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That's the drive of the eponymous generation ship in Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora. It sends a mirror ahead of itself, then the Sol-Mercury lasers bounce off the mirror, back on the ship to slow it down.

I could see the light spacecraft with their matter-antimatter engines laying down "lightways", like railroads in the old west. Once a lightway is established, then it's much less of a big deal to get from system to system. Apart from the tens of thousands of years in subjective time, of course.




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