I am not so sure that a solar sail would be useful for creating a relativistic weapon. Needing a star behind you to push you forward makes building your weapon very easy to detect unless you are at a different star, and even then at best you could accelerate to the heliopause, then drop the sail and traverse interstellar space until you reach your destination, but this would take years and require amazing targeting(assuming you had huge sails that would actually accelerate your payload enough to both get there and have enough energy to cause significant damage)
The only other option is to start near the system's star and have it push you outward, but this would be easy to detect and once more require a huge sail to get much acceleration. Perhaps if you used a beam-sail you could manage, but this would only complicate the process of accelerating the large mass, as you would need a ship to be following it through interstellar space providing the beam, so you might as well just accelerate the weapon by attaching it to that ship and then drop it close to the target. On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 3:47 PM, Jon Lang <[email protected]> wrote: > Roger Burton West wrote: >> As a sort of corollary to this, I'm _very_ wary of reactionless >> thrusters. Reaction drives, even super-efficient total conversion >> thrusters, still need reaction mass, and there's a limit to just how >> much delta-V you can squeeze out of them. Reactionless drives, apart >> from breaking physics which I can live with, automatically give you >> planet-killing weapons: just plug together a drive and either a >> high-power reactor or solar panels, and wait a few months or even years, >> and you can slam into a planet at relativistic speed. And most settings >> have at least one group - and it doesn't have to be a big group - that >> would be willing to do this. Yes, there are ways round the problem, but >> I'm not really entirely convinced by any of them. > > Technically, you'd have to rule out solar sails too: while they're not > truly reactionless, they don't need to carry their own reaction mass > and have the same unlimited delta-V issues that true reactionless > drives have. > > That said, there's a reason why I prefer reaction drives and inertial > dampening as the default means of interplanetary travel. > > -- > Jonathan "Dataweaver" Lang > _______________________________________________ > GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> > http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
