I'm sure I can make something less sleek. I'll try later.
Mind if I try my hand at some concept art?
I'm not artist, but I do have lots of knowledge in the field of aerospace engineering. It's from a real-world design perspective, maybe artists will roll their eyes at this, but James Cameron decided to go with realism and made some really beautiful ships! Just check out the Interstellar "Venture Star"!!!
(ISV - InterStellar Vehicle)
In the show, the Venture Star is near it's destination. For the interstellar flight out, it carries 3 whipple shields. Tiny dust particles are strewn through space - the chance of hitting one is a great risk, at .7c, or 70% the speed of light, a single gram of material has about 30 megatons of kinetic energy! Luckily, the micrometeorites that far into space will be much smaller than that, but you get why those are there. Whipple shields don't really "stop" projectiles, but they rob a tremendous amount of it's energy, while scattering it everywhere into tiny pieces, and at those speeds, it should vaporize any micrometeorites.
Here's it with those 3 shields, and check out the other images in the gallery - BEAUTIFUL!
Link to gallery:
http://www.benprocter.com/avatar/vehicles/8071348The Venture Star carried 2, also designed by realism, shuttles. Here's a shot of those (they're in some of the earlier pictures docked or undocking) :
(TAV - Trans-Atmospheric Vehicle)
Here's a page that nicely explains all the bits and bobs on how Avatar's Venture Star works:
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns.php#id--Avatar_ISV_Venture_StarEDIT: I decided to re-read that part, and it nicely mentioned that the typical interstellar dust particle is roughly 4 x 10
-6, or 0.04 miligrams. At .7c, that delivers the punch of about four anti-tank mines, compressed into a spot about the size of a pinhead.
Really, it doesn't matter what the micrometeorite hits. Hitting anything with that force will release enough energy vaporize it, so mission accomplished.
But you'll want to put those whipple shields a good distance out - you want the gas to have time to expand before hitting non-armored stuff, because a tiny speck of compressed gas will hit about as hard as a solid object at these kinds of speeds. How fast will it expand? I have no idea. I'll run the math later and come back and edit this post.
