Will solar sails dominate future space travel?

Not for the vast majority of ships. Ion/VASIMR/Fission Fragment type thrusters will likely be used for long-term acceleration and reaction control with thermal rockets for quick course changes.

>VASIMR thrusters
Yet another meme drive.
Don't bet on it actually working more than a few microseconds any time soon.

have you been living under a rock?

>you wanted to take 40 tons to mars, you'd need a solar sail 2000 square meters across

I thought they wanted to use solar sails for small loads, like just a camera to explore deep space. Not take a man to Mars, because as you say, it's impractical.

You brake using light from the other star. If your solar sail can reach 950 km/s in less than a a day by flying to 0.05 AU, you can do similar at another star.

Or perhaps you are refering to laser sails which are completely different? Forward determined that you can use the method in pic related to break.

Second the proposed method for sending interstellar probes in the near future can only send microprobes, otherwise we would need a much bigger laser.

And what exactly makes you think that communication would be impossible over such distances? A laser of sufficient aperture on the probe can be detected at interstellar distances by a telescope of sufficient aperture provided the probe can point sufficiently accurately.

I'm an idiot, you were replying to OPs question.
Sorry.

"sol" is a fucking better name than sun. we dont say "sunar flare", we dont have "sunar panels" on our houses. Sol is just a better name

It's a meme drive unless it's nuclear powered.
This is why you have no friends

No.
There are several basic issues with the technology that make it just impractical to use, if not impossible.
First is power generation. The only way to address it is a nuclear reactor. And not a small one. The proposed 200 000 kW hardware would require something like 4000 tons of nuclear reactor.
Second is heat management. One doesn't simply throw 200 000 kW into coils in the vacuum without consequences. Remember that the thing is supposed to run for months uninterrupted.
Finally thrust misalignment. You're supposed to shoot particles in a strait line. But it turns out charged particles like to follow field lines. So they exit,go around and negate the thrust. It creates even more problems down the line, because this constant stream of hitting charges particles can end up damaging your hardware. Also even more heating.
The figures they published have no basis in reality.

While I agree with you that VASIMIR is a meme drive you can't say something is impossible just because they are problems. They can solve most of those problems by simply scaling it down.

The issue is, they're talking of scaling it up.
We're talking order of magnitude breakthroughs in nuclear engineering and superconducting materials, to get something remotely usable for a crewed vessel to our closest neighbors.
Hell, it wouldn't even cut travel time.
It's not a newish concept. The thing's been around for 30 years and it's still basically at square one.

Inst that just a regular Ion engine? Also why does it need the neutralizer? As soon as the positive ions are thrust out of the chamber who cares what happens to them. Why do they need to be recombined with the negative ones?

The entirety of the problem with deep space travel is because we never developed compact nuclear reactors for space. We need to concentrate on this before thinking about what sort of drive it may power. It's like trying to build a drone when the best batteries are lead-acid.

Well I just said it's moot unless you go to other star systems.
In the near future, it might be used to send small probes to do flybys in the solar system. But it's kinda pointless because we can already do that.
So not really high priority stuff on our agenda.

One word: statites.
With solar sails you can use radiation pressure to make something float a set distance away from the sun or do other really weird things like non-keplerian orbits. The cool thing about statites is because of the way radiatian and gravity scale, the same statite essentially works at any distance from the sun.

We calculated a reasonable solar sail for an astrophysics course once.

If you had a small payload around 300 kg, and used a sail about a square kilometer in area, you could get up to .8c before leaving the solar system. This would get the device to alpha centari in about 10 years relative to the craft. If you had a camera attached, it would take about 8 years relative to the earth to receive the data

that's pretty amazing

while we talking about propulsion does anyone have any opinion on antimatter drives?

Holy shit get the fuck out of here.

did I accidentally meme?

Yes, antimatter is relatively hard to make but the real problem is that, immediately after contacting matter, it annihilates. Thus transporting and storing it is slightly problematic.

>As soon as the positive ions are thrust out of the chamber who cares what happens to them
Greenpeace

Just because you think "sol" is a better name does not make it acceptable behavior to change a word as you see fit.

I might think that albacus is a better word for asparagus but I'd be a fucking retard to go around referring to asparagus as albacus.

instead you could make it on the craft as it travels, annihilate protons and antiprotons the accelerate the resulting pions with a magnetic field.

hooray pion rocket

obviously i wouldnt use it in everyday conversation, what I'm saying is it does seem to make more sense in the realm of astronomy/physics to refer to it as "sol", as no other star is referred to as "the... whatever"

it would be cool in common parlance though.

dude, u know the suns name IS sol, right...

Stop being autistic user. That is the reason why you're still a virgin.