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Re: starship-design: Solar Windsurfing: The Fastest-Ever Propulsion (So Far)



Kevin Houston writes:
 > What if the magnaetic bubble was also spinning (or varying it's field 
 > orientation in a cirular manner) like a magnuson effect wind-sail,
 > or a spinning baseball?  (let's ignore surface irregularity arguments 
 > for the moment.)
 > 
 > Would this allow one to "Tack" a spherical object against the wind.

It's been a while since my college physics course and its coverage of
electromagnetism, but I think making the magnetic field spin is probably
not going to be that effective.  I do remember fairly clearly that
charged particles spiral around magnetic field lines, since I had a
physics lab that demonstrated this experimentally; continuously changing
the orientation of the magnetic field will probably not do what you're
hoping it would do.

I suspect simply orienting the magnetic field in a particular way
without continuously varying the orientation would deflect the charged
particles in the solar wind to produce some ability to steer the thrust
so it wouldn't have to be exactly parallel to the solar wind's flow.