DANGER: Impulse Engine Overload Causes 97 Megaton Explosion.
Posted on 10/03/2012 3:52:03 PM PDT by Dallas59
There's a hierarchy of "Star Trek" inventions we would like to see become reality. We already have voice-controlled computers and communicators in the form of smartphones. A working Holodeck is under development. Now, how about we get some impulse engines for our starships?
The University of Alabama in Huntsville's Aerophysics Research Center, NASA, Boeing, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are collaborating on a project to produce nuclear fusion impulse rocket engines. It's no warp drive, but it would get us around the galaxy a lot quicker than current technologies.
According to Txchnologist, the scientists are hoping to make impulse drive a reality by 2030. It would be capable of taking a spacecraft from Earth to Mars in as little as six weeks.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.cnet.com ...
DANGER: Impulse Engine Overload Causes 97 Megaton Explosion.
... hence the deflector shields...
/johnny
There was an article here the other day where someone hypothesized that a ship with warp capabilities could be built.
http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.html
Science fiction is great. It takes dreams and makes them, well, into books and movies. Dream on!
All I know is that we'll never fly, travel under the sea anything called a "Nautilus", talk to each other with little flip top "communicators", have talking computers, harness the atom, or go to the moon.
It’s not crazy, it’s really the only thing we have unless you build the ship in orbit. The amount of fuel required to get to even low Earth-orbit requires such a huge thrust/weight ratio that your payload can’t be more than a small percentage of the weight of the spacecraft. That payload is anything that isn’t fuel or fuel containment, so a real “engine” is pretty much out of the question unless you’re launching from a platform in space where you’ve been able to assemble your spacecraft from multiple Earth-based launches.
You can do that with an ion engine, but it is such low thrust it all ends up being the same anyway.
In practice, even with a super-scifi engine you still don't need to run it very often -- it isn't like you have anything slowing you down you need to compensate for.
The only real reason to run your engines the whole time would be to provide artificial "gravity" via acceleration. And if you have the technology to do that you probably have the technology to create artificial gravity anyway.
All of a sudden, there's an asteroid right in front of us.....what to do?
Same thing you would do if you were running into the path of one as you drove to work in the morning. The likelihood of you running into one in either instance remains about the same.
A quick internet search turns up a rocket science term known as "specific impulse," which has dimensions of seconds; this somewhat enigmatic dimension expands into "pound per pound per second" or
Here the numerator represents "pounds of thrust" and the denominator represents "pounds per second of fuel consumption."
Specific impulse is a single catch-all parameter for measuring the value/quality of a rocket engine and its fuel supply. The higher the specific impulse, the longer the engine will generate a particular thrust level on the same quantity of fuel.
"Impulse" is also an engineering quantity. It's dimensions are force·time, or lb·sec in the units used above; these are also the units of momentum. Interestingly, these dimensions are identical to m·v, mass times velocity, which relates to the amount of mass ejected from a rocket engine times the velocity at which the mass leaves the engine.
Anyway, I've always assumed (as a long-ago avid viewer of ST-TOS) that "impulse power" or "impulse engines" were classical rocket engines, although probably using some energy source far in advance of the chemical reactions we have mostly used in earthly space programs over the years.
"Warp Drive" seems to be based on some sort of bending or twisting of the space-time continuum, and thus is not limited by the speed of light. I remember reading long ago that "warp factor W" meant the speed of light times two raised to the power of W:
Thus when Captain Kirk called out "Warp factor 7 Mr. Scott" he was telling Scotty to make turns for 128 times the speed of light.
My friend, civilization is about to be snuffed out. Science might (that’s a big might) under conditions of peace and prosperity, but these ain’t them times. Besides, too much science is given to shopping for grants. Buying headlines from some lab looking for cash is hardly reaching for the stars.
You can get there even faster if you don’t worry about how you slow down... SPLAT!
/johnny
When, exactly. Prove it.
Bend over and kiss your asteroid good bye.
“If you just have an engine that can operate for the whole trip as needed, you are there in a few weeks.”
I didn’t read the article, but assuming a nuclear engine - perhaps then we could also LEAVE mars. As it is now with a rocket - you can check in, but never check out. Although I imagine you would have some intrepid explorers that would take on the mission. Set up a permanent camp, be resupplied from earth, etc.
Only for pessimists.
/johnny
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