Relativistic Dust Shield Simulator (2D)

A spacecraft cruising toward another star at even a modest fraction of light speed does not glide through empty space — it sandblasts itself against the interstellar medium. This 2D side-view companion renders a relativistic starship pushing through a stream of interstellar dust grains and computes, from first principles, how fast its leading Whipple shield erodes: relativistic kinetic energy per impact, the impact rate set by cruise speed and local dust density, the resulting erosion rate, and the mission lifetime that follows. Tune cruise speed, regional dust density, grain size and shield thickness and watch the shield-health bar — and the underlying numbers — respond exactly as the physics dictates, the same trade-off real interstellar mission concepts like Breakthrough Starshot have to reckon with.