What if you took the principle of magnetic acceleration, created a bunch of acceleration gateways in space, and then shot space trains through it? Have catching gates on the opposite end for the deceleration part.
What's the maximum speed that magnetic acceleration can accelerate an object to in a vacuum before the object is travelling so fast that the magnetic effect can no longer impact upon it as it passes the gates?
I wanna build some fucking space trains. What can I read that's explored this?
i think the linear momentum is also canceled out by the counterweight launch, but if youre relying on a second station to catch the counterweight youre also relying on another launch to act as counterweight to the counterweight. if shipment is late or theres no shipment available youre either not catching your counterweight and its gone or you have tons of angular or linear velocity now. and if you have means to store angular velocity (eg big reaction wheels) for when the next payload arrives you can do all that with a single station.
oh I didn't mean launch the counterweight, I was imagining that the counterweight does nothing but get pushed around the ring one way or another.
if the ring is centered around the sun, maybe a bit bigger or smaller than earth's orbit, you could control big solar sails on the ring to get rid of unwanted linear momentum.
were thinking on very different scales, i was thinking interplanetary launchers between earth and mars, youre thinking interstellar travel. and yes solar sails on that scale would work to remove momentum