Mach Effect progress

[93143]

You do not need a flywheel to convert thrust to power.

Of course not. You could linearly accelerate M-E thrusters up to high speed, crash them into a barrier, and run a steam turbine off the resulting heat. There are tons of ways. I chose the flywheel as a convenient, easy-to-work example. It does have the disadvantage that the rotational motion muddies the water a bit with the non-inertial nature of the thruster's reference frame (not the analysis reference frame) - perhaps I should have used a flat drive belt... the answer would be the same... in fact the math is the same...

I still dont get it. If you apply a counter- force to your ME- thruster without putting the same amount of energy into it, it will just slow down and ultimately stop.

Quit trying to use conservation of energy as if it were a separate physical law. It's inherent in Newtonian mechanics. And I just used Newtonian mechanics to CONCLUSIVELY PROVE that a locally over-unity device is possible using Mach-effect thrusters as a black box. Read it again.

It uses the reast of the universe of a reaction mass, yes, but so does a wheel of a car with earth (if you want it that way).
If you put a horizontal wheel here on earth and then used a car to rotate the wheel and produce energy, you too have to keep pushing the gas pedal on the car, or the car will stop. I would assume that that same would be true for the ME- thruster and a flywheel in space.

A car interacts with a surface at a certain relative velocity. The power required to develop a certain accelerative force, neglecting losses, is simply the dot product of the desired force with the relative velocity.

Here's the money question: How fast is the "rest of the universe" moving relative to a Mach-effect thruster? Assuming your thruster generates a reliable force F when fed a certain quantity of power, what's the upper limit on v in F·v? (As it turns out, the answer is 1/E, where E is the thrust efficiency in N/W - which is a characteristic of the thruster, independent of what the thruster is doing or how fast it's moving in what direction. This may not be the actual average interaction-weighted relative velocity if something funky and relativistic and mind-bending happens to balance out the energy, but it is the effective average interaction-weighted relative velocity.)

If you understand mechanical work, you will now see that trying to discuss the M-E thruster as a "power amplifier" without specifying its mode of use is nonsense.

For example, if you use an M-E thruster to push against a reinforced concrete wall, you will not get any energy out, because it is doing no local work. Distant matter is being shoved in the other direction, but that does us no good. (Well, technically it's probably doing more work on the Earth than on the distant mass, but it still does us no good.)

On the other hand, if you have the M-E thruster push on something that's moving faster than 1/E, you will get more energy out than you put in. This comes from the distant mass that is moving in the same direction as the thruster at about the same speed, and thus already has kinetic energy in the local reference frame. Some of that energy is being transferred to the object being pushed on, with the energy input to the thruster as a mere enabler.

Now do you understand why I posited that the mechanism of operation of the thruster would act preferentially on matter near the thruster's velocity? If something like that is not true, something really funky is going on (you know, assuming it works at all, and Woodward isn't simply barking up the wrong tree...)

[Carl White]

Quit trying to use conservation of energy as if it were a separate physical law. It's inherent in Newtonian mechanics. And I just used Newtonian mechanics to CONCLUSIVELY PROVE that a locally over-unity device is possible using Mach-effect thrusters as a black box. Read it again.

The problem I see here is that it seems the apparatus you describe can be "over-unity" no matter what thrust the M-E thruster produces relative to its power consumption. All you have to do is pick your parameters and let the flywheel accelerate long enough first.

[93143]

That's right. Theoretically, it doesn't matter what E is; if you have a working Mach-effect thruster, you can design a system to harvest energy from the distant universe with it.

Practically speaking, of course, you'd end up with either a preposterously large flywheel or a ridiculous rotational speed, and/or get killed by losses from bearing friction and air resistance and what have you... there would be a practical lower limit on thrust efficiency. Similar considerations would apply to any other reasonably engineerable energy harvesting concept.

Why do you say this is a "problem"?

[zapkitty]

That's right. Theoretically, it doesn't matter what E is; if you have a working Mach-effect thruster, you can design a system to harvest energy from the distant universe with it.

Until the neighborhood cops show up in their dimensional slips and tell us to chill, abide by local conservation regulations and to quit shortening the lifespan of the universe our children will inherit.

Then they'll pull away from this backwater neighborhood while muttering to themselves about savages who can't even plan beyond the next millennium much less mature time scales in the gigayear range...

[CaptainBeowulf]

This reminds me of that Star Trek episode (TNG IIRC) where they find out that warp drive damages the universe/space-time continuum or whatever.

[CaptainBeowulf]

Here's an amusing thought: what if the reason for the slowing of the expansion of the universe is that millions of civilizations are out there flying around trillions of ships using ME drives harvesting momentum from the universe?

[Giorgio]

One could argue say that without the sun, sailing would not be possible, and therefore the sun must be in the boundary of the system...all that energy has to come from somewhere...

Thoughts?

Good example, and nothing to say about it.
A couple of thousands years ago it was indeed difficult to believe that winds were generated due to the heat supplied by the sun.

I guess that the final word will be left to the experiments.

[Enginerd]

Until the neighborhood cops show up in their dimensional slips and tell us to chill, abide by local conservation regulations and to quit shortening the lifespan of the universe our children will inherit.

"Yo, Mike!"
"Yeah, Gabe?"
"We got a problem down on Earth."
"I thought you fixed that last century!"
"No, no, not that. Someone's found a security problem in the physics
program. They're getting energy out of nowhere."
"Blessit! Lemme look... <tappity clickity tappity> Hey, it's
there all right! OK, just a sec... <tappity clickity tap... save... compile>
There, that ought to patch it. Dist it out, wouldja?"

[GeeGee]

Here's an amusing thought: what if the reason for the slowing of the expansion of the universe is that millions of civilizations are out there flying around trillions of ships using ME drives harvesting momentum from the universe?

If M-E drives work, it would certainly add a new twist to the Fermi paradox.

[Betruger]

Only for us to eventually find out the universe is empty of other life.. With no further prospects except a few "fringe" insisting they've found potential evidence for other universes and some revolutionary means to go there.

[Jded]

Here's an amusing thought: what if the reason for the slowing of the expansion of the universe is that millions of civilizations are out there flying around trillions of ships using ME drives harvesting momentum from the universe?

Funny, that was one of my first thoughts when I tried to understand how ME thruster is supposed to work.

[GIThruster]

I think though, what you both meant is that M-E use could explain the acceleration in expansion. That makes perfect sense given the "arrow of time" definition for entropy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)

[CaptainBeowulf]

Actually, I was just thinking of other stuff and was in a mental time warp back to the 90s when we were assuming that expansion would continue to slow... but yeah, M-E could explain accelerated expansion... basically the M-E ships are the "dark matter."

[GIThruster]

I remember one of the eight questions in my first year physics final in high school was to calculate the critical mass of the universe that would determine whether it would continue to expand, given the rate we then knew, or would eventually slow, stop and collapse. Who then would have guessed it was actually accelerating?

Any explanation for this past the nebulous undefined (Dark Energy) is a good one. Really, we don't have any forces that act like anti-gravity, and those proposing DE really are asking us to believe something hard to swallow, despite they're not explaining anything.

ME use does explain it pretty darn well. . .

[Jded]

I think though, what you both meant is that M-E use could explain the acceleration in expansion. That makes perfect sense given the "arrow of time" definition for entropy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)

Yes, acceleration. I misread the post I was replying to.

Edit:

I wonder if we could try to estimate density of advanced civilisations (colonised planets, more likely) with the data on Universe's expansion rate.

Many assumptions would be needed, but probably still better than Drake's formula.