I really like the concept for the second starship, the electromagnet concept is dope

most ships in SC use it - to my knowledge it's a legitimately massive boost to realistic space travel that could be built today, but nobody really thought about it until now and the space industry is still sleeping on it because it's a slightly unconventional idea: instead of a "normal" electric sail, the spaceship actually uses its magnets to turn a roughly Earth-sized chunk of the solar wind itself into an even bigger magnet which can absorb much more force from the solar wind than the spaceship itself could alone. at first i thought it had to be some kind of scam, but as far as i can tell at least it seems to check out, and the main purveyor of the concept, Jeff Greason, is a rocket scientist who seems pretty well spoken for. the kicker is that you can achieve upwards of half a percent of lightspeed inside the Solar system purely by surfing the solar wind plasma, basically for free with no fuel/propellant expenditure, using at most a modest fission reactor for power. it's really quite something, and while i won't say it will happen, i could see it legitimately opening up the Solar system in the near-midfuture.

That’s interesting, I’d never heard of this concept before!
The fact that the theory is tied to a grounded scientist does give it some credibility, and it would be interesting to see if it gets used in the near future 👀 But yeah, wishful thinking uwu