Artifact: Flying Solar Tile Array. The parametric tile model, square and hex packings, and formation presets are in there.
What changed in my thinking
Before committing to structure, I wanted to check the alternative honestly: must a photovoltaic array be a rigid thing at all? A loose formation of small tiles — square or hexagonal, individually framed, connected by flexible harnesses — has real attractions. Tiles are cheap to make. Failure of one tile is a rounding error. Launch packaging stops being a deployable-mechanism problem.
I record this entry because the ledger should show explored branches, not only chosen ones. The formation idea did not die from a single number; it faded under an accumulation of inconveniences I kept having to excuse — station-keeping budgets, mutual shadowing in anything but a flat formation, the harness becoming a structural element with none of a structure’s virtues, and the service problem of a hundred free-flyers that are each almost worthless and collectively essential. Later entries return to rigid quadrants and hard tiles, and they do not cite this one, because by then I had quietly stopped believing in the loose array. Better to say that here than to let the branch vanish.
What survived from the exploration: the tile as the unit of failure and replacement, and the habit of asking whether geometry can do a job before mechanisms are assigned to it.
Recalled
- Ringworld (Larry Niven, 1970). The shadow squares are the canonical free-flying panel formation: twenty-odd enormous rectangles held in orbit between the sun and the ring, providing night by formation flying rather than by structure. Where Niven is wrong for my case: he never paid their station-keeping bill, and the squares are shades, not generators — they can drift without the mission noticing. A power formation cannot. Every metre of relative drift is shadow, tension on the harness, or a collision in waiting, and the bill lands on propellant or on structure. I chose structure.