hop - 18/5/2008 10:12 AMQuoteNathan - 17/5/2008 4:03 PMEM-Drive is not fake science. They have a WORKING prototype and are moving towards a flight test in 2009. www.emdrive.com. This uses actual physics and obeys all the convervation laws.He claims to have a working prototype. He claims it doesn't violate conservation of momentum, but many experts disagree.See http://www.newscientist.com/blog/fromthepublisher/2006/10/emdrive-on-trial.html for various objections.
Nathan - 17/5/2008 4:03 PMEM-Drive is not fake science. They have a WORKING prototype and are moving towards a flight test in 2009. www.emdrive.com. This uses actual physics and obeys all the convervation laws.
tnphysics - 17/5/2008 9:24 PMIt is possible to perform propulsion with light as reaction mass.But this requires a large energy input and the light is ejected.
If you think this is all science fiction that's your privilege, but the peer reviewed experimental data showing that this is all possible with enough development effort put into it over the next 25-to-50 years is readily aviable on the web and elsewhere, like the American Institute of Physics (AIP) if you care to look for it.
The only true way to make a starship is to be able to create a spacedrive that can modifiy gravity and/or inertia. Everthing else talked about here except perhaps the EM drive is just for use on solar system scale missions.
The only true way to make a starship is to be able to create a spacedrive that can modifiy gravity and/or inertia. Everthing else talked about here except perhaps the EM drive is just for use on solar system scale missions. Gene Rodenberry pretty much nailed it when he created the Starship Enterprise that was equipped with inertia modification "impulse-drive" system for solar system based travels and a wormhole based "warp-drive" for interstellar jumps measured in days to weeks and not tens to hundreds of years for both the ship crew and the folks back home. If any of you are curious how this might be done, we have to look at the confulence of General Relativity and Quntum Mechancis to first find the means to transiently modify the inertial properties of mass by manipulating its stored energy and bulk acceleration of that mass relative to the distant stars. That Mach/Lorentz technology will provide us the Startrek like "impluse drive" we need to start down this path. We then use this same "gravinertial" technology to create traversalble wormholes shortcuts through spacetime that our starships can use to star hop. If you think this is all science fiction that's your privilege, but the peer reviewed experimental data showing that this is all possible with enough development effort put into it over the next 25-to-50 years is readily aviable on the web and elsewhere, like the American Institute of Physics (AIP) if you care to look for it.
HOP:Sure, try this one: http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=APCPCS000813000001001321000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes And if you want any more citations, let me know...[...]
When Woodward's (2004a, 2004b, 2005) and our test results were compared with the model's predictions, the test results exceeded predictions by one to two orders of magnitude. Efforts are underway to understand the discrepancies and update the model.
[...] See Dr. Harold White's following paper on Space-time metric engineering at the following link for details: http://www.springerlink.com/content/t52g457576w8m2x2/
Khallow:IMO multiple generation starships are out of the running since they would only be attempted by our current world governments out of a desparate need to survive as a race. It's much better to think a bit more creatively and out of the current power and propulsion (P&P) box, and then put some development R&D resources into it to see what really can be done in this advnaced P&P venue.
Sandrot:[...] And when that happens, we will have signed our death warrants in the long term for when the next killer asteroid comes along, we still won't have enough of our civilization off this rock to survive. [...]
Sandrot & Crew:Ok, let's not be dramatic [...]
[...] As to what is unambiguous for most folks seem to fall around 1.0 Newton (101.971 gram-force) of force output at a minimum with preference being given to being able to levitate the test article into the conference hall.
Is sunlight strong enough out at Mars to power a VASIMR roundtrip?