Planetary system is stable?

I have the Dakak series of books and one thing has bothered me. With starships the size of small planets, why wasn't the capital system of Bitra(?) messed up? If I remember right when Collin and Dahak arrived, the system had hundreds to thousands of planetoid sized vessels floating around. Shouldn't that many planetoids have messed up the orbits of the planets in the system already? That's a LOT of mass floating around that would have a gravitational effect, and I'd think that would have disjointed the orbits of more than a few worlds.

Yes, but this is a system that designed the drive systems for warships the size of small planets. I am sure that they could have easily corrected any planetary orbital irregularities whenever they cropped up.

Zakharra wrote:I have the Dakak series of books and one thing has bothered me. With starships the size of small planets, why wasn't the capital system of Bitra(?) messed up? If I remember right when Collin and Dahak arrived, the system had hundreds to thousands of planetoid sized vessels floating around. Shouldn't that many planetoids have messed up the orbits of the planets in the system already? That's a LOT of mass floating around that would have a gravitational effect, and I'd think that would have disjointed the orbits of more than a few worlds.

If I remember correctly, there were only about a 78 planetoid sized vessels. And I had assumed that they were in parking orbits outside of traffic patterns. (38 light minutes from Bia) And that would place them out 424 million miles. And that's out around Jupiter's orbit. And again if you were going for Parking orbits, you'd put them in a orbit that's on the other side of what planet is in that orbit. And a Parking orbit would be one to not cause problems.

Edit,
These are Earth based numbers not Bia's

Rod wrote:If I remember correctly, there were only about a 78 planetoid sized vessels. And I had assumed that they were in parking orbits outside of traffic patterns. (38 light minutes from Bia) And that would place them out 424 million miles. And that's out around Jupiter's orbit. And again if you were going for Parking orbits, you'd put them in a orbit that's on the other side of what planet is in that orbit. And a Parking orbit would be one to not cause problems.

Edit,
These are Earth based numbers not Bia's

The mass of the planetoid ships is about the mass of the moon (self evident, since Dahak is the moon). The mass of the moon is 1/81 the mass of earth. so a total of 78 of them is going to be about the mass of earth. The mass of earth is about 1/318 the mass of Jupiter. Parking it in one of the Lagrange points (L4 or L5) should keep the system stable for 50,000 years or so, depending on the number of other gas giants in the system.