Mach Effect progress

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birchoff
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by birchoff »

GiThruster,

I just managed to get my hands on the March 2007 STAIF paper Paul March authored on his WarpStar-1 design. while I am currently searching for the 2006 paper he references. The question that I cannot seem to get an answer to on my own is this. Is the MLT design still viable in light of the refinements that have been made to the theory? Or is the MLT design a complete dead end that cannot be rescued by some innovative engineering and/or material science?

DeltaV
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Joined: Mon Oct 12, 2009 5:05 am

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by DeltaV »

birchoff wrote:DeltaV any idea on how to get access to the original slide deck. It looks like there are a bunch of animations in it. Would love to know if that piture of the minature car/cart looking device was the beginning of animation showing that minature car/cart moving via a current gen MET device.
Sorry for the delayed reply. Due to present circumstances I'm only able to check in here a few times per week.
You know as much as I do about the animations. The slides also have some equation font issues for me.

Here is the conference link:
http://aspw.jpl.nasa.gov/workshop-proceedings
The 20th Advanced Space Propulsion Workshop
Ohio Aerospace Institute, Cleveland, Ohio
November 17-19, 2014

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

[removed double post]
Last edited by GIThruster on Tue Dec 23, 2014 3:54 pm, edited 2 times in total.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

GIThruster
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Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

I'm actually pretty proud of that paper. That was my design concept. I approached Paul with that idea in March of 2006, just after STAIF. The idea of course is to illustrate what is possible when you have a certain level of mastery in gravinertial technology. In our case, we chose what was then and is still now a plausible baseline thrust efficiency of 1 N/W. If you have that you can fly a "one gee solution" by accelerating at one Earth Gee for all your travels and you get the travel times in the paper. That's also where I first coined the term "Golden Age of Human Spaceflight" and noted what is required for this is that space travel become "safe, quick, convenient and economical".

Paul did all the engineering for that paper and he chose the GM fuel cells because he already had sufficient experience modeling with them. There are however certain flaws in the concept. First is there is no relativistic correction in the paper to do energy management, and this often causes conservation calculation errors. When we wrote the paper, Jim told us "you can't do the calculations like that" and we ignored him. We figured the numbers were close enough and there was no harm because to order of unity, the calculations are correct. However, the method used does invite people to make the kinds of conservation calculation errors that have filled this and other forums over the years, and what we've seen is, people have to be told half a dozen times "you can't do it that way". And in fact, the only person I have ever met who can do the conservation calcs without the tools of General Relativity--meaning "suming the instantaneous frames of rest" the way Jim does, is none other than our own 93134. He did the calcs right in this thread about half a year or so ago, and that is really astonishing work.

Another problem is, that if you have a 1N/W thruster, you don't need the fuel cells because they're efficient enough you can just strap them to a flywheel and generate your own power from the gravinertial field. We didn't look at that because we're both firm believers in "one impossible thing at a time" but you need to understand that according to theory, METs are not electrical to kinetic transducers that are limited in their output to the electrical energy in. They're gravinertial transistors that control the flow of momentum into the device, and the real power being handled is in the universe's gravity field. So you can actually harvest energy from the field (not too different from an electrical alternator" or a sail) and when you do this, you don't need fuel cells.

There were a handful of other issues too, but very minor. Paul and I disagreed at the form of the Warpstar itself. (He offered me co-authorship but I declined since I haven't got the technical background he does and I thought including me might discredit the work--a decision I've oft regretted.) He chose a lifting body because he wanted to maximize safety and his choice is excellent in this regard. I however favor the form of a flying brick because I want people to realize that we can defy convention in many ways. There is for instance no need to use orbits. When you can produce this kind of thrust for indefinite periods of time, you can simply fly from point to point, And as the paper notes, you don't have to make hypersonic reentries where you scrub off speed from orbit in the atmosphere, so you can ascend and descend at just subsonic and there's no real wear on the craft. This is what makes the thing so practical--practical on the level of today's modern commercial aircraft. "Slow in atmo, fast in space" is the mantra that never quite made it into that paper.

As to the function of the MLT, there are several issues. Yes, that design could still be used, but no, this is not the best choice. What Jim discovered (and actually this was best put by Nembo Buldrini in what famously became known as "Nembo's bulk acceleration conjecture") is that in order to get useful M-E generation, you have to accelerate the entire bulk of the active mass. The MLT didn't try to do this. That concept was an attempt to sidestep all the acoustic energy management issues with the previous UFG design (what is today now called the "MET"). Building and running MET's is very difficult for many reasons and Jim thought, if we can use this other design we can have a "silver bullet" that sidesteps these issues. It was a great idea, but if you look carefully at the design, what you see is the intention is to accelerate only the mobile ion inside the dielectric's lattice. (In the BaTiO3 molecule, the mobile ion is the Ti ion.) The lattice itself is essentially stationary and what Nembo showed from Jim's equations is that the entire lattice--both sides of every electromagnetic spring chemical bond--need to be accelerated--otherwise they don't produce thrust. And additionally, the caps used in these things have a sintered BaTiO3 ceramic that has a sintering agent in it, intended to attenuate all the electromechanical actions--piezo and electrostrictive--so your electronics stuff doesn't shake itself apart. Turns out, we NEED those actions to get good thrust. So the design suffered that difficulty in that we should have used a very different ceramic. If one were to use properly sintered PZT, one would get far better results than we did. However, you'd still have another difficulty, which is that the Lorentz force that is supposed to accelerate the ceramic is not powerful enough to give good acceleration. It is many orders of magnitude less than the forces generated by shape change materials. And, the design requires an inductor, and one of the unfortunate issues with inductors is they knock off the sharp bits of any waveform you pass through them. In our case, we want those sharp bits because these are the places of greatest dE, and this is what is required for M-E generation.

So while the MLT can and did work, and in theory can work much better than Jim was ever able to make it work, it is far from an ideal design and more a curiosity and learning experience. The past (UFG) and current (MET) design is far better. That's why Jim wrestles through all the acoustic issues. I built Jim a dozen MLT's so he would have an entire test series to get data from, and it was as result of that series he realized the MLT is not the "silver bullet" answer he had hoped for. Most of those thrusters never made it onto the balance as result, and that's okay. This is how we learn. I was actually the first person to jump ship on the MLT design. The UFG work had been before my time and in 2008, when I saw all the troubles with the MLT I began studying the UFG for the first time. As result I announced on Jim's reading list I was done with the MLT and we should look again at the UFG. Jim followed suit and it was only just recently, last year I think; that the UFG was renamed the "MET". Good thing, too. "Universal Force Generator" really lacks finesse and descriptive power. "Mach Effect Thruster" is far better.
Last edited by GIThruster on Tue Dec 23, 2014 6:52 pm, edited 5 times in total.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Betruger
Posts: 2321
Joined: Tue May 06, 2008 11:54 am

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by Betruger »

AcesHigh wrote: people cause thousands of deaths every year in USA alone driving in 2D. Imagine driving in 3D.
Multiplied by gravity.
You can do anything you want with laws except make Americans obey them. | What I want to do is to look up S. . . . I call him the Schadenfreudean Man.

Skipjack
Posts: 6805
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 2:29 pm

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by Skipjack »

Betruger wrote:
AcesHigh wrote: people cause thousands of deaths every year in USA alone driving in 2D. Imagine driving in 3D.
Multiplied by gravity.
It has always been my understanding that flying cars would have to be self driving, automatically communicating with the other cars in the vicinity. There might be a central computer directing traffic in more crowded cities.

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by birchoff »

GIThruster wrote:I'm actually pretty proud of that paper. That was my design concept. I approached Paul with that idea in March of 2006, just after STAIF. The idea of course is to illustrate what is possible when you have a certain level of mastery in gravinertial technology. In our case, we chose what was then and is still now a plausible baseline thrust efficiency of 1 N/W. If you have that you can fly a "one gee solution" by accelerating at one Earth Gee for all your travels and you get the travel times in the paper. That's also where I first coined the terms "Golden Age of Human Spaceflight" and noted what is required for this is that space travel become "safe, quick, convenient and economical".

Paul did all the engineering for that paper and he chose the GM fuel cells because he already had sufficient experience modeling with them. There are however certain flaws in the concept. First is there is no relativistic correction in the paper to do energy management, and this often causes conservation calculation errors. When we wrote the paper, Jim told us "you can't do the calculations like that" and we ignored him. We figured the numbers were close enough and there was no harm because to order of unity, the calculations are correct. However, the method used does invite people to make the kinds of conservation calculations that have filled this and other forums and over the years, and what we've seen is, people have to be told half a dozen times "you can't do it that way". And in fact, the only person I have ever met who can do the conservation calcs without the tools of General Relativity--meaning "suming the instantaneous frames of rest" the way Jim does, is none other than our own 93134. He did the cals right in this thread about half a year or so ago, and that is really astonishing work.

Another problem is, that if you have a 1N/W thruster, you don't need the fuel cells because they're efficient enough you can just strap them to a flywheel and generate your own power from the gravinertial field. We didn't look at that because we're both firm believers in "one impossible thing at a time" but you need to understand that according to theory, METs are not electrical to kinetic transducers that are limited in their output to the electrical energy in. They're gravinertial transistors that control the flow of momentum into the device, and the real power being handled is in the universe's gravity field. So you can actually harvest energy from the field (not too different from an electrical alternator" or a sail) and when you do this, you don't need fuel cells.

There were a handful of other issues too, but very minor. Paul and I disagreed at the form of the Warpstar itself. (He offered me co-authorship but I declined since I haven't got the technical background he does and I thought including me might discredit the work--a decision I've oft regretted.) He chose a lifting body because he wanted to maximize safety and his choice is excellent in this regard. I however favor the form of a flying brick because I want people to realize that we can defy convention in many ways. There is for instance no need to use orbits. When you can produce this kind of thrust for indefinite periods of time, you can simply fly from point to point, And as the paper notes, you don't have to make hypersonic reentries where you scrub off speed from orbit in the atmosphere, so you can ascend and descend at just subsonic and there's no real wear on the craft. This is what makes the thing so practical--practical on the level of todays' modern commercial aircraft. "So in atmo, fast in space" is the mantra that never quite made it into that paper.

As to the function of the MLT, there are several issues. Yes, that design could still be used, but no, this is not the best choice. What Jim discovered (and actually this was best put by Nembo Buldrini in what famously became known as "Nembo's bulk acceleration conjecture") is that in order to get real M-E generation, you have to accelerate the entire bulk mass. The MLT didn't try to do this. That concept was an attempt to sidestep all the acoustic energy management issues with the previous UFG design (what is today now called the "MET"). Building and running MET's is very difficult for many reasons and Jim thought, if we can use this other design we can have a "silver bullet" that sidesteps these issues. It was a great idea, but if you look carefully at the design, what you see is the intention, is to accelerate only the mobile ion inside the dielectric's lattice. (In the BaTiO3 molecule, the mobile ion is the Ti ion.) The lattice itself is essentially stationary and what Nembo showed from Jim's equations is that the entire lattice--both sides of every electromagnetic spring chemical bond--need to be accelerated--otherwise they don't produce thrust. And additionally, the caps used in these things have a sintered BaTiO3 ceramic that has a sintering agent in it, intended to attenuate all the electromechanical actions--piezo and electrostrictive--so your electronics stuff doesn't shake itself apart. Turns out, we NEED those actions to get good thrust. So the design suffered that difficulty in that we should have used a very different ceramic. If one were to use properly sintered PZT, one would get far better results than we did. However, you'd still have another difficulty, which is that the Lorentz force that is supposed to accelerate the ceramic is not powerful enough to give good acceleration. It is many orders of magnitude less than the forces generated by shape change materials. And, the design requires an inductor, and one of the unfortunate issues with inductors is they knock off the sharp bits of any waveform you pass through them. In our case, we want those sharp bits because these are the places of greatest dE, and this is what is required for M-E generation.

So while the MLT can and did work, and in theory can work much better than Jim was ever able to make it work, it is far from an ideal design and more a curiosity and learning experience. The past (UFG) and current (MET) design is far better. That's why Jim wrestles through all the acoustic issues. I built Jim a dozen MLT's so he would have an entire test series to get data from, and it was as result of that series he realized the MLT is not the "silver bullet" answer he had hoped for. Most of those thrusters never made it onto the balance as result, and that's okay. This is how we learn.
Thanks for the well laid out response. However, your response does cause me to ask, What would change about the schematic of the "tesseract" drive arangement if your using MET's instead of MLT's? It would be interesting to get an updated design.

GIThruster
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Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

The tesseract thruster array geometry is something Paul had come up with before we ever talked about the paper. While it is fun, it is not especially useful. In fact I convinced him to diminish its use some because you simply do not need as much lateral thrust built into a spacecraft design as you need forward thrust. Also, piling arrays of thrusters atop each other so closely is not especially useful for thermal management. All these things generate heat and need to be cooled--best to spread them out around the craft unless they are designed to get really hot, which then you'd want to place them outside the craft so they can direct radiate as black bodies, at the 4th power of their temperature.

So while the tesseract geometry is interesting and in some ways emotionally satisfying, it is not intrinsic to the physics nor engineering. It's an artistic choice that inspires, as obviously we can see in you!
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

AcesHigh
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by AcesHigh »

Skipjack wrote:
Betruger wrote:
AcesHigh wrote: people cause thousands of deaths every year in USA alone driving in 2D. Imagine driving in 3D.
Multiplied by gravity.
It has always been my understanding that flying cars would have to be self driving, automatically communicating with the other cars in the vicinity. There might be a central computer directing traffic in more crowded cities.
and fines for bad maintenance of flying cars must be pretty high too. Nobody wants people driving old flying cars which may have an electrical problem and fly from the sky over a crowd.

GIThruster
Posts: 4686
Joined: Tue May 25, 2010 8:17 pm

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

FAA started a program to look at just what changes were necessary to accommodate flying cars back in the early 80's. I'm sure it will work itself out. People really want them, and who can blame them?. What they're not going to accommodate is 200MPH downwash from ducted fans and things that pose serious safety hazards to everyone around. To have flying cars you need something like METs.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

Betruger
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Joined: Tue May 06, 2008 11:54 am

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by Betruger »

Skipjack wrote:
Betruger wrote:
AcesHigh wrote: people cause thousands of deaths every year in USA alone driving in 2D. Imagine driving in 3D.
Multiplied by gravity.
It has always been my understanding that flying cars would have to be self driving, automatically communicating with the other cars in the vicinity. There might be a central computer directing traffic in more crowded cities.
I understand the intended idea, but it would probably have to have many levels of redundancy rather than one central computer. ... This is probably something that local/state govt could so badly snafu, that it might be worth legislating. There's probably not much of the efficiency bonus, compared to our current ground level vehicles, to sacrifice in exchange for enough foolproof AKA risk averse design margin. Instead of uranium in each centrifuge vessel, it would be one or more people's life support (the vehicle's capacity to safely take someone to and back from potentially harmful speed) to sabotage by mere 0's and 1's, as it was in Iran.
You can do anything you want with laws except make Americans obey them. | What I want to do is to look up S. . . . I call him the Schadenfreudean Man.

Diogenes
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Joined: Mon Jun 15, 2009 3:33 pm

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by Diogenes »

GIThruster wrote:
So while the MLT can and did work, and in theory can work much better than Jim was ever able to make it work, it is far from an ideal design and more a curiosity and learning experience. The past (UFG) and current (MET) design is far better. That's why Jim wrestles through all the acoustic issues. I built Jim a dozen MLT's so he would have an entire test series to get data from, and it was as result of that series he realized the MLT is not the "silver bullet" answer he had hoped for. Most of those thrusters never made it onto the balance as result, and that's okay. This is how we learn. I was actually the first person to jump ship on the MLT design. The UFG work had been before my time and in 2008, when I saw all the troubles with the MLT I began studying the UFG for the first time. As result I announced on Jim's reading list I was done with the MLT and we should look again at the UFG. Jim followed suit and it was only just recently, last year I think; that the UFG was renamed the "MET". Good thing, too. "Universal Force Generator" really lacks finesse and descriptive power. "Mach Effect Thruster" is far better.


I read up a bit on that Keith H.Wanser paper and it has rekindled an interest in this topic lately.


If you accept that you can get a transient mass fluctuation from charging and discharging a capacitor, the rest of it automatically follows as a self evident method of exploiting this effect. Now while I don't follow how you can assert that charging and discharging a capacitor will result in a mass fluctuation (other than from the tiny electron mass being shuttled back and forth) it is not necessary that I understand such a thing in order to consider methods for making it useful.


It occurs to me that this business of using a piezo transducer to vibrate a capacitor back and forth at 1 mhz+ is very problematic because of all the acoustical coupling problems which have been pointed out. I can imagine that real matter is a bit mushy when you try to shake it that hard and fast.

It also occurs to me that the effect is similar to the problems they were having when they tried to develop high frequency power transistors. To make them heavy enough to control the current you want to put through them they have to be so large as to have unwieldy capacitance problems.




The manner in which they solved this problem would seem to me to be applicable to this similar problem of getting as large of capacitance as possible to be driven as hard as possible while being shaken as hard and as fast as possible. They made arrays of transistors.


Image

Image


Instead of making 1 big unit with all of the compressive mushiness and inter-electrode capacitance and binding issues, it would seem that it might be feasible to make arrays of small ones.


Each one may produce a miniscule effect, but acting in concert and cumulatively, they could collectively produce an effect significant enough to give a good signal.


Etch them on substrates. It's not like we haven't been doing stuff like this for a long time. :)

Image

Image
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by birchoff »

Diogenes wrote:
GIThruster wrote:
So while the MLT can and did work, and in theory can work much better than Jim was ever able to make it work, it is far from an ideal design and more a curiosity and learning experience. The past (UFG) and current (MET) design is far better. That's why Jim wrestles through all the acoustic issues. I built Jim a dozen MLT's so he would have an entire test series to get data from, and it was as result of that series he realized the MLT is not the "silver bullet" answer he had hoped for. Most of those thrusters never made it onto the balance as result, and that's okay. This is how we learn. I was actually the first person to jump ship on the MLT design. The UFG work had been before my time and in 2008, when I saw all the troubles with the MLT I began studying the UFG for the first time. As result I announced on Jim's reading list I was done with the MLT and we should look again at the UFG. Jim followed suit and it was only just recently, last year I think; that the UFG was renamed the "MET". Good thing, too. "Universal Force Generator" really lacks finesse and descriptive power. "Mach Effect Thruster" is far better.


I read up a bit on that Keith H.Wanser paper and it has rekindled an interest in this topic lately.


If you accept that you can get a transient mass fluctuation from charging and discharging a capacitor, the rest of it automatically follows as a self evident method of exploiting this effect. Now while I don't follow how you can assert that charging and discharging a capacitor will result in a mass fluctuation (other than from the tiny electron mass being shuttled back and forth) it is not necessary that I understand such a thing in order to consider methods for making it useful.


It occurs to me that this business of using a piezo transducer to vibrate a capacitor back and forth at 1 mhz+ is very problematic because of all the acoustical coupling problems which have been pointed out. I can imagine that real matter is a bit mushy when you try to shake it that hard and fast.

It also occurs to me that the effect is similar to the problems they were having when they tried to develop high frequency power transistors. To make them heavy enough to control the current you want to put through them they have to be so large as to have unwieldy capacitance problems.




The manner in which they solved this problem would seem to me to be applicable to this similar problem of getting as large of capacitance as possible to be driven as hard as possible while being shaken as hard and as fast as possible. They made arrays of transistors.


...


Instead of making 1 big unit with all of the compressive mushiness and inter-electrode capacitance and binding issues, it would seem that it might be feasible to make arrays of small ones.


Each one may produce a miniscule effect, but acting in concert and cumulatively, they could collectively produce an effect significant enough to give a good signal.


Etch them on substrates. It's not like we haven't been doing stuff like this for a long time. :)

...
GiThruster please correct me if I am wrong here. But it is my understanding that simply charging and discharging a capacitor is not enough to create a Mach Effect. It is simply one step in the many that need to be executed at the exact right time to result in the "Impulse" Mach Effect.

Additionally while I think your idea in general is what would be applied in the end. The problem facing the Mach Effect experimenters today is the magnitude of the thrust is not big enough to offset the weight of just the thruster (much less the thruster and its power source). In the end I think the question becomes what is the sweet spot of thruster Size/Mass where you get enough thrust to lift the thruster plus some additional amount. When they start getting the excess thrust is when they can being lashing these things into arrays(assuming the mass needed the array does not consume the excess).

GiThruster:
From everything I have read and seen, it seems like there really should be a high focus on increasing magnitude and a lesser focus on increasing durability. Assuming that the durability that exists today is more than a few seconds with a limited amount of variation when using the exact same construction and the exact same parts. If this assumption is true then the minute you have a thruster design with enough thrust to cancel out its entire weight you should have more than enough of a compelling argument to get some seed capital to continue the refinement process. As you improve to where the thruster can not only hold itself in place above any surface but rise for as long as its power tether allows even more investor capital could be sought. Assuming you have enough excess to lift multiple banks of thrusters, where only one bank is active at a time. A simple timer based circuit could switch between banks as the expected run time of each bank gets close to their expected die-off time. Thereby allowing for a long running demo.

GIThruster
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Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by GIThruster »

I don't know if what Dio was suggesting was that the only requirement to generate a Mach Effect is to charge a capacitor, but the two requirements are this large change in internal energy (shape change materials like perovskite crystals being charged as capacitors) and that the material needs to be accelerated relative to the distant stars. Dio is certainly correct that smaller is better and this is in Jim's book. Not only do you reduce spurious resonances that kill your mechanical Q by reducing the thruster cross section, but you mitigate heating issues and solve a handful of other practical concerns. We don't know if the gravinertial flux propagating from these things at c can be constructively and destructively interfered with yet, so we know what we don't know about arrays. It may turn out there are very specific concerns for large arrays that limit how they're designed, as well as create new possibilities depending upon how they're designed. In fact, the bootstrapping method of running two wormhole generators out of phase that are linked at a distance that causes them to constructively interfere, that is explained in Jim's book; is one possible way of using arrays, but as I have said to those holding this position, I don't then see a salient distinction between small elements in an array, and the very molecules of any particular element. This quickly turns into a nightmare of calculation. We'll have to wait and see what we see.

Oh and BTW Dio, all 1/4 wave acoustic resonators have an inverse proportional relationship between their thickness and their frequency, so at 1 Mhz, you have to have very small elements, at least in their thickness. At 500 Mhz, these thicknesses are measured in microns and microwave resonators are near the limits of how thin we can make things.
The problem facing the Mach Effect experimenters today is the magnitude of the thrust is not big enough to offset the weight of just the thruster (much less the thruster and its power source).
Surprisingly, not. What you're describing is what I like to distinguish as between "low thrust efficiency" and "high thrust efficiency" applications. Low thrust efficiencies where the thruster is much more massive than the force it generates, are still quite useful. Hall thrusters on geosynchronous orbit telecommunications satellites weigh much more on Earth than the thrust they put out, but in microgravity they can still achieve the results needed. So really when you look at thrust to mass, you are looking at general classes of applications. (Same with thrust to power so I lump these two together into the high and low classes.) If you want a flying car, or a spaceship that can fly direct from the surface of the planet, then yes, the thruster has to produce several times more thrust than the weight of the thruster and power supply. If all you want to do is create a space tug to tote Dragon 2 to the Moon or Mars, then you can make due with far less thrust. In fact someone did some decent calcs here in the forum a few weeks ago and found that it doesn't take much thrust at all to reposition all of ISS from its highly inclined orbit to equatorial, given 6 months to do this. Even I was surprised how easy things can be when you can't run out of propellant. And really the calcs that describe what we would be able to do with a nanosat with just a few mN's continuous thrust are astonishing. If you can loiter in the VAB without being cut to shreds, you can send 15,000 nanosats to LEO with a single Falcon 9 and fly them to the asteroid belt. THAT is the kind of thing that can make space exploration cheap, even without high thrust efficiencies.

But of course we want the high thrust efficiencies, flying cars and Millenium Falcon's too. Just they need to wait a bit.

If we can produce 20 mN thrust continuously, that can be reversed on command, with very little power and from a thruster and power supply that can last hours on a smallish battery, we will have hundreds of millions in development funds available. It is EASY to sell such things, when people cannot doubt what they're looking at, and have explained to them what is suddenly possible. For instance, DARPA has been looking for years for some method of repositioning sats on command and constantly maneuvering on orbit with sat killer craft, etc. This is probably what X-37 is all about but it still runs out of propellant and needs to come home. Even very low efficiency METS can make X-37 obsolete, because they cannot run out of propellant.
"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

birchoff
Posts: 200
Joined: Sun Jul 27, 2014 7:11 pm

Re: Mach Effect progress

Post by birchoff »

GIThruster wrote: ...

Another problem is, that if you have a 1N/W thruster, you don't need the fuel cells because they're efficient enough you can just strap them to a flywheel and generate your own power from the gravinertial field. We didn't look at that because we're both firm believers in "one impossible thing at a time" but you need to understand that according to theory, METs are not electrical to kinetic transducers that are limited in their output to the electrical energy in. They're gravinertial transistors that control the flow of momentum into the device, and the real power being handled is in the universe's gravity field. So you can actually harvest energy from the field (not too different from an electrical alternator" or a sail) and when you do this, you don't need fuel cells.
...
So I am intrigued that you have touched on this possibility. As you are pretty much the first person that I would consider close to this effort that has mentioned it. Is it accepted by Woodward and his collaborators that this is a natural outcome?

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