Posted on 12/25/2016 8:46:40 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Considering NASA’s attitude to nuclear power, I would think so. Hopefully, more details will be forthcoming.
It has a factor in there people aren’t dealing with yet. From what I’ve read this device is alleged to allow achieving velocities of hundreds if not thousands of miles a second. You are not going to be able to have a solar system teeming with vehicles at those velocities unless those vehicles have autodestruct mechanisms that turn them into a cloud of gas if they get within X million miles of inhabited structures or planets.
There is just to much kinetic energy to risk it. Objects with the mass of a pickup truck striking the earth at 5000 miles a second would be cataclysmic. The fastest we’ve gotten anything up to is, I believe, the voyagers at about 11 miles per second. There will have to be a whole system developed for safely moving objects around at 1%-10% C.
One thing sci-fi hasn’t tended to convey accurately (or wanted to, since it would be boring) in visual space epics is the fact that anything that is going somewhere in space at a rate remotely capable of getting there within a reasonable time is going to be going so fast you’re not going to be able to see it.
17 megatons of TNT. That’s the kinetic energy of a 5,000 lb pickup truck going 5,000 miles per second. But it would require twice that much energy to accelerate a 5,000 lb pickup truck to 5,000 miles per second in the first place. Science is not about to start becoming magic where that kind of energy can just pop out of nowhere. How many laws of physics do we intend on ignoring to make this phantom drive a reality?
“If the EM drive works....”
****************************************
It DOES work...that has been established. NASA’s contribution was to determine that it also works in a vacuum. The current problem is developing an understanding of WHY IT WORKS. NOBODY (as far as I know) understands WHY it works. There are various conjectures as to why & how it works but none have yet been proven. This is the type of thing to which I hope Trump has NASA devote reallocated resources. The efforts would be far worthier than their current MASSIVE waste of resources spent trying to promote the Man-caused global warming hoax or trying to make Muslims feel better about themselves.
>It DOES work...that has been established. NASA’s contribution was to determine that it also works in a vacuum.
Actually we still don’t know if it does work. The amount of thrust generated is well into the experimental error range. Nor have any of the experiments designed to scale up the effect generated the expected thrust. I’ve been following the EM drive for years and so far it appears to be a bust.
I’d put no faith in Chinese claims. Chinese scientists and academics are the biggest frauds in the world.
Oh yeah sure....I believe all the science news coming-out of that dump
That’s fine....they also say that AGW is real. When they produce a fully function engine then let’s talk
Can’t help remembering a video of Kelly Ripa riding around the TV studio in a kid’s express wagon, using a CO2 fire extinguisher as her jet engine. (I still can’t believe the fire extinguisher has that much force.
No big deal. We have reverse engineered the flying saucers, and are way ahead of the Chinese (unless Madame President sold them the blueprints).
You sound like a Y2K bug conspiracy theorist and climate alarmist rolled into one.
This sort of thing went on all throughout the renaissance. Relativity meant that Newtonian mechanics was incomplete, not fatally flawed. If this thing winds up working, it isn't free energy, it is a way to directly convert electrical energy into kinetic energy.
This effort to treat the laws of physics like holy scripture is counterproductive. This is probably why scientific progress has become stagnant. We spend our time on fairy tales like global warming (and a couple of others that even mentioning would guarantee a long and acrimonious thread) rather than real, observable science.
As soon as something interesting is observed, the first impulse is always to discount it rather than truly addressing it. Science anymore amounts to mostly defending orthodoxy. Galileo would be persecuted and rejected by contemporary scientists if he made similar sorts of unorthodox observations today, as has happened to many other real scientists who have done nothing more than report what they saw. Most "scientists" today should dress in robes and wear funny hats, it better fits their frame of mind.
EM drive isn't violating Newton's 3rd Law. EM Drive microwave energy might create micro fractures in the space vacuum, and unbinding even a microscopic fraction of the space vacuum would unleash massive quantities of energy.
They have had one for a few years now.
The alien reverse engineered stuff (if it exists) would be in the ultra deluxe mega sellout your country payoff package.
If anything alien is on hand, I’d like to hope the program is so hidden and obscured in the event of a krinton or the wun coming along to prevent it being sold or given away.
So you seriously believe there is zero reactive force to photon emission by cascading electrons? Electrons have momentum and inertia.
I happen to know someone who designs and makes the geosync satellite stabilization rockets. you would be amazed at just how small the thrust nozzles are.
Not so fast my friend! The engine may not be “reactionless” if the photons it produces are the “reaction mass”. It just doesn’t generate reaction mass by burning fuel, so it doesn’t need to carry that reaction mass along with it in a tank.
On the other hand, big claims require big proof.
Lots of “impossible” things have been promised over the years, very few make it to market.
Personally I a rooting for this to be true.
Now WHY didn’t I think of that!
After all, I grew up in Dorchester in the same neighborhood as Leonard Nimoy, so I should have known!
Oh..those pesky, old, s-l-o-w impulse engines.
Good in a pinch, though!
I am beginning to think I can cure a rainy day! :-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.