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Originally Posted by Sailor Steve
Excellent article. Thanks for the heads-up.
One of my favorite science-fiction short stories was by Larry Niven, and was written back in the '70s. Sorry I don't remember the name.
In the story one guy is being chased by an enemy, both in ships that use a collection field of some sort to gather loose hydrogen from space, which is then fed into a sort of ramjet. The guy being chased realizes that if he can drop a large enough mass he might collapse the other guy's field, possibly even wrecking his ship. So he figures out a way to do this, and drops a part of his ship behind him. He starts watching his rear with a digital telescope. Six months later he sees a flash of light billions of miles behind that tells him it worked.
Now that was original, and probably realistic.
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I believe that was one of the Man Kzin War series - I don't remember which one though.