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this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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But the air is not contained on the boat, it is pushed away from the boat after hitting the sail. Since that air has mass it will produce and equal force pushing on the sail, aka thrust.
A jet engine with deployed reverses is just a fan mounted on the plane pushing against the plane but it works just fine.
A sail is just a very inefficient deflector of air, but the principle is the same.
For what it's worth, a thrust reverser is also a very inefficient deflector of air. It's better than nothing, and jet engines produce a lot of thrust, so even inefficiently reversed it still provides a significant amount of reverse thrust which happens to be quite useful for slowing down an aircraft when there's minimal weight-on-wheels or on slippery runways, but it's still only a tiny fraction of what the engines produce in normal operation for forward flight.
A fan blasting air at a sail is also quite inefficient, but as other comments note, it does technically work. It just works so poorly for the amount of energy you're putting into the fan that you'd probably be better off rowing or just using the sail properly.