@l1ama: Yeah of course any thrust will affect your momentum but my point is it wouldn't be enough to have any significant outcome. Is this not correct?
And yeah the power alone wouldn't do anything but there are ways to use that energy for propulsion
Is it weird that this game makes me question why things that seem so intuitive to me just don't work? Like I actually want to understand/learn why you can't just put a solar powered battery on an actual space ship and have it move forward. XD
Space, man. It's hard.
As an educated guess, at our current tech levels, you would never be able to produce enough power through solar energy, although the ship would be 'weightless' in space it would still have the same mass, and as mentioned before newton's third law of motion means that you would need to push enough force in the opposite direction to get it to move. It would be pretty slow going.
If you think about the ships mass as the arrows on the right, you would need the same amount of arrows on the left (the thrust) to do anything. Which i'm not sure solar power could produce. I could be wrong though.
@xymox: That's not how thrust works. To get anywhere, you need to push off something else.Rocket's bring their own something else in the form of fuel which provides double duty of being full of energy as well as something to push off of with that energy. Out of something else to push on, you aren't going anywhere.
Haven't watched the video yet, assuming they get into a situation where spinning makes it look like they are affecting their orbit. That's usually artifacting around your center of control (and thus measurements) being different than your center of gravity. Which is fine and normal but something to keep in mind when it seems something is lying to you.
This is fundamentally incorrect, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, you don't need anything to 'push' against.
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