Planet Found in Habitable Zone Around Nearest Star

[The Grand Nudger]

It seems improbable that any spaceship driven by an external laser to a fraction of speed of light could carry enough chemical fuel to slow down to make orbit at its destination.    Most likely it would be designed to zip by the destination star without slowing down or having its trajectory appreciably altered by the tiny (compare to the space craft's velocity) gravity pull of the destination star.   It can maybe sending out a blizzard of smaller probes to get closer up looks, but all will just blast by the destination at cruising speed and then sail on into oblivion.

Theoretically...it can be done, accelerate for half the trip, decelerate for half the trip.  That solves the low impulse problem inherent to any (current) engine with enough delta to get there.  It would require constant operation of the engines for so long...though......that shits bound to just break.

To get there fast and then slow down almost to zero in order to ba captured by gravity squares the technical difficulty.

I wonder if it is possible to first send  ahead A a massive Mirror, and then bounce a laser off the mirror to stop or slow the spacecraft  on approach to the destination.

I don't  I think accurate auto mated navigation would be difficult. Auto mated star tracking navigation system had been perfected in the late 1950s for missile guidance

That's a bit like saying that biplanes perfected global circumnavigation..in context, and even that's an massive understatement.  Burn even the tiniest fraction of a degree off grade halfway to the nearest star and by the time you get there, "there" won't be anywhere near where you were aiming.  That's assuming you don't get navigational wobbles or pulls from any number of things between here and there.  The things that can get a missile from one continent to the next (or even the moon) aren't suitable for interstellar distances. OFC...since we're talking about interstellar distances, your star map would neccessarily change as you crossed them. It all gets a little more difficult to resolve than anything we currently have. We could get reasonably close, but reasonably close in context might still be one hell of a miss.

As to the mirror...you'd have the same problem getting the mirror there, then stopping it, so that it could stop the craft. I suppose you could just let it pass by straightline while it attempted to slow down the chase craft.......but that would present it;s own problems, as the slower the chase craft was moving relative to the mirror the greater the distance between the two and the lesser the effect of the mirror. Essentially, the harder you brake, the more difficult it becomes to brake. I'd just go with the lofting method above, as well as picking a good capture window that has a periapsis which could provide a hefty amount of oomph itself. Even with a really eccentric orbit even a small amount of chemical fuel ought to be able to burn at apo and drop the periapsis to surface. Might take a few* passes, is all.

(I've met a fellow super nerd...haven't I, lol?)