Exactly. 50 years of sci-fi movies have conditioned us to picture everything in space being right on top of each other. Space is really, really roomy, and collisions suck. You'll put things as far apart as you can just to reduce the chances of collisions due to unexpected drift.

I still remember the shock I felt when I found out that even in the thickest part of Sol's main asteroid belt, it is essentially never possible to stand on one asteroid and see another with the naked eye (unless it's in orbit around the one you're on). 

On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 11:51 PM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org> wrote:
On 11/1/2017 10:15 PM, Richard Aiken wrote:
On Wed, Nov 1, 2017 at 7:49 PM, Kelly St. Clair <xxxxxx@efn.org <mailto:xxxxxx@efn.org>> wrote:


    Pity the hulls probably wouldn't be close enough for naked-eye
    observation; spoils the visual of a dozen starships all slowly
    rotating like kebab rotisseries.


Why *not* put them inside easy reach of each other? Doing that would make them a lot easier to visit when necessary.

In space, naked-eye ranges aren't just "inside easy reach", they're "practically /touching/".  You might, at best, be able to make out a constellation of other points of light against the starfield, gradually brightening and dimming as they reflect more or less light in your direction.

--
---------------
Kelly St. Clair
xxxxxx@efn.org

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