If you're too impatient to play kerbal, solar sails are not for you!
There are probably sail mods but they're not in the stock game afaik.
I think it would only stop accelerating once it had fully decayed, which would be 1-3 years for the medical waste. It's not much thrust though, comparable to ion engines. If I understand correctly there's a way of throttling using the two sheets, so maybe it can throttle down to 0 anyway (depending on the complexity of the sail design I guess).
Otherwise you could put your ship in a spin if you wanted to hold a particular spot in orbit (so it spends equal time thrusting in every direction). I guess if you absolutely needed to stop the micronewtons of acceleration you could kind of half fold up or roll up the sail, or jettison it entirely.
Supposedly when it gets holed there's not much of a difference in performance. The sail itself is dumb and mechanical, and can be re-angled to compensate for holes (all using tiny actuators and no rcs required).
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brb Monkhouse Stampede, Sat 10 Feb 2024, 22:00,
Reply)
I was thinking about the U-232 version.
1-3 years seems a little short for those long missions, and obviously you would need to be able to throttle it for any sample return missions. You could easily do this if the sail were umbrella-shaped - just partially close it - but as I said the force from the sail would act to force it open again. (To be fair it would be doing that as soon as you built it in the first place.)
As for holes I wasn't thinking about performance; if there's a hole then it will tend to make the craft rotate regardless of which way you point it. It's not really a solar sail after all, just a very, very wide rocket nozzle.
It's a very interesting idea on the whole, rather like a solar sail that carries its own sun with it.
Incidentally, my issue with Kerbal is that I prefer proper games. I used to play a lot of bridge builder back in the day, but I wouldn't really call it "fun".
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jonbob loves you, Sat 10 Feb 2024, 22:56,
Reply)
I think the science and career modes make it a proper game (missions, unlocking the tech tree, managing funds & reputation, finding all the eggs, etc).
The thrust is just photons, very weak. As you say, whatever mechanism is built to hold it in place for launch will be strong enough. It needs actuators for unfurling and sailing anyway... Making a system rugged enough to safely furl and unfurl several times might add a lot of weight though.
Assuming this sail can do everything a wind or solar sail can do, it could compensate for holes. Assuming the sail is sufficiently huge, a few dozen fist sized holes would be negligible.
If you lose 50% of the sail you lose half your thrust, but you'd also lose 50% of the mass of the sail, which would slightly compensate. There must be an equation for that.
Orbital rendezvous wouldn't be that much more difficult with a very slowly accelerating ship. Not colliding with the giant sail would the the tricky thing IMO.
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brb Monkhouse Stampede, Sun 11 Feb 2024, 0:33,
Reply)