2005-05-04

Breezy Bajor

I was checking out NASA's SpaceWeather site earlier, and it occurred to me that Bajor's sun must produce a much, much stiffer wind than our own.

As of this writing, our sun is putting out 0.6 protons per cubic centimeter, and they're being flung at a velocity of over 377 kilometers per second. Obviously, 377km/s wind at atmospheric pressures would put all known hurricanes to shame, and any known sailing vessel would be dust (along with just about anything else on the surface of the planet).

But, when the pressure is just those .6 protons per cubic centimeter being flung by the sun, 377km/s results in a somewhat paltry force. A craft massing a single kilogram which had a sail of a square kilometer would barely make a 1g acceleration, for instance.

And so, then, we come back to Bajor. "Explorers"[DSN3] has Sisko and Jake aboard a Bajoran solar sailing vessel of ancient design . . . spars of wood, metal fittings, and so on. Her sails weren't large at all.

It should be possible to very roughly estimate the mass of the vessel and the approximate sail size, and thus figure out some possibilities for Bajor's sun. Might be interesting, sometime.