“The rotor is stuck. But if we blow the hatch, the rotor’s outer casing will shear. One half will eject out the port side. The other half will stay with us.”
“That’s just breaking the ship, Mira.”
But Captain Okonkwo wasn’t celebrating. “Mira, we’re not turning. We’re drifting sideways. The meteor swarm is wide. We’ll clip the edge.” action reaction and momentum conservation
“Explain.”
On the command deck, the trajectory plot updated. The ship’s vector line bent away from the red swarm. It was working. “The rotor is stuck
The ship lurched violently. A gout of incandescent gas and a twenty-meter chunk of beryllium-steel tore through the port hull, spinning end over end into the void. The Ulysses shuddered, creaked, and then—moved. The inertial dampeners whined as the entire 10,000-ton vessel accelerated sideways at a gut-wrenching 0.2 Gs.
BAMM-THUMM.
“No, sir. That’s action-reaction . For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The chunk flying out will push the Ulysses in the opposite direction. We don’t need a rocket nozzle. We need a fifty-ton bullet and Newton’s third law.”