Talk:Magnetic sail

message: Section heading added to outline. Anticipated using other citations, but Perakis & Hein 2016 citation used was a preprint and not WP:RS - so deleted that text. Also, exponent for magnetic sail force may have had an error in that and Sharma 2020 citation. Reached out to Perakis & Hein in August 2022, but so far have not gotten response.
Text from prior to article reorganization placed there cut and pasted below: for discussion:
The operation of magnetic sails using plasma wind is analogous to the operation of solar sails using the radiation pressure of photons emitted by the Sun. Although solar wind particles have rest mass and photons do not, sunlight has thousands of times more momentum than the solar wind. Therefore, a magnetic sail must deflect a proportionally larger area of the solar wind than a comparable solar sail to generate the same amount of thrust. However, it need not be as massive as a solar sail because the solar wind is deflected by a magnetic field instead of a large physical sail. Conventional materials for solar sails weigh around 7 g/m2 (0.0014 lb/sq ft), giving a thrust of 0.01 mPa (1.5×10−9 psi) at 1 AU (150,000,000 km; 93,000,000 mi). This gives a mass/thrust ratio of at least 700 kg/N, similar to a magnetic sail, neglecting other structural components.
The solar and magnetic sails have a thrust that falls off as the square of the distance from the Sun. Dmcdysan (talk) 03:30, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: This may still be a useful topic. There are two references that describe this but appear use an older version of the Freeland paper where the equation for magsail force has an error that significantly overestimate the magsail force. Another paper from Chineses authors is mentioned in "History of Concept." Keeping this topic here for now in planned auto-archive. Dmcdysan (talk) 19:54, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comparison with electric and solar sails 

message: There's now a separate article for the plasma magnet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_magnet. I think much of the text currently on this page for the plasma magnet design should be moved there.
Final Muscid (talk) 00:42, 1 February 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: There isn't much background or content there, and I believe most of the citations and content are already in this magnetic sail article. There is already a link to "Magnetic Sail" in "See Also" for the plasma magnet article. Could remove the separate Plasma magnet page and have it redirect here ensuring that no content is lost before removing the separate plasma magnet sail article. Dmcdysan (talk) 00:56, 3 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plasma magnet move 

message: this entire article appears to be twelve high school science projects copy pasted together 99.196.12.236 (talk) 13:51, 1 March 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Sadly, I must agree. I'm not going to get into an extended discussion of this, let alone try to suggest any edits; I did that extensively with Dmcdysan last year and he agreed with some of my better points, while admittedly some of my points simply expressed confusion. But whatever the improvements this may have led to, a quick glance at the middle of the article shows it is still very dense with complex equations and terms which need constant definition, with the sub-sections often not relating to each other so that each one is an entirely new project, and which no one but an engineer or physics major would be able to keep track of. Most of this material should be relegated to the original articles it is gleaned from, leaving behind only a general summary accessible to the well-educated, interested reader.ScottForschler (talk) 22:19, 8 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  wow this is unreadable