Beam rider

From Red Galaxy

A beam rider is a ship powered by a solar sail. Solar sails become less effective as a solar sail ship travels farther from a star. To offset this effect, an advanced civilization can build a very large laser or system of lasers to increase the efficiency of solar sails. Unfortunately, even the most perfectly focused laser beam disperses over distance. Electromagnetic radiation of higher frequency is less subject to dispersion. Therefore, lasers used for beam rider propulsion tend to be higher frequency.

Because a beam is a scarce resource, and only a few ships are likely to be able to use it at a given time beam riders tend to be small bullet ships. Indeed, beam use may be restricted to ships that can carry data at some minimum throughput or better. Bullet ships try to avoid decelerating. Bullet ships download and upload data from a star system or other node as fast as possible, retaining as much velocity as possible.

As an interstellar civilization grows beam ways interconnect and a beam network emerges.

Beam riders in Orion's Arm use particle beams or other matter beams and ships with magnetic sails. In the Founder's canon matter for building nanites, computronium, and infrastructure is assumed to be scarce. Therefore, it is unlikely that a stellar civilization would want to spray matter into space. Nevertheless, a few beam networks might be based on magnetic sail technology. Ships from solar sail networks and from magnetic sail networks are incompatible. Of course, data itself could be transmitted between solar sail and magnetic sail networks.