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But you did not exhaust all the options. What about spherical constellation of energy gathering sails that stay mostly in place? Can autonomously maintain their
by rini17 5y ago
But you did not exhaust all the options. What about spherical constellation of energy gathering sails that stay mostly in place? Can autonomously maintain their position with help of solar wind.
- perihelions 5y agoOr even pure radiation pressure. They balance out somewhere around 10^-3 kg/m^2; thinner than that and you have a solar sail.
- PeterisP 5y ago> spherical constellation of energy gathering sails that stay mostly in place? Wait, what? You can't have a spherical constellation of unconnected stuff that mostly stays in place, that's not how orbits work. You can have a single orbital ring, but a sphere consisting of many circular orbits would have these orbits intersect with very large relative movement. If you're thinking about non-rotating constellation where the gravitational pull is balanced by solar wind, the problem is that they have gravitational interaction with each other and the planets so it's inherently unstable, they would "want to clump up" and as soon as they do, the balance is disrupted as the same mass has less solar pressure and it starts to fall into the sun.
- rini17 5y agoTo me it sounds like "flight heavier than air is impossible!!!!". Why would a device that has 1kW/m2 at its disposal at all times, be fundamentally unable to counteract gravitational interactions? We are not talking about planetary gravity wells here but much weaker ones.