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

==== For your solar-catapulted ice depots: ====
* Near the Sun & in the outer Solar System: Zig-zag with depots? Very likely worth it. You’re fighting the gravity well; every bit of staged mass helps.
* Out past the “shoreline” (Solar gravity mostly done): - You want your starship on the cleanest possible outbound trajectory. - You only touch depots that have: - nearly the same outbound direction, - similar speed, - modest intercept costs.

So the refined statement is:

: 

Beyond that, the zig-zag turns into self-sabotage.

If you want, we can now sketch a two-zone mission profile:
# Zone 1: “Messy” depot-rich region (inside Solar System out to, say, a few thousand AU).
# Zone 2: “Straight shot” region (pure cruise toward Alpha Centauri).

That gives you a crisp mental map of where your logistics lattice lives and where it must give way to clean inertial flight.