troyunrau

So to maintain stable orbit (from my understanding) you will need to counteract that with a constant antinormal force, or else you’ll get pushed out of L1 and then go flying off.

You're absolutely right, assuming the craft is on the L1 saddle point. The craft can, however, sit slightly sunward of the saddle point in a halo orbit. It wants to fall towards the sun (and enter a solar orbit) due to being on that side of L1, but you set it in the position it needs to be to balance the force of sunlight. There will be quasi-stable points in a halo orbits around the sun-facing side of L1 which could sustain a whole lot of these buggers.

KSP is great, but it only does two body physics (unless you're using the Principia mod -- never tried it). So you cannot simulate things like lagrange points there. The patched conics are a great first order teaching tool though, and KSP is great for that!

Solar sailing doesn't require fuel, and can be truly solar powered. The IKAROS probe is a great example of this, and it was launched quite a while ago already. My favourite part of this probe was the liquid crystal panels that could change brightness and darkness electrically in order to steer by creating a differential absorption/reflection of sunlight. Clever stuff. It's basically a steerable continuous thrust system that tacks against sunlight.

There's also some untested methods that could potentially work here, like eletric tethers in the sun's magnetic field -- this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodynamic_tether -- although I'm not aware of anyone that has done this calculation in the context of sunshields. And further outside the box, magnetic sails: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_sail or even this craziness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bussard_ramjet#Dyson_swarm-based_stellar_engine_(Caplan_thruster)

Probably you'd still want some RCS thrusters for faster reaction times in a pinch. And reaction wheels are "free" in terms of fuel, so there is likely some upper bound to lifetime. But not as bad as normal spacecraft.

Long short: RCS thrusters are probably still useful, but may not necessarily need to be the primary means of station keeping.

not all of our population has adapted to this

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." -- William Gibson

Bleh. As a former resident of Niverville, this is dumb for Niverville (and others). They want their cake and to eat it too.

Yes, I even once got a B+ in thermodynamics, decades ago. I was proud of that B+ -- one of the hardest courses I've ever taken.

Yes, AC. It uses energy, adds heat into the total system, and you cannot fight entropy. However, you can mitigate heat gain in other places. You trade local effects for net zero global effects.

Simple example: AC running off of solar. It increases heat by decreasing albedo (solar panels are dark), but if you paint another area white, you can have a neutral effect in terms of total energy captured by the earth. But you can have a net zero heat gain and still have AC.

Obviously you'll have a harder time balancing this equation if you're using non-renewable energy sources.

Right -- cause rain to fall here, cause a drought elsewhere. Etc. Could probably be weaponised if clever about it.

Sure, it's just another tarball to compile and install, right? What do you mean lots of dependencies? Oh, well, I guess there is Krita :)

That article is light on implemention details. It talks a lot about the legislation itself, and ways in which it might be implemented.

Looks cool. But it's no Mako

Weird spin. It looked like a productive and friendly conversation -- and they even bothered to watch the video! Do you block everyone that challenges anything you say? That's not blocking fascism, that's backing yourself into a carefully curated echo chamber.

The gish gallop and the firehose of falsehood. It makes truth and facts meaningless if allowed.

Very cool!