Posted on 10/14/2004 1:14:50 PM PDT by PatrickHenry
All your Martian commercial properties are belong to us!
Nearly everything
that can be used as a drive
can be a weapon.
Larry Niven once
wrote a short story about
how a "weaponless"
Earth ship was attacked
by a Kzin warship. Tough luck
for the Kzin, because
the Earth ship had a
really powerful magnet
for their ramjet drive . . .
My thought exactly.
Now, if they based the generator on the moon, that would be feasible for the outbound trip (the effects shouldn't become pronounced for thousands of years, anyway). But on the Mars side, they'd have few choices. Even if the rotations of Deimos and Phobos weren't a problem, their masses are small enough that this sort of constant gentle force could begin to perturb their orbits.
Conceptually - they could use aerobraking in the upper Martian atmosphere to decelerate. And if we can get really wacky - when ready to return they can head away from the Earth - get re-accelerated by the beam - and hope Jupiter is somewhere out there to use the bank shot effect - doing a tight 180 around Jupiter as if in a highly elliptical orbit - to reverse direction while conserving velocity. Just conjecture though...
....also, depending on the complexity of assembly, the vehicle itself could conceivably carry along the basic elements necessary to assemble a similar beam generator on Mars to facilitate the return trip, using local material mass for the bulk of it. Again...totally off the wall conjecture.
If you "balanced" the thrust by using the rotations (and multiple thrusters, though the thrust would be intermittent), you could avoid that problem.
58 - Thanks for the ping.
It seems like this type of drive would 'microwave' or 'plazma wave' the occupants of any such space ship. If it can drive a ship, it should also cook the ship contents.
Winglee has been around with this idea for years. It is not new. It IS his idea, but he keeps shopping it around and nobody bites. I find it droll that this is being touted as 'breakthrough' technology...
Awesome stuff. Great news.
It's true that the "beam and sail" concept isn't new. I've read about in SF for decades. But it's a bit of a breakthrough -- although perhaps only a bureaucratic breakthrough -- to get it developed at the engineering level.
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