@mfb Thanks for taking the time to come up with this elaborate example!

I will comment on it bit by bit in the following.
DaveC426913 said:
They would likely first notice it as a miniscule acceleration in their velocity - if they are paying attention.
If they aren't, they might notice it as a deflection in their path, but by the time that happens they are too close - and moving too fast - to do much about it.
Acceleration and deflection of the path are precisely what I imagined this to look like so far, too. However, the “too close and too fast to do anything about it once they notice” is of course a problem. Could I have them notice at some point in between?
Let’s say the black hole is about a light-week away from the ship when they discover it. Since they’re only traveling at 0.1 c, they would have ten weeks (2.5 months) to course-correct. Would that still work?
DaveC426913 said:
Another way they might notice at a distance far enough to do something about it is by happening to spot a Newton's Ring as it passes in front of some background star..
Is that the gravitational lens idea I thought about?
What if they don’t come into dangerous proximity of the black hole at all, but the lens effect distorted the image of Teegarden’s star enough so that they were traveling into the wrong direction this whole time (=since the beginning of the journey)? Not by a lot, of course - they would still have covered sufficient length towards the star over the course of the past 100 years (10 light-years at 0.1 c). Instead, they would have missed the star “laterally”.
DaveC426913 said:
Actually, they are likely studying the destination system all the time, aren't they? Some plucky young scientist might notice a miniscule anomalous Doppler blue-shifting. Her superiors think it's too small to be anything other than a calibration error, and her hypothesis that it's due "an unexplained but nevertheless very real acceleration" is laughed off - until the ship starts drifting off-course ... then comes all the screaming and running around.
That sounds like a good way to set this up in advance, without pulling it out of thin air!
The crucial question here is:
How much “reasonable panic” can I have come up as a result of the discovery, without it already being too late to do anything about the black hole?
If they notice so early that they can easily course correct in time, there is no sense of urgency, and thus no suspense.
But if they notice so late that a collision with the black hole is unavoidable, there is no point in trying anymore.
DaveC426913 said:
It's too powerful a tool to use frivolously. Larry Niven has some great advice about such things:
If you have to tell a lie for your story, tell it as soon as practical.
The bigger the lie, the sooner you need to tell it.
Coincidentally, I think I just read that precise quote yesterday somewhere on Quora, when I was looking up some of these things.
Perhaps it was when I was trying to find out if the black hole’s Hawking radiation could harm the people on the ship? (As far as I know: No, it couldn’t - if the ship is close enough for the Hawking radiation to become a potential threat to the crew, the black hole itself will already be pulling the ship apart).
DaveC426913 said:
What he means is: if your sci-fi story relies on some space fold drive, make sure your reader doesn't find out in chapter 23. If your story relies on magical telepathic piloting, make sure your reader finds out in chapter 2 at the latest.
In my case, that would mean I should already mention early in book 1 that
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There have been experiments with black-hole drives back in the Sol system, but they were canceled for some reason (could be something as simple as not enough trust in the project by investors). That way it doesn’t seem like the people on the ship have to invent something completely new when they use the black-hole drive in book 2; they just need to make something work that other people have already tried.
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The ship’s rings can dismantle, split into the subsections, and land on the surface. This is part of the ship’s construction, so it can be mentioned early on. Of course, that means the ring sections need a shape suitable for entering the atmosphere. For this purpose, they have the same coating on the outside like space shuttles have it on the bottom. Also, the rings can extend wing shapes. How do you fit two flat metal wings inside a curved ring? By having the shuttle wings be comprised of several pieces, a bit like with plate armour, so that the pieces can slide into each other and “bend” around the curvature while in the ring shape. Once the wings are extended from the ring section, they are sturdy.
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This then also explains how the rings were originally built in space: The four sections of each ring were built separately, then flew to the trunk of the ship (spherical tanks and central pipe, with ring hubs and spokes) like regular (oversized) space shuttles. There they retracted their wings and assumed their curved shape, docking onto the lift shaft extending from the central pipe. Thus, the construction of the ship simultaneously served to test whether the dismantling function actually works on all rings and their respective sections.
The problem with that is: All this information will seem redundant / out of place in the beginning of book 1. In other words: Like info-dumping. The reader won’t necessarily know what this is good for, aside from me being able to say later “see, I told you early on, I didn’t pull this out of thin air to fix a plot hole!”
For example, I just recently removed a section in chapter 3 explaining the purpose of the airlocks, as the protagonist runs past one during daily exercise. Because of course, the airlocks are useless during the travel. They were only for the boarding of the Generation-Zero crew, and to eventually leave the ship after landing.
I had them act as graveyards for a while, too - but simply dumping the people who die on the ship out into space, despite all supposed “sea-burial romanticism”, isn’t just illegal - for all I know, it would also result in the ship dragging along those dead bodies with itself.
DaveC426913 said:
Consider, perhaps, chapter one being a flash forward to the critical moment where Exodus is about to break apart (or whatever) because they're swinging around an undetected mysterious object, then chapter two starts back at the beginning, decades before. This preps the reader for the suspension of disbelief as well as setting up some great foreshadowing.
That would be a start in medias res. Perhaps it might work as a prologue. But those have fallen out of fashion, recently, even in fantasy, where they are much more common.
My Chapter 1 is already pretty much fixed: It’s the New Year’s celebration of 2475, which is simultaneously the 100th anniversary of the departure from Earth. The commander gives a speech to remember why they left Earth in the first place - this is where the gamma-ray burst threat from WR 104 is introduced. Also, the protagonist saves a kid from climbing over a guardrail on the public ring and falling to the deck below (save-the-cat moment).
I could of course have the commander mention other cosmic dangers alongside WR 104 in her speech - including the great number of rogue black holes roaming between the stars - to hammer home the point that the universe is indifferent to humanity, and would have wiped them out carelessly in the blink of an eye, if it weren’t for their “noble defiance”.
mfb said:
You still need to fly back to the planet, for a total remaining travel time of 125 years or whatever you like depending on how much propellant is left.
Ah yeah, sorry, I wasn’t thinking!
mfb said:
There is no sharp boundary.
I don’t think we necessarily need a sharp boundary - the danger zone could fade out somewhere between the solar system and Teegarden’s star. 12.5 light years are a quite large margin of error, aren’t they?

At least for the
width of a gamma ray burst. The thinner they are, the further they reach - but that only refers to their length. And that distance is already clear: The beam needs to be long enough to cover the 8,400 light-years from WR 104 to Earth.
mfb said:
Still beats the dark matter cloud I guess, but it's still far too unlikely to be a serious option.
That was one idea I had about the course deflection: The pilot says she keeps having to course-correct, but she can’t figure out why. And the commander might assume, if there’s no other explanation, that it’s just dark matter, and that it would therefore be immaterial to the spaceship. And then oops - it’s a black hole, after all.
mfb said:
The earlier you do a course correction the smaller it can be
Yes, but wouldn’t and early course-correction also lead them further off their intended route?
That was my idea of them having flown into a slightly wrong direction from the beginning of the journey, due to a gravitational lens effect of a disk-less black hole they couldn’t tell was there: At the beginning of the trip, they might just have been a few degrees off, but 100 years later, after already having covered 10 light years, they might be a few light years away from the star laterally (in addition to the 2.5 light years they still have to cover in “length” before they would reach the star anyway).
mfb said:
the spacecraft would probably measure its motion with meter per second precision throughout the trip. Not because that precision is needed, but because it's easy to do even with current technology. Any deviation would be picked up quickly.
Good to know that’s possible today already. But
is meter-per-second precision still that great when you’re flying at 30,000 km per second (0.1 c)?
mfb said:
Nominal profile: Accelerate with 0.048 m/s2 for 24.9 years to reach a target speed of 12.5% the speed of light, cruise for 75 years, decelerate at 0.048 m/s2 for 23.9 years. The acceleration is hardly noticeable even in the non-rotating sections of the spacecraft .
ISS reboosts are somewhere in that range.
Great reference here with the ISS reboosts!

So this level of acceleration shouldn’t be a problem at all.
mfb said:
18 years into that process it passes the star at ~15,000 km/s - giving a brief view of the star system that no adult in the ship will reach (at zero speed) within their lifetime.
18 years into the process, the protagonist’s son (born at the end of book 1) is an adult, and that’s precisely when the second book plays. Shooting past the target star could be the inciting incident for him, inspiring him to try and get the ship back there, while the older generations have already resigned and accepted that they won’t actually land on the planet within their own lifetime.
mfb said:
The first 1000 km/s of that are used to accelerate the ship back towards Teegarden (0.75 years of acceleration).
So far, so good - I was indeed planning for the re-acceleration in book 2 to take about a year.
However, they’re accelerating to 0.77 c this time, using the black-hole drive, so that acceleration needs to be worth it. If the remaining distance they have to cover is so short that they’d basically have to brake again right away, that black-hole drive might seem like overkill. Unless of course they really need that black-hole drive to
brake with sufficient strength, rather than to re-accelerate the ship to sufficient speeds so that the current generations will all still get to land on the planet just 2-3 years later.
mfb said:
After 93.5 years of cruising the remaining propellant is used to decelerate for 0.75 years, reaching the star system after a total trip time of 225 years, 125 years after the accident, 107 years after the first fly-by.
This would be the perspective / future outlook of the people in book 1, then? Because it can’t be what actually ends up happening in book 2.
The characters in book 1 will be those the reader will get primarily attached to. So the black-hole drive in book 2, shortening the trip (through a combination of more efficient acceleration, higher coasting speed, and braking), is just so that those characters the reader cares about are still the ones who actually end up landing on the planet.

But in book 1, I do need that perspective shift of potentially looking at a much longer journey than expected.