An interplanetary industrial process:
scoopships collect substances, including metal atoms, from the Jovian atmosphere;
an orbital station processes these complexes into dangerously explosive isonitrate;
unmanned sailships/sunjammers, moved outward by light pressure or inward by gravity, take months to tack between orbits;
a sail is a metal-coated carbon compound sheet, continually eroded by micrometeorites and eventually replaced;
each sailship also has sensors, automata, signalling equipment and motors that are powered by solar batteries and controlled by a pilot computer;
the motors control rotation and precession of the sail;
one sailship cargo is a ten yard diameter sphere containing cold, liquefied, high pressure, high energy isonitrate, shaded by the sail to prevent boiling;
Earth pays the asterite Beltline Transportation Company well for this cargo, needed to start several chemical syntheses;
Beltline herdships/maintenance ships stay close to the orbits of sail and power craft;
thus, when an isonitrate cargo is endangered by an imminent solar flare, a herdship crew is on hand to detach the sail and other mass, then hook the cargo to their ship and haul it to a safe distance from Earth and Moon before valving it out.
I have learned far more about these processes by summarizing them than by merely reading about them. Readers without a scientific or technical background are at a disadvantage with this kind of hard sf.
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