January 8th, 2001, 07:01 AM
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General
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Join Date: Aug 2000
Location: Ohio, USA
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Re: Solar Sail???????
quote:
Originally posted by Puke:
but working on magnetic pricipals as you say, or working on other field / wave related principals it could function without a star. granted, it might have a hard time in deep space, but if nebulae are cool enough to disable shields or sensors then they certainly have enough background radiation puttering about to power a sail. we have definitly observed black holes cranking out all kinds of radio / microwave / high frequency wave output, so they should not have any problem powering a sail either.
as someone else pointed out, the simple answer is to look at it a little more abstractly, and maybe change the description from 'bounces photons at 90 degrees to generate force' to something more like 'manipulates naturally occuring fields and background radiation to indirectly propell a ship.'
I suppose you could call it "Electromagnetic Sail" then, and make a graphic image of some big magnetic coils to replace the sail thing. But then it doesn't belong in the stellar harnessing tech field. 
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