Talk-Polywell.org

Wiseass...

I didn't notice that, but I still figure he meant 99%...



Relativistic effects don't become significant until maybe 0.25c. It's like aerodynamics, where flows below about M=0.25 can be considered incompressible. There would be measurable time dilation, but the trip wouldn't be dramatically shorter for the crew.



If you're going to have something that takes off and lands a lot, there are definite advantages in something with more stability. A vehicle like that couldn't land just anywhere, because it would tip over if the ground weren't sufficiently level. This is one reason I've started to warm to the saucer shape, although the cigar shape with decks parallel to the long axis could work too.



The Saturn V got that high IIRC, but I think the Shuttle is limited to 3 gees. They throttle down deliberately over a certain portion of the launch to keep max-Q down, and to limit acceleration.

Yeah, that's what I get from the article too. Seems completely nonsensical to me, but supposedly the guy is an actual physicist/mathematician, and I consider Space Daily to be a legitimate news source, so I assume the math at least works.

If the math works theoretically, then the antigravity repulsion effect might work in reality. That's the main point.


David

Dr. Cramer's retrocausal experiment should be completed by the end of this year. And yes if verified it would buttress Dr. Woodward's M-E arguments and provide a path to finally merging GRT with QM.
See: http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~lisa ... Symposium/

Economically viable starships require faster than light (FTL) drives, period. The only way that GRT permits such is by creating absurdly benign traversable wormholes or Alcubierre like space warp bubbles around the ship that can guide the ship through normal 4D spacetime at arbitrarily high speeds that can be much greater than c, since there is no limit on how fast a warp bubble can travel and the fact that the ship is in free fall in the middle of the space warp. Both approaches require the use of exotic/negative inertial energy densities to create the wormhole or space warp in question. That exotic energy density distribution can be created by the M-E drive’s excited dielectric when the M-E impulse term transiently drives the dielectric’s mass density to zero, or so the M-E theory goes. In case of the warp bubble an initial velocity vector would be created in the ship toward the interstellar destination using the M-E impulse drive to say 0.01c and then you would engage the warp drive which will then boost that initial velocity by some boost factor that can be arbitrarily high, provided of course it is within the physical power limits of the M-E warp field generators.

Last item. The M-E technology road map I provided at the end of several of my PowerPoint presentations is NOT Dr. Woodward estimates, they are mine. And they assumed an aggressive R&D program in pursuit of them. By aggressive I’m talking billions of dollars per year total in pursuit of these goals.

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

Felber's antigravity paper is straight GRT. If you don't like it, argue with Einstein.

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

I'm not arguing with the theory. I'm wondering how it translates into a practical propulsion system.

But of course...



Care to check my math?



You certainly wouldn't be able to do course corrections easily, but I suspect that if you had the tech to fire such a device you'd have the tech to see that it hits the target. After all, even with our puny tech we have the ability to lob probes at other planets and hit our mark with minimal in-flight course correction.

Going back to the original posters point... A 1000t projectile travelling at 0.99%c would probably take out a city rather thoroughly, but probably won't be much worse than that in damage. The Earth routinely experiences energetic events equivalent in released energy, as it's about as much energy as an 8.0 earthquake.

Even the 99%c version isn't the worst the Earth has seen, but it would be pretty bad as far as we were concerned. The last impact of roughly comparable size was 65 My ago in Mexico, estimated at about twice the kinetic energy of our supposed impactor.

Of course, there is a difference between being hit by a slow-and-heavy projectile and a fast-and-small projectile of the same energy. I'd expect the 1000t fast-impactor to dump it's dinosaur-level-extinction energy much deeper in the Earth, and I have no idea what that would do.

According to the Wikipedia page on TNT equivalence, there was a megathrust earthquake in 1960 that released/converted almost half that (surface damage potential was of course much less). Naturally this is followed immediately by [citation needed]...

my mistake... I meant 0.99c or 99,99%c

he envisions we acelerating ships to near lightspeed before the end of the century??

ok, first we must find a NEARBY (less than 1 ly away) STAR travelling at least half the speed of light. EASY TASK!

Seriously... I cant understand it... the article says you need a star travelling at least 50% of lightspeed... to acelerate a ship!

I'm not quite sure what you all are saying. But I calculate

4.4e+22 joule = 10 516 252.39 megaton [explosive]

Here I am using mass equal 1000 metric tons, speed of light equals 299792458 meters per second and ship velocity equals 0.99 c
Relativistic mass is not considered though by GRT it must be considered at this velocity and energy will be much higher than the number I calculated.

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Aero

The inverse of the Lorentz equation would multiply this by 7.089 for an object moving at 99% c.

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Vae Victis

Yes exactly - so we get spacecraft energy that equals 7.454773666E+07 megatons.

And I'm sorry, relativistic mass is a feature of Special Relativity, I misspoke above. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_in_special_relativity

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Aero

The Philip Bono design would be for deep space craft that would lift off from a prepared space port. Say, a space craft that travels from Earth to Mars or the outer solar system. A winged craft would be better for regular air transport on Earth.

This is good to know. I will await the results.



FTL would be nice. There is Berkhard Heim's theory that suggests the possibility of FTL. I didn't know about the wormholes.

Speaking of wormholes, would these have to be made in space and then space craft would fly through them, like the ones in StarTrek? Or could these be made in warehouse somewhere and people just walk through them, or in the case of Hamilton's "Commonwealth", run the railroads through them?

I read somewhere that the negative energy conditions necessary for the Alcubierre warp drive are much higher than those needed to make wormholes and that, therefor, it would be easier to make a wormhole than a warp drive space craft. At least according to the wormhole calculations by Haisch, Puthoff, and company. Is this true for the Woodward calculations as well?

In any case, wormholes seem far-fetched to me. It seems to me that the Mach thruster technology needs to be developed first.

I have a question about the dielectric material necessary for the Mach experiments. Is this the major engineering hurtle right now? Is the material cited in the powerpoints, BaTiO3, sufficient for realizing a demonstration device? Or do you need a better material? What about grain size?