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Re: Most likely candidate for future spaceship propulsion
Quote:
Originally Posted by Moontanman
No, actually it is a good thing for traveling toward a star, you have to decelerate, a magnetic field will allow you to decelerate with the target stars own wind. a magnetic sail will power your space craft as far as a solar sail would using star light and even faster because a magnetic sail will expand as it moves away from a star and allow you to get more thrust as you sail away! a magnetic sail doesn't have any problems with erosion from interstellar dust and can be furled and unfurled in a short time with no danger of damaging the sail. A magnetic sail that gets larger as you move away from the star would allow you get thrust a large distance from your sun, and a magnetic sail could interact with the galactic magnetic field to give some thrust. You could build up a large delta V close to a star and then coast to the next one.
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It wouldn't be as fast and no matter how big you made the Magnetic field there wouldn't be enough power from the distant sun to propel it at all, once the sun becomes a dot, it's pretty much hopeless.
And there aren't enough mag fields in the interstellar medium to propel it far enough.
It would become stranded in space.
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"We believed the world would not be the same, a few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent, I remembered a line from the Hindu scripture, the bagavagita, Vishnu was trying to convince the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, he takes on his multi-armed form and says, Now I have become death, destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, in one way or another"
-Robert J Oppenheimer, The atomic bomb
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