In finishing up the first draft (yay!) of my paper on sailing, I thought about other kinds of sailing (for the discussion). One is solar sails: In principle if a spacecraft has a sufficiently large solar sail, of which it can change the size and shape, the spacecraft can navigate in arbitrary directions and perform arbitrary three-axis attitude adjustments, by working on a combination of radiation pressure and gravity. It's really very flexible. It makes me want to design a spacecraft!
I also thought about ice boats. An ice boat is like a sailboat with an extremely large keel and almost no water drag. That is, it sails like a sailboat in the limit that the keel gets large but the water drag gets small. This should make ice boats extremely fast at upwind sailing. Maybe I'll try to find an opportunity to sail on ice this winter?
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