Talk-Polywell.org

Honestly, GIThruster, your posts are the more disruptive. If you don't like corresponding with him, might I suggest you just pretend his posts don't exist while the rest of read both and respond as needed? Your constant insults are getting on my nerves. While he may post some things that could be construed as insulting, you leave no doubt as to your intended purpose - to be an ass about him posting.

And yes, I know I probably should be feeding the troll ...

Paul,

Is Harold White planning to publishing a paper with his most recent calculations on exotic matter requirements for warp drive?

Disregarding antimatter, what would the notional boost be with power cores of 5MW, 300MW, and 5GW, assuming RF tech has advanced sufficiently? I.e. a range of plausible fission and/or fusion sources.

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Vae Victis

GIThruster,

I agree with krenshala. Please ignore chrismb, since he distresses you so. Your posts when you are ignoring him are the best. chrismb does not distress me, nor do you when you are not distressed by him.

Thanks,
Tom

Thanks for the response Dr. March & djolds. I have one more question; from the link:

If energy is to be conserved, then ½ mv2 would need to yield a higher effective velocity to compensate for apparent reduction in mass. Assuming a point design solution of 5000kg BOL mass coupled to a 100kW Hall thruster system (lower curve), the expected transit time is ~70 days for a specific mass of 50 kg/kW without the aid of a warp drive. If a very modest
warp drive system is installed that can generate a negative energy density that integrates to ~2000kg of negative mass when active, the specific mass is dropped from 50 to 30 which yields a reduced transit time of ~40 days. As the amount of negative mass approaches 5000 kg, the specific mass of the spacecraft approaches zero, and the transit time becomes exceedingly small, approaching zero in the limit. In this simplified context, the idea of a warp drive may have some fruitful domestic applications “subliminally,” allowing it to be matured before it is engaged as a true interstellar drive system.

My question, is if the "inertial mass" of the ship is reduced by the negative matter of the warp field, would not the mass of the expelled reaction mass of the Hall Thruster, and therefore the transferred momentum to the ship be reduced? Furthermore the Fusion/Fission/Antimatter reactor converts matter to energy for the conventional propulsion, is driven by the process of E=MC2. Okay if the apparent mass (M) converted to energy is reduced would not the energy produced be reduced?

My understanding is that per Einstein's General Relativity Theory (GRT) space and time when considered as a single entity (spacetime) can be distorted or bent from its normally flat or undistorted form by the presence of mass & energy in any form. As in any material, spacetime has a certain stress/strain resistance to this mass/energy induced bending and that resistance is considered to be its spring constant, or if you prefer, how much mass/energy pressure does it require to bend spacetime by what degree? Per GRT, spacetime's spring constant is equal to the speed of light to the fourth power divided by the product of 8*Pi*the Newtonian gravitational constant big G with all variables being in MKS units (meter/kg/second). This spacetime spring constant is a very large number that implies it takes very large concentrations of mass/energy to distort spacetime even a little bit from its normally flat self, unless that is we can find a way to dynamically reduce this spring constant in the volume of interest. Dr. White thinks that through the application of alternating electromagnetic (E&M) fields of sufficiently high amplitudes and frequency over a preferred toroidal geometry that this GRT spacetime spring constant can be reduced by many orders of magnitude, which should reduce the total negative mass/energy or pressure requirements needed to create a warp drive bubble by the same amount.

Best,

_________________
Paul March
Friendswood, TX

GeeGee:

Sonny is planning on publishing an update to this conjecture, but I have no clue as to when it will be published. Dr. White's work plate is rather full at the moment...

Best,

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

I hope it gets some attention after it's published. There hasn't been any significant modifications to the Alcubierre metric since the 90s, to my knowledge.

On a different note, I found a new article on the Mach Effect on the sci-fi blog io9

http://io9.com/5972727/the-woodward-eff ... ag=physics

Not bad except that the author talks about pushing and pulling particles rather than bulk mass, which could mislead one to believe this proposes altering the mass of individual particles which it does not.

The responses where funny. This is a fiction forum? Fact and fiction blended, like with the old Omni mag?

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"Courage is not just a virtue, but the form of every virtue at the testing point." C. S. Lewis

You really don't appreciate how hard this problem really is. Assuming we use a 100,000 kg vehicle with an initial velocity of 0.1 times the speed of light (c), with green light (6.0x10^14Hz) lasers for our warp field oscillators, a toroidal warp field cavity that has a superconductive Q-Factor of 10^8, with an input power of 1,000 GWe or 1.0 terawatt (T), we could expect a net light speed boost factor of only 4.02c. With 10 TWe input power we get a net c boost factor of 12.72c. Of course I could have used even higher frequencies for the warp field oscillators of say 1,000x the green light frequency, which would reduce these power levels by a factor of ~30 for the same boost factor, but we really don't know how to build X-Ray lasers yet...

Best,

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

OUCH. Yes, that is an... ahem... noteworthy required energy budget. Getting up toward the Petawatt range for sfnal scale performance.

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Vae Victis

I thought White's warp drive system was to use electric fields generated by ceramic capacitors. Where does the laser fit in? Or is the laser just for detecting the warp field?

Djolds1:

I did some more fiddling with our warp-field analysis tool just now and I found that if I decreased the resonant cavity dielectric density down to a lunar like vacuum level of 5x10^-12 Torr and increased the warp-core torodial resonant cavity size up to 20m OD by 15m ID by 20m long while still using green light laser frequency for the RF source and using "just" 1.0 GWe of input power, that one might be able to obtain a c boost factor of 88,000 times the speed of light. If one pulled back to using an infrared 1x10^12 Hz (THz) RF source using the same 1.0 GWe of input power, then the c boost factor lowers down to ~3,600c. As you can tell there from these comments, there are many design parameters that go into this simulation, so your obtainable c boost factor will depend on just how clever we are in the actual design and buildup of the starship.

Best,

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

Ceramic capacitors were used in an earlier implementation that reduced the RF operating frequency requirement for the initial Q-Thruster prototype studies. If Dr. White's QVF conjecture is correct, then operational Q-thrusters and Warp drive units will use a hard vacuum for their cap-ring dielectric or in the warp cores while being run at the highest operating frequency and E-field levels obtainable without generating electrical breakdowns in same.

Best,

_________________
Paul March
Friendswood, TX

Dr. Harold Sonny White is at the www.thespaceshow.com at the Moment.

You can listen to the Show at:
http://www.live365.com/stations/dlivingston?site=pro



N.B. You can call and ask questions!