Space 19a: Solar Power Satellites, Take 3 Redux
goddammit.
… we can have a station at L2 behind Mercury and still have a wide variety of orbits available. Which is good because I don't know how else we can do a fixed collection point.
I really should know better.
If we're really going to depend on power satellite orbits following the Kepler rules, then we need to keep them far away from any actual planet. Mercury can't be there; end of story. If Mercury is there, then there's no way around having to solve a 3 body problem, and while it might be possible (like I've been assuming) to perturb the Kepler orbit into an actual orbit that works and stays in synch with Mercury, my gut feeling at the moment is that'll be a huge mess to get right.
Also Mercury's orbit is really eccentric which severely screws up the only 3-body solutions I know about.
And if Mercury is not there, then there's no way to hang a station at aphelion. By default, anything stationary at aphelion falls into the sun, unless we do weird space elevator shit and tether it to something (no idea); but, as with the Earth space elevator, that probably entails unobtanium cables with insane tensile strength and we're in Not Gonna Happen Land.
And I'm realizing now there's a much, much simpler solution available:
Put rockets on all of the antimatter cells.
That's it. Once a cell finishes charging, the satellite releases it and it flies off to wherever it needs to go.
(Yes, Rockets are Still Stupid, but if we put a mass driver on the satellite, then the satellite will nearly always have to do an orbit correction every time it launches a cell and we won't actually have saved anything. So rockets it is…)
Chances are, for the sake of administrative sanity if nothing else, we'll still want to have a collection point somewhere. And we'll probably want it to be a Lagrange point so as to have access to all of the best IPTS orbits. But this can be any of the ones available in the inner solar system.
Hell, we could even use Earth-Moon L2. That might even make sense if it's still fairly early in the agenda and lunar orbit is where we need to have antimatter arriving.
In case you were wondering, the energy cost of moving a kg from, say, Mercury's orbit to Earth's is about 2.5 billionths of a kg, which somebody has to be paying anyway. Unless we want to be really stingy and do some stupid funky Mercury/Venus flyby to bleed off momentum, which I suppose we could do, but bleah.
What to do with the empties is potentially more complicated. Maybe our software will be good enough that calculating ballistic trajectories to get them all back to some power satellite somewhere will be workable.
Or we can just make a point to never discharge a cell below the 2.5 billionth mark (or just keep an extra cell around with power in it to do infinitesimal recharges as needed), so that it'll always have enough energy to go find itself a power satellite. KISS.
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