12-28-2015, 01:44 AM
(12-28-2015, 12:42 AM)Davepeta Wrote:(12-28-2015, 12:13 AM)Jim_Clonk Wrote: That reminds me, what's been happening with the EMDrive lately?NASA hasn't bothered announcing anything on it yet. They probably know whether it works or not, but they haven't bothered saying anything official about it.
The EM drive only produces a tiny amount of thrust anyway. Its great for keeping communications satellites in their proper positions longer than possible with any other propulsion system, but the extremely tiny thrust makes it all but impractical for anything else we might want it for. Though if we can boost the thrust produced and decrease the energy requirement, then hoverboards and wheel-less cars might become a practicality using it to provide lift.
Fairly sure they have a scale model of the Alcubierre drive- aka star trek warp drive.
They devised an experiment to measure how strong of a field it made using two laser beams- one passed through the field and one passed around it, but calibrated so that a pulse of light takes the exact same amount of time for each of the two paths.
With the device active, the beam of light passed through the device's field arrived sooner than the beam that was the control path.
However there are two big problems with the technology.
The first is the energy requirement needed to move a large object. Just to operate that tiny concept demonstrator unit requires a pretty significant amount of power, which doesn't scale in any easy to deal with way.
The second is that according to some sources, the device that generates the distortion field has to exist outside that field to work properly- thus in effect you have to have a FTL capable vehicle to build a FTL capable vehicle.
Though perhaps we could work around this to some extent in the form of a hyperspace conduit as often seen in scifi, but this would be a tremendous undertaking to build to the tune of thousands of years to construct and requiring multiple planets worth of resources.
Feel free to PM me if anything is broken