". . .There's a reference to the biefield Brown effect, which I know nothing about. . ."It's a bad joke. An inefficient ion thruster that does not work as reported. Easiest way to tell is put it in a box. The ions accelerated by the potential difference in the design can't get out of the box and the thruster doesn't work at all. Was shown not to work many years ago. You can ignore it as junk science.
Any electrical source can be used to drive an MLT or UFG. The reason Paul chose GM fuel cells for his WarpStar illustration is that for that application, flying to the Moon and back on a single charge; batteries do not have a high enough energy density. Fission would not work in such a small craft. We're still waiting on Fusion. BLP reactors are still under investigation though, it appears using them instead of a fuel cell would give a WarpStar an exponential extension in range, perhaps enough for travel to Mars.Given a 1 N/W M-E thruster like what is the baseline assumption for the WarpStar, one might fly to LEO on batteries but not much further and probably have to return hypersonic with wings and tiles. We talked about this when he was writing the paper but I don't remember all the details. The key thing to get from this though is that each of these options for storing or generating electrical power have different energy densities, meaning a set amount of energy/mass; so not all of them can accomplish the same things. Even the best, most cutting edge batteries cannot fly a 1 N/W WarpStar to the Moon and back.
I have not read the paper. (Or have I? Okay, I have not read the paper recently.) I'm no fan of coasting, but Star-Drive seemed to be giving people the impression that the moon trip wasn't possible at all with batteries, and it is.Batteries. To the moon. That's almost as much of a paradigm shift as the fuel-cell-powered 4-hour high-thrust trajectory.Almost.
Star Drive: You wrote "Predicted thrust levels for this ~175 gram test article using Dr. Woodward's M-E derivation is approximately 52.0 Newton with 100W of input power at 146 MHz". Is that 52.0 Newtons for real? If so then you are halfway to the 1 Newton/Watt needed for the Warp Star. I wax excited.
inside wormhole territory
it will produce very small thrusts. So don't get your hopes up.
Yes well, this isn't Woodward's prediction. Apart from the fact Woodward's derivation cannot legitimately be used to make thrust predictions inside wormhole territory, it is also true that the mathematical tool Paul is using to get this thrust number is not up to date. It was constructed by Andrew Palfreyman before Jim realized the necessity of bulk acceleration in these thrusters. Paul's current build likewise does not accommodate such acceleration so there is an excellent chance that if it works at all, it will produce very small thrusts. So don't get your hopes up.