Solar sails for probes

[ringerc]

Ion drive and decay power is cool, but what about solar sails?

Their thrust would be fairly easy to model - just a nonlinear relationship with distance from sun, adjusted for relative speed toward/away from sun if you wanted to get fancy. Off-axis thrust for non-90-degree headings would rock too, but there's probably not much point worrying about it.

A deployed sail would be too delicate to tolerate torque and shear force, and would fail immediately.

Is the issue with these that the engine would need to be capable of applying an impulse to an object that's not the current gameplay focus? Even if it's just an intermittent, timewarp-dependent periodic addition of the integral of thrust since the last interval, i.e. quite coarse? (Or alternately, a precalculated vector that the vessel follows, like an "orbit" but derived from its thrust).

'cos that'd be nice for ion drives too. Especially since you can't timewarp under thrust, it's incredibly tedious to use them to get a probe anywhere.

[Iron4venger]

Solar sails are far from your vision as game is programmed, even solar sails need stored "fuel" in order to work. There was a mod that added them, but as I said it were mere a new fancy ion engine.

[tater]

The game doesn't do any constant acceleration engines right now, so they'd be absurd (as are ion engines as they are now).

[Helix935]

hmm how about having it a solar panel (the sail) that feeds into a generator(on permanently) that turns electric charge/unnamed resource into xenon/unnamed resource which is fed into a thruster (the sail) which should more or less do the job

this should do it although it could probably be simplified via a plugin or something else...

[tater]

Like the current ion engine it would be magic, not a solar sail. A sail requires constant acceleration, and the only way to do this is to have the ship remain the focus constantly, and you can have at most 4X time warp.