Talk-Polywell.org

I have not been paying sufficient attention lately. I didn't know you were working on the Q-Thruster idea. Using a hall effect thruster on transient virtual particles is a pretty clever idea. (In theory anyway.) Can't wait to hear how it tests out.


Congratulations and good luck.

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Adam Smith and Edmund Burke- Synergistic philosophies.

I thought all the old SP-100/Prometheus work was sent over to US Navy when JIMO was shut down. Did they send it back?

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

Found it. Made a liar of myself.

Page 77, posts 1143 and 1149.

http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index. ... 13020.1140

1143:

Cuddihy:

My ideas on FTL communications have evolved since I authored that Stair-Steps to the Stars presentation some eight years ago. Now think about driving a toroidal ring of dielectric that is bulk accelerated and driven with enough ac power (dP/dt) to evoke the M-E wormhole term that in turn creates a nano-to-micro OD wormhole at the center of this toroid with its destination in space and time at X & Y. Next aim a modulated laser beam into your end of the wormhole while having your partner put a laser receiver at the other end of the wormhole. You will note that just a few nano seconds is used for the laser beam to traverse the wormhole no matter where or when in the universe the wormhole exit and reciever may be placed.

I vote for Mike Lorrey's Fermi Pardox solution D. ("D) The use of active high powered radio wave transmissions by intelligent species is a short-lived phase of technological development lasting 100-200 years on average") ... To be replaced by near instantaneous M-E wormhole comm links...

1149:

Martin:

Steering the exit port of a traversable wormhole has never been done before, so what I'm going to say next is just speculations on my part, but here goes. If one were to build the M-E toroidal...whoops, spherical dielectric structure in geodetic like segments that are driven separately so as to be able to control the magnitude of the wormhole term being expressed in each segment, one could then hope that the end results of such a control system could direct the exit port of the wormhole to location X, Y, Z within a spherical zone around the wormhole generator. This would be much like a phased array radar being able to direct an E&M beam over a surface area, but with the distance of the destination exit port being determined by the average strength of the evoked exotic G/I matter in each of the segments.

As to how one is to be able to determine the time t coordinate of the exit port, I would have to guess that it would have to involve some form of AM and/or FM modulation of the G/I exotic matter amplitude and/or frequency being expressed in each segment, but one would have to go back to Einstein's GRT gravity field tensor equation to get a better handle on what needs to be done before diving off building anything along these lines...

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Vae Victis

Ron:

It's the same old problem nuclear power in space has been suffering since the ending of the Apollo Moon program and the proposed follow-on Mars mission that was cancelled by Nixon in 1972. Without a FUNDED exploration program that needs nuclear power and propuslion to work, nobody is willing to pay for its development in the meantime. So when Sean O'keefe's Prometheus Jupiter icey moon nuclear electric propulsion and power program was cancelled by Mike Griffin, NASA's involvement with the Navy's nuclear program ended along with it as well as most of its other nuclear power ambitions. (That was also when the MSFC advanced propulsion lab was shut down in 2006 by Griffin.) As far as I know, all that is left of NASA's nuclear propulsion and power program is low level design studies that are occuring at the Marshall, Glenn and JSC field centers along with NASA headquarters begging the DoE to restart the PU-238 production line for JPL's deep space RTG powered science missions, and getting nowhere in the process. I'm just participating as a very part-time advisor for the JSC NTR/NEP study group.

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

Paul, at least there is a little bit of funding for all that. I know about a small NTR project that has been going on for a while ( I posted about it a year ago, or so) and NASA is funding fusion research (on a small level), like John Sloughs fusion rocket engine.

Skipjack:

Don't get me wrong, NIAC grants and small 2-to-20 person nuclear study teams are needed to keep our eyes on the nuclear power prize in an educated way, but they are no substitute for a long term space nuclear power program tailored to be able to support both scientific and human spaceflight requirements that is spending real $$$ on real hardware. And in my view what’s needed now is a closed-cycle nuclear electric propulsion (NEP) program that has the goal of developing a space qualified 1.0-to-10 MWe output electric power plant that has an operational specific mass of 5-to-10 kg/kWe which includes its reactor, radiation shielding, internal structures, thermal radiators and controls with all of these subsystems being constructed as a turn-key power module ready for the next customer's mission. The open-cycle NTR isn't much good past Mars due to its low Isp and it's a political hot potato in regards to ground testing on Earth, so in my view its just not worth the development pain verses its performance gain over chemical rockets in getting payloads to LEO and GEO. Now if we could build single stage to orbit vehcile using NTR, my analysis would be different, but that just isn't going to happen in the USA due to the current nuclear bomb perceptions of the populace and their politians.

IMO power plants are always the long pole in the tent in both in development cost and schedule impact for any project and they have to be developed first to take the largest risk out of any program of note. So my recommendations are along the lines of picking up where the USA’s SP-100 NEP ~2.0 MWt program left off and start developing it along the above specifications with its first use to be able to drive an array of the currently available 20 kWe, 1.07N, ~2,800 second Isp Hall Effect thrusters that could be replaced with any competing electric thrusters that might come along, like Ad Astra’s VASMIR or longer term, Woodward's M-E thrusters or White's Q-thrusters and Warp drive.

BTW, 1.0 MWe is only 1,336 horsepower (hp) so talking about a few megawatts of power is just talking about building a dragster with several thousand hp and no big deal, except in space…

Best,

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

I have to admit I was interested when I saw that Dr. Woodward had put together a new paper, but when I tuned in here all I saw was arguments about how important UFOs were so I shoved it on the back burner for a couple weeks--wow, what an important paper!

I think I was mostly convinced preponderance of the evidence on thermal effects had eked out a victory for Dr W last year, but still waiting for "the other shoe" in terms of an explanation for the original inability for DrW/TMahood to easily explain the "naive" equation thrust calculation vs. observed thrust mismatch.

They've got it! A way to characterize materials as to suitability for producing the effect (at least for devices using piezoelectric/electrostrictive mechanical effects) and a way independant of the thrust effect investigations to predict the expected behavior fully in a manner even your dumbest high school physicals teacher -- and hence perhaps the a few of the very "brightest" of science journalists -- can understand.

I expect big strides to come quickly from here in terms of both magnitudes observed and in terms of observability and predicability of Mach Effects.

I might have to design a shirt with the Kp equation on it...

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Tom.Cuddihy

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Faith is the foundation of reason.

Paul,

Has anyone looked at using micro/nano-array versions of mechanical frames, patterned perhaps after the macro variety below, to amplify piezo actuator displacement amplitude? They would need to be much smaller to get the desired high frequency.

How does thrust scale with displacement amplitude, vs. with frequency?

http://www.dynamic-structures.com



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tuf_P4EM ... r_embedded

I have looked at what most of the industry calls "displacement amplification" pretty carefully over the years. M-E generation is linear with acceleration and hence also with displacement, and force rectification is likewise linear with acceleration, so total force is quadratic with displacement. However depending upon the design, force generation is either quadratic or cubic with frequency so there's no gain to be had here, and since to get displacement amplification you need additional structures such as a cantilever, you end up with significant losses. The only real reason I can see to use displacement amplification is that in some iterations such as use of a backplate with an electrostrictor, the mechanical phase is reversed which in some instances may be desirable.

BTW, this particular iteration you linked to was I think developed by MASA last year. I'm surprised to see no note of this at the link to the flex frame.

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

Ron:

Please go back to Woodward's AIAA JPC 2012 M-E paper and note that from Woodward's current derivation based on the work performed on the accelerated ions that the magnitude of the M-E mass fluctuation should scale with the product of the time rate of change of the applied power (dP/dt) to the caps and the bulk acceleration SQUARED (a^2) concurrently applied to the caps. It's not a linear effect as you stated above. As to how that a^2 reality should affect the use of displacement amplifiers, I think it needs to be looked at, but I'm also a firm believer in the KISS motto...

Best,

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

Dr. Wooward's book is available on Amazon for pre-order here.

Found an interesting new article authored by Harold White:

http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/daydr ... mechanics/

Apparently he's been able to reduce the amount of exotic matter needed for a warp bubble down by orders of magnitude. And that's for a 10m bubble with an effective velocity of 10c!

Looks like a restatement of claims made in his paper "Warp Field Mechanics 101" - referenced by Paul March upthread.

http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtop ... start=1136

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi. ... 016932.pdf

A "boost" of 100, combined with a 'starter velocity' of 0.1c, yields an apparent velocity of 10c.

100 * 0.1 = 10

I was whining to Paul about wanting a higher boost.

Tho it looks like Dr. White has been able to reduce the required quantity of negative matter to 1 order of magnitude less than the minimum cited in the previous paper. Was 5000kg, now <500kg.

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Vae Victis

If Dr. White's 4D+ theoretical conjecture on this warp field topic is correct, and I say if for we have no data yet to back it up until our back-ordered replacemnt laser shows up in the lab, we should be able to make the required inertially exotic mass requirement as small at desired dependent on the selected starting velocity, desired boost factor and how fast we can vary the warp-field's potential energy field about its mean value, which is dependent on how much power our RF generators can handle. However the higher the effective boost velocity becomes, the more ac potential energy one has to store in the warp-field and we all know what can happen to pressure vessels when they are pushed too far...

Best,

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Paul March
Friendswood, TX

Assuming Dr. White's approach works, I'd still want a minimum boost factor of 1000 at a starter velocity of 0.1c - minimum effective velocity 100c. That implies a minimum boost factor of 10,000 at a starter velocity of 0.01c - achievable in 3.5 days assuming a 1g QVT or MLT. Limitations of the boost would seem to put a premium on high initial velocities.

Interesting limitation on FTL - detonation of the field.

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Vae Victis