter.

That’s a very good trade at civilizational scale.

==== For a starship: ====
* One depot of, say, 10⁹–10¹² kg of water/ice is an enormous resource: - reaction mass - hydrogen for fusion - radiation shielding - life-support reserve

So if you launched 30 depots and only one ends up in a usable intercept track, that one can:
* radically reduce the departure mass of your ship
* serve as an emergency fallback
* give you options (e.g., mid-course re-shielding, system repairs, extra delta-v)

At this scale, “hit rate” is not like bullets; it’s like asteroid mines.
One success is a jackpot.

==== Compared to a perfectly straight, depot-less route: ====
* If a depot is: - phase-space close (position + velocity) - interceptable with modest Δv - holding enough usable mass to more than pay for the detour

then yes: a slightly “zig-zag” route using 1–3 depots is strictly better than a ruler-straight vacuum cruise.

Your “30 small bags → 3 usable” mental model maps to:

: 

That’s not wasteful; that’s just probabilistic logistics at interstellar scale.

==== : ====

So yes, in principle:

: 

If you want, next step we can formalize this as:
* A very simple stochastic logistics model: launch N depots, success probability p, required fleet resources vs expected usable depot count.

That’s exactly the kind of thing you can drop into an SSE/EUCE doc as “Interstellar Probabilistic Depot Strategy.”