The ion drive will predate warp drive
Newton Law of Motion #1 violated
Either that or Second Law of Thermodynics violated.
Other than that: perfect like cold fusion in Ytah
Slinky also makes a wonderful toy
Another Muslim invention!
hell, anybody who’s ever scraped out a jeffries tube knows that...
I believe it is possible, does not violate the laws of motion or thermodynamics, and is relatively straight forward. Does that make me a barking moonbat?
“Shawyer claims the EmDrive converts electric power into thrust, without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves around in a closed container. He has built a number of demonstration systems, but critics reject his relativity-based theory and insist that, according to the law of conservation of momentum, it cannot work.”
It would be interesting to see exactly how this guys “relativity-based theory” works. After all, relativistically, the microwave energy is equivalent to mass, but you should still need to shoot a whole lot of microwaves out the back of the ship in order to generate any forward thrust.
Just bouncing microwaves around in a box would seem to achieve nothing. One impact on one side might move the box infintesimally forward, but the reflection hitting another side would then impart momentum in another direction, and in the aggregate, it should all negate and result in no motion at all.
The only way I can conceive of this working is if you could direct the microwave impacts to only hit the front side of the box. This would require catching any reflecting photons and redirecting them back at the front side, without letting them strike any other surface to impart their momentum. Some sort of non-physical system, like a magnetic containment field, might do the trick, but I have a feeling that there is a “catch” I am not thinking of that would make even that solution not work.
As soon as they said, convert electricity, I stopped.
Where does the electricity come from? At best perfect nuclear conversion of mass to energy.
Try running the numbers for a machine to get to say 90% light. It is 100,000 fuel to payload ratio. Then there is slowing down and return.
It would be awesome if it is true. Humans would literally OWN the solar system. Probably not beyond it for a long time though.
I stopped reading after “NASA a major player in spaceflight” then realized it must be fiction
Ah, I found some “meat” about how the drive works, and it seems to work basically how I speculated it might. It directs the photons to impact one side more than the other, but instead of using a containment system, it relies on a relativistic effect to achieve this:
“The device uses a magnetron producing microwaves directed inside a specially shaped, fully enclosed tapering high Q resonant cavity whose area is greater at one end, upon which radiation pressure would act differently due to a relativistic effect caused by the action of group velocity in different frames of reference.”
“Roger Shawyer’s idea is to try to design a microwave cavity as a conical frustum in such a manner that forces due to radiation pressure on one side are greater than the other.
Cullen showed the propagation rate of electromagnetic waves in space (group velocity) and the resulting force it exerts can be varied depending on the geometry of a waveguide within which it travels.[32] The increasing confinement of a narrowing waveguide (convergent) leads to a widening wavelength and a decrease of the group velocity (lower momentum transfer). Conversely, a widening waveguide (divergent) leads to a narrowing wavelength and an increase of the group velocity (higher momentum transfer).[35]
Shawyer states that if the electromagnetic wave travelling in a tapered waveguide is bounced between two reflectors, with a large group velocity difference at the end surfaces, the force difference resulting from the radiation pressure difference will give a resultant thrust to the waveguide linking the two reflectors, in the direction of the larger surface.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EmDrive
Jesus, if this works, it is genius. Using simple geometry of the cavity to force the waves to transform their momentum into wavelength in order to control the direction of thrust. That’s a sublime solution if ever I’ve seen one.
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140006052.pdf
Among the interesting facts from the paper: The measured thrust was only about 0.0001 ounces. They put the device in a vacuum chamber, but never bothered to actually test it in a vacuum. Most significantly, they build a "null" device, intentionally built to not produce any thrust, but that also appeared to show thrust. This is a strong indication that there is a systematic measurement error in their setup.
Clarke’s Three Laws are three “laws” of prediction formulated by the British writer Arthur C. Clarke. They are:
1.) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2.)The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3.)Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Nothing is “impossible”, there’s only stuff we haven’t tried yet....
How the reactionless space drive could send nuclear subs into orbit
http://io9.com/how-the-reactionless-space-drive-could-send-nuclear-sub-1493423673
