Security

Security and safety is a concern throughout all space. The divergent velocities innate to orbital dynamics mean that any object has the potential to be a devastating kinetic weapon. Developed star systems thus employ various security measures to keep themselves safe.

Detection

Every spacecraft has its own set of tracking telescopes; such a technology is deemed a design requirement. These telescopes and their associated processors can detect and track nearby spaceborne objects at all EM wavelengths, sweeping their local region of space in minutes or seconds depending on the volume and computational hardware. Ships also typically have a link to the local watchtower arrays, which provide real-time data throughout their route.

Watchtowers

A watchtower is a generic term used to refer to any space surveillance system. In developed space, watchtower arrays use thousands, millions, and sometimes billions of interferometer satellites networked together to create as close to a real-time map of a solar system as the speed of light permits. They use automated systems to track, log, and categorize every single spaceborne object they can detect, down to pieces of rock or debris less than a meter wide, all the way out to a system’s oort cloud. The massive amount of data this process generates is stored in physical databases dotted throughout a system.

Watchtower arrays are a universal concern. Their establishment in a new star system is often a joint effort by all colonial parties, with information publicly accessible to some degree by all government bodies as well as individual citizens to some extent; such efforts are undertaken in good faith. There are nevertheless many instances where nations develop and maintain their own private arrays.

Mitigation

If a spaceborne object is determined to be a threat, it is dealt with depending on the circumstances of the threat. Most cases, which occur as a daily aspect of space-based society, are simple rocky debris on a potential collision trajectory. Lasers can be used to vaporize some or all of the object, pushing it to a new non-threatening trajectory. Kinetic impactors fired from mass drivers can be used to tear apart larger objects.

In peacetime, objects larger than several meters wide are detected many years before they actually pose a threat at all. In wartime however, watchtower arrays and mitigation efforts get exponentially more complicated. Railguns can fire rounds at several percent the speed of light; such objects can be easily detected and tracked, but defenses will depend on the circumstances of the target.