Solar Sail Radiation Pressure: Thrust Vector

Sunlight has no mass, but it carries momentum, and a large enough mirror can ride that momentum like a ship rides the wind. This simulator renders a real 3D solar sail bathed in a stream of photons and computes the actual radiation-pressure force it feels — split into an absorption component that pushes straight along the sunlight and a reflection component that pushes along the sail's own tilted normal, exactly as the physics predicts. Tilt the sail's cone angle to see how steering trades radial thrust for a sideways component, slide reflectivity from a black absorber to a perfect mirror to see the thrust roughly double, and move the sail closer to or farther from the sun to watch irradiance — and thrust — fall off with the inverse-square law.