Colonel_Korg wrote:
GIThruster wrote:
And I will also beg to differ that we don't know how to make a reactionless drive. We do.
I followed NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Labs work and I didn't see where the work on the Mach Effect thruster had been peer reviewed and that it would actually work. The entire scheme sounds like some of the perpetual motion machines the US patent office gets plans for 10 times a day. Does a charged capacitor have more mass than an uncharged one?
That's what the M-E thruster comes down to. If it really works and we have power available then we have our "inertia less" drive that the sci-fi writers have dreamed about for generations.
Experiments
In 2004, John G. Cramer, Curran W. Fey, and Damon V. Cassisi of the University of Washington reported that they had conducted tests of Woodward's hypothesis, but that results were inconclusive.
On January 20, 2006 Paul March and Andrew Palfreyman reported experimental results at an American Institute of Physics conference. Test results exceeded Woodward's predictions by one to two orders of magnitude.
In 2006, researchers at the Austrian Research Centers reported results of a study of the effect using a very sensitive thrust balance. Results did not seem to be in full agreement with the findings claimed by Woodward and collaborators. However, given the importance of the subject the researchers recommended further tests
So far, only Paul March has seen positive results. I would really want the M-E Trusters to work and produce large amounts of thrust so we can get out of this gravity well. But until we see the conclusive results from
multiple reliable sources, then the M-E is still in the realm of sci-fi.
This is all only partially correct--no fault there, we're almost playing the telephone game here. . .
The work at Marshall by Tony Robertson had nothing to do with BPP and was several years after BPP closed shop. Tony didn't get to run the experiments he'd planned and nothing was ever written or reviewed. That's not because Tony wasn't focused but rather because he was reassigned as result of the decision for NASA to end all research into advanced propulsion, as result of defunding to pay for VSE.
Most of the work done in M-E research has been done by Dr. Woodward himself. He's the only person who has been working on this anything approaching full-time. All of his experiments have had success though some have been disappointing. The work by March has the largest claims, but that work did not provide adequate scientific controls (such as vacuum) to make hard claims. The claim concerning that thrust in excess of what Woodward's theory predicts was observed is inaccurate. Andrew Palfreyman extrapolated Woodward's theory into a predictive model and the thrusts observed by March were in excess of that prediction. However, Woodward has been very plain that his theory cannot be used to make predictions in Wormhole territory, and so the "prediction"is not Woodward's, it was March and Palfreyman's. Since that time, March has identified reasons that the predictive model was in error, so even that prediction is useless and the claim is out of place. Thrust was noted, but there is no correlation as to it's value as compared to prediction because a predictive model for this does not yet exist.
Most importantly above is your assertion that this has not been peer reviewed. This is correct. The experiments have not been peer reviewed except in forums like STAIF and SPESIF which are not what you'd call "peer review" forums. The early theoretical work has all been peer reviewed in places like
Foundations of Physics and has emerged unscathed, but certainly there needs to be more stringent peer review of experiment, as well as replication of tests, just as soon as experiment produces results inspiring enough for this. So far, the test results of the MLT, the Rotator and the UFG have all been impressive that they show thrust (or in the case of the rotator--simple M-E) in vacuum under very controlled conditions. What we need to see is lots more thrust, and perhaps some scaling with things like voltage and frequency, and I'm sure people with purses will step forward and fund replications. Rarely does anyone do these things for free, at least not with the controls we need to see, like vacuum.
Colonel_Korg wrote:The entire scheme sounds like some of the perpetual motion machines the US patent office gets plans for 10 times a day. Does a charged capacitor have more mass than an uncharged one?
There's much more involved than charging and discharging the caps. Each time the cap is simultaneously charged then discharged, while accelerated, it generates an M-E or Mach Effect whereby the rest mass fluctuates both positively and negatively around the unfluctuated mass, at the second harmonic. So for example, if you have 2 grams of active mass, and generate an M-E of 50% fluctuation at say 50 Khz, then the mass will go to 3 grams, then down to 1 gram and back to 2 grams, at 100Khz. To produce thrust rather than just M-E, you need to rectify this fluctuation by pushing the active mass when it's heavy, and pulling it in the opposite direction when it's light--so the whole endeavor is more complex than you'd guess.
"Wormhole territory" occurs when the fluctuation is more than 100% because then you are temporarily generating exotic matter, that has negative mass and its negative inertia. So a 200% fluctuation of 2 grams would be positive fluctuation to 6 grams, and negative to -2 grams. It's precisely because we don't have experience handling exotic matter that Dr. Woodward refuses to extrapolate his theory as to what we ought to see when handling it, but his model DOES make predictions of what we ought to see outside wormhole territory or with fluctuations of less than 100%--which is where he does his experimentation and why he has smaller thrust figures than Paul March, who
has worked in wormhole territory.