DaveC426913 said:
I figured it wasn't about inadequate lasers so much as they hit a pocket of dense interstellar dust that wasn't in their predicive models.
They can't predict that very well when first plotting the trip and it's just bad luck that they came upon the cloud right at turn over. A risk they knew about on launch yet nonetheless unavoidable.
Wow, that’s great! Believe it or not, that was precisely the idea I had last night when thinking about this. 
Perhaps it’s simply the most straightforward, “Ockham’s razor” explanation. I’m glad I didn’t post it, though, because the fact that you came up with this independently from me suggests to me it will intuitively make sense to the reader, too.
Last night, I was wondering whether the pocket of dense interstellar dust should be “caused” by something (so that it feels less like plot convenience), or if it should indeed be the randomness of space you can encounter at any moment — the latter would fit thematically, since the crew kind of see the surrounding universe / cosmos as the external enemy that’s always out to kill them.
This is why I’m so fond of your suggestion, because it moves the cause the of the problem back to the ship’s exterior. Even though this thread has moved away from the original idea of a fire breaking out on board (which could of course still happen as a result of this), a fire inside the ship would ultimately have felt more like human failure at best, and deliberate sabotage at worst.
The best part is, going back to the issue of interstellar dust particles even allows me to keep the additional problem of a single dust particle piercing the ship hull (and potentially killing some people as it passes through the ship). This is something we’ve discussed at length before — I simply won’t specify the actual size of the dust particle, so that the debate doesn’t become about whether a particle of this size at 0.125 c would have destroyed the entire ship, or simply punched holes into the walls of several rings and/or water tanks (the latter of which are used for both shielding against radiation and as fuel storage for the nuclear-fusion drive).
In short: The dense dust cloud which the lasers can’t handle in time is what causes them to turn around faster than intended, and that causes friction on the ship’s structure. Given the setup of “the lasers can’t handle this much dust”, the odds of at least one speckle of dust piercing the ship would actually be higher, so this wouldn’t come out of nowhere.
DaveC426913 said:
Ejecting a defensive cloud ahead of the ship is all well and fine but if the onslaught of interstellar dust is dense enough it will deplete the defensive cloud faster than ideal, requiring a dangerous, but unavoidable, fast turnover.
Great! :) This means the ship had this extra layer of protection, but it was depleted — rather than the ship designers / earlier generations of crew members “simply having forgotten” about this option. I always prefer the “we had it, but it got destroyed” explanation (especially since the ship can only recycle its resources, not pick up any new ones) over “we forgot to include it at launch”.
I think you’ve once again solved a major issue for my story, @DaveC426913 — and more importantly, this time, it was one of the major plot holes that was keeping me stuck for several years! :D (I think I should probably include a “Dave” at some point in the prequel, among the ship designers… because the Exodus’s iconic dumbbell design was also your idea.)
Many thanks once again for all of your ideas and effort! 
Now all that’s left is to predict the characters’ responses to this issue:
1) The decision to turn the ship faster than intended has to be based on the commanding staff picking up the denser dust cloud prior to getting there. This means they will now also anticipate any higher risk of the ship being hit by dust particles. That doesn’t mean they’ll be able to prevent them — however, it allows them to
brace for impact:
Where would a responsible commander have the crew members go inside the ship if she must factor in that the lasers might not be able to vaporise all the dust particles in this dense cloud during the rotation process? Would they be safer in the ring sections, or would the commander send everyone who isn’t needed elsewhere into the central trunk (“pipe”) of the ship, around which the rings rotate? Or maybe even to the front sphere of the ship, as it will be the first thing that no longer has to face the incoming barrage of interstellar particles?
2) The obvious alternative to “turning the ship around faster” would be “let’s keep coasting until we’ve passed the dust cloud, and only rotate the ship once we’ve made it through, at the intended rotation speed”. This would be the more cautious way of doing it, so
I need to find a way to rule out this option in order to not make my commanding staff come off as reckless for deciding to turn the ship when it’s at its most vulnerable.
The easiest way would be to simply postulate that this dust cloud is so big that the ship would overshoot the target star by several decades if it kept coasting through the entire dust cloud. Even then, though, some could frame this as the preferable alternative to risking the lives of crew members.
Hence, if the commander decides, “this takes too long, we take the risk”, she could come off as selfish / impatient for prioritising getting to the destination star on time. Her own commitment to the mission is in fact more in line with “keeping everyone alive” than with “getting to the planet as fast as possible” — the latter would fit the pilot’s motivation, though, so I could let the pilot make that suggestion.
Two arguments that could convince the commander to take the rest of turning the ship around now and fast, rather than impatience on her own part, would be:
a) The current generation of crew members were promised they would be the ones to land on the surface of the planet. This is amplified by the fact that the commander raised the number of allowed (and suggested) children per family from 2 to 4 (the inciting incident of the plot).
If she now has to backpedal and say it will take much longer, and that this generation won’t be the one to land on the surface, after all — because they must overshoot the destination star in order to only brake once they’ve made it through the dust cloud — she will face a very disappointed and probably angry crew, because they were promised something else. The commander might also find herself having to take back the four-child policy (which would indeed go against her personal convictions).
Of course, all of this ends up backfiring, because the drive takes damage in this disaster, reducing its braking force, and thereby causing the ship to overshoot the target anyway — in fact, by a century. (This is something we developed in an earlier thread.)
On a thematic level: The commander could then conclude that she prioritised the crew’s well-being — their desire to be the ones to land on the surface — over the survival of everyone. This goes against her personal convictions (she’s all about “sacrifice of well-being in the name of preserving life”); however, her choice could be a result of listening to her bridge officers. Namely, the pilot and the navigator, both representing the “well-being” side of the argument.
With this quick-rotation move backfiring on everyone, it would incentivise the commander to not only double down on her own “survival above well-being” convictions, but
it would also give her a reason to become less democratic in the wake of this event: If she hadn’t listened to her bridge staff, they would probably have overshot the target by just a few decades, not a century — and everyone would still be alive.
The “well-being” side, in turn, gets to point to an earlier situation, in which somebody suggested braking a little earlier so that the ship would be slow enough to one day pick up an ice deposit at the edge of the target solar system — extra water which could be stored in some of the depleted fuel/radiation-shielding tanks, and then pumped into the system to allow everyone a few more minutes of shower time per day. This is a suggestion that the commander rejected in order to make it to the target planet on time — after all, it was merely about convenience for the crew, a mere luxury, not essential to the success of the mission. However, in hindsight, if the ship had started braking that early, they would have turned around before even encountering the dust cloud.
b) The primary “selfless” reason to make it to the destination planet as quickly as possible is not what the crew members want, but what humanity back on Earth expects the crew of the generation ship to do: Colonise the planet to create a safe haven that more humans from Earth can escape to, before the impending gamma-ray burst from WR 104 hits the entire solar system.
Thus, there are still also good survival reasons to be “in a rush”. This is something a bridge officer on the “survival over well-being” side could invoke, while still arguing for “let’s turn the ship around now, and fast”. Same conclusion, different motivation. I think this would suit the commander’s first officer.
And the best part: For all the parallels I’ve set up between my ship and the Titanic (even though mine doesn’t get destroyed in this event), the course of events looks quite comparable: The Titanic crew used the fatal combination of “hard-a-starboard” and “reverse gear”; some have suggested the ship would have taken less damage even if it had passed through the iceberg head-on.
Turning the Exodus around in a rush and trying to brake, rather than coasting through the dust cloud at the previous speed while firing all lasers, is ultimately the decision that causes more damage to the ship. The Titanic parallels are also why I’d like to keep the part with the dust particle piercing the ship hull. However, that particle alone isn’t going to kill a lot of people (it doesn’t even have to kill anyone; it could just pierce a bunch of layers which then require quick fixing).
The damage to the ship’s structure as a result of rotating faster than intended is going to be the primary problem. If I set up the warning that the ship wasn’t built for this level of stress, that may give me some leeway to render the potentially ensuing problems as unpredictable. If the reader buys that, I can have a bunch of different, seemingly unrelated issues pop up on board, as a result of this fast turnaround: fires breaking out, pipes bursting, power cuts etc.
The cause is an external threat by the universe, but the consequences ultimately still stem from the characters’ decisions… Sounds like an optimal combination of what people commonly consider “good writing”.
As I’ve said: I really like where this is going now!
It finally feels like all the pieces are coming together, both on a plot and character-motivation level / in-universe and on a thematic level.