Quote Originally Posted by TalonOfAnathrax View Post
  1. If you want motive force, then good ship design + "solar" sails are now the optimal way to move through space. Everfull Sails from Stormwrack are very easy to craft (my Sha'ir 3 could make them right now!) and creates enough motive force to drive the ship forward "at its full normal speed". Simply design a spaceship so that its "normal speed" is spaceworthy, and you have now created a cheap way to travel through space that doesn't rely on Teleportation or high-level spellcasters! Of course you'll want a real space agency to actually design the ship. This isn't the kind of space exploration one PC can do from his backyard (you'll want to wait a few more levels for that).
There's... a lot of questions here. With radiation pressure, to get 1 newton (roughly the weight of an apple), you would need a solar sail about 360 meters (about a fifth of a mile) on each side. Presumably the Everfull Sails still needed to be full size, so the solar sails would still need to be as well, which puts us right back to square one on the solar sail issue. Unless you're creating actual wind in space, which would be it's own whole set of things, and would still require a massive amount of sail material.

Also, there's the whole issue of how the acceleration would be handled, if we stick with a "max speed" for space travel.