[Pontiac]

I guess I can understand skimming around an object depending on your trajectory being anything less than a bull’s eye.

But having a star or black hole directly in your path seems to be inescapable death to me at any speed.

[Dead Corpse]

Could be. I'm thinking of these "fields" as if they were soap bubbles. The analogy brakes down a bit around the edges, but the over-all idea is still illustrative.

Think of the space/time "bubble" as a gravity based version of the meniscus of the soap bubble. As the energy of the artificial vs natural space/time meet, one should react to the other. Same thing with opposing magnetic fields. The strong and more direct the interaction, the more one will over power the other. Absent that, they just kind of "slide" around each other.