Planet Ship

Artist's interpretation of a planet ship. Planet ships are a concept from futurism and science fiction. To achieve maximum speed while traveling across interstellar distances a lot of material is needed to shield valueble infrastructure from radiation from the interstellar medium. Travelling at highly relativistic speeds, every bit of debris along the way turns into a devestating nuke. The easy solution is just to use an entire planet as a shield. The backside and the space behind it is safe to put humans and equipment. Pushing a planet along is of course no easy task, but it can be achieved by harnessing energy from stars along the way. Each star has a dyson swarm built around it which focuses starlight onto the planet ship, to help push it along it's journey. This way, the ship leaves a trail of newly colonized star systems in its wake. Even at these break neck speeds, the ship can travel along for many millenia.