Editing Openai/691a2d9f-c044-8012-bccf-942bfce6334d (section)

===== Even more important than angular alignment: =====
* Almost all comets we know are on bound orbits; even long-period ones are still tied to the Sun.
* They go out to some aphelion (maybe thousands or tens of thousands of AU), slow, turn, and fall back.

Your starship, once it has climbed out of the Sun’s deep potential and is on an interstellar escape trajectory, is effectively on a near-straight geodesic toward Alpha Centauri.

A bound comet:
* may start roughly in that direction for a while
* but its path curves under solar gravity long before it has gone even 1% of the distance you care about.

So you might get, at best:
* a depot that helps you in the first few hundred or few thousand AU, but
* for the remaining hundreds of thousands of AU, the comet peels away and you never see it again.

In other words: comets can at best be Solar System–edge oases, not actual “halfway points” to Alpha Centauri.