Interesting idea about magnetic braking, I didn’t know about it.
Not sure you need a very powerful laser to accelerate. Stuart recently pointed out here that you can add another mirror at the source, so the light keeps bouncing between the ship and the source, improving efficiency by a huge factor.
Seems like that’s going to be less effective than it might sound because of (1) beam divergence and (2) the fact that if there’s even the tiniest misalignment between the mirrors then after a couple of bounces the light will be missing its target.
Interesting idea about magnetic braking, I didn’t know about it.
Not sure you need a very powerful laser to accelerate. Stuart recently pointed out here that you can add another mirror at the source, so the light keeps bouncing between the ship and the source, improving efficiency by a huge factor.
Seems like that’s going to be less effective than it might sound because of (1) beam divergence and (2) the fact that if there’s even the tiniest misalignment between the mirrors then after a couple of bounces the light will be missing its target.