Hollywood has vastly overplayed the actual density of asteroid fields. It’s kind of disappointing.

If you build something in a vacuum then you don’t necessarily need a single continuous piece to create a vacuum. If you specced an accelerator a million miles in diameter, the diameter matters from a standpoint of whether we can accelerate the particle sideways fast enough to keep it in the track, but they are also saying they need 3.1 million miles of accelerator hardware. They are implying they can’t lay it out as a crazy straw, but is that because of the lateral acceleration, the interaction between the coils, or the limits of manufacturing?

What if you built a collider in a spherical arrangement, accelerating in three dimensions at once, but 1/3 the diameter? What if the accelerator were broken into sections to dodge asteroids, with a cumulative segment length that added up to the desired total? What if you laid it out like a Spirograph? What if you laid it out like a truncated Spirograph (just bits of the outer circumference)? What if you laid it out like a 3 dimensional truncated Spirograph?