The Oort cloud is pretty much completely around the sun, I don't think there's a lot of difference in the density along the ecliptic, the distribution is mostly spherical I believe.
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Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
So we're going to try to navigate a unguided sailing ship through this field of randomly movie ice bits that are influenced by the Suns gravity. And then we're going to try to shoot a laser through it to send back data.
I'm not a smart man, but this seems to be almost an impossible theory.
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As mentioned while pictures of the Oort cloud make it look dense, the sizes of the objects are incredibly exaggerated. The mass in the Oort cloud is only maybe 6 earth's worth, while the volume it comprises is probably trillions of times larger than the volume of the earth's orbit. So while an artists's rendition looks like it's a mess (see below), in reality you could probably send millions of light sail ships straight through it and never hit anything. It'd be like if the earth was smooth, you spent your life driving a car on it, and you happen to hit the one telephone pole on the whole planet. You have to actually try to hit something.
