A question about hyper speed in space

originally posted by: oldcarpy
I am fond of the interstellar drive in the EE "Doc Smith" books - the first space operas. Inertia-less drive. Way ahead of his time.

Basically if you can cancel out inertia you can accelerate and manoeuvre without having to worry about mass or G-forces. Not FTL, though.

I think his Triplanetary series was written in the 1930's. Good stuff.

and hwo do you cancel out inertia? nullify the weight something has. remove the effect of gravitys pull on your atoms and you are golden.

originally posted by: oldcarpy
I am fond of the interstellar drive in the EE "Doc Smith" books - the first space operas. Inertia-less drive. Way ahead of his time.

Basically if you can cancel out inertia you can accelerate and manoeuvre without having to worry about mass or G-forces. Not FTL, though.

I think his Triplanetary series was written in the 1930's. Good stuff.

I love those stories from that time. Many of those authors had military experience, saw how fast the tech was advancing (sonar, radar, communications, uniforms, chain of command, battles) and how society was advancing (hippies, biker gangs, military, hunter-gatherer) and extrapolated into future space exploration.

There was a story where humans had discovered how to remove the mass from cargo, and store it in mountains. Due to their immense size the slight change in mass was thought to be negligible. Until one mountain disintegrates leaving rubble floating around in the atmosphere.

originally posted by: butcherguy
a reply to: network dude
I think that the biggest reason is the relative emptiness of space. Interstellar travel would mean not much to run into.

Roughly 100 tons of fine dust, grit, gravel hits the earth every day, so I would think its not all that empty.

A Magnetic shield --- surrounding a starship --- must also be powerful enough to diffuse or deflect particle beams and lasers aimed at it. For magnetic shield diffusion to be successful...a particle beam or laser strike will have to be deflected or absorbed by the magnetic field, by causing an electric current at the strike zone; whereas the beam will only penetrate/fracture or bend the shield a small but ineffective distance for a microsecond --- But this process allows the magnetic shield to absorb the potentially lethal hit, by spreading the weapon's energy over the whole radius of the magnetic shield itself; thus rendering the weapon strike harmless.

And the only possible way to create a magnetic shield of this magnitude...is to harness the strong magnetic field from a micro-mini black hole propulsion unit housed onboard the starship itself.


Cheers

Erno

a reply to: Fowlerstoad

Ty I have read so many in the past year.

originally posted by: Erno86
A Magnetic shield --- surrounding a starship --- must also be powerful enough to diffuse or deflect particle beams and lasers aimed at it. For magnetic shield diffusion to be successful...a particle beam or laser strike will have to be deflected or absorbed by the magnetic field, by causing an electric current at the strike zone; whereas the beam will only penetrate/fracture or bend the shield a small but ineffective distance for a microsecond --- But this process allows the magnetic shield to absorb the potentially lethal hit, by spreading the weapon's energy over the whole radius of the magnetic shield itself; thus rendering the weapon strike harmless.

And the only possible way to create a magnetic shield of this magnitude...is to harness the strong magnetic field from a micro-mini black hole propulsion unit housed onboard the starship itself.


Cheers

Erno

A magnetic field has no effect on em-radiation (lasers etc.).

Deflection of charged particles produces em-radiation, which depending on the energies involved can be just as dangerous.

a reply to: network dude

Ability to turn craft into photons.
Or neutrinos...

The weak force has a very short range, gravity is extremely weak on the subatomic scale, and neutrinos, as leptons, do not participate in the strong interaction. Thus, neutrinos typically pass through normal matter unimpeded and undetected.[2][3]

a reply to: network dude

Space is a dangerous place, laced with micrometeorites some of the which travel at a significant percentage of the speed of light(C). Then there are the solar issues and other radiological problems to contend with never mind the fact that you are existing within a near vacuum.

Space is pretty much the most hostile environment humanity has encountered short of our deep oceans really.

There are no free passes or second chances for that matter in space.

a reply to: butcherguy

Depending on distance and journey time there might be plenty of particulate matter that you will inevitably either run into or will run into you. Space is not empty by any manner or means just, really, really vast by its definition.

a reply to: Crumbles

Kind of off-topic, though not entirely off-topic, but if you like sci-fi reading, I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend the Ringworld Trilogy and fourth follow-on book by Larry Niven.

If you have not already read those, I think you will enjoy them fully. There is an interstellar travel angle pertinent to this thread, plus much more.

What if you could perform metric engineering of the vacuum?

Does the speed of light in a vacuum have that speed for a reason? Could the reasons be altered to change the speed of light?

Would you really want your spaceship to be massless or turned into photons? What about the people inside the ship? How would electricity flow etc? Maybe it wouod be better to sheild your mass fromthe rest of the universe?

Can you essentially supconduct the local vacuum?

I dunno.

Scotty knows and i guess so does laforge. No wait they senselessly warp space. Well maybe. Admiral akbar and chewbacca know. No wait they jump into upper dimensional space somehow with no ill effect on their bodies.

Maybe bob lazar knows. No he says use gravity to warp space again. Surely somebody out there knows how they do it.

originally posted by: moebius

originally posted by: Erno86
A Magnetic shield --- surrounding a starship --- must also be powerful enough to diffuse or deflect particle beams and lasers aimed at it. For magnetic shield diffusion to be successful...a particle beam or laser strike will have to be deflected or absorbed by the magnetic field, by causing an electric current at the strike zone; whereas the beam will only penetrate/fracture or bend the shield a small but ineffective distance for a microsecond --- But this process allows the magnetic shield to absorb the potentially lethal hit, by spreading the weapon's energy over the whole radius of the magnetic shield itself; thus rendering the weapon strike harmless.

And the only possible way to create a magnetic shield of this magnitude...is to harness the strong magnetic field from a micro-mini black hole propulsion unit housed onboard the starship itself.


Cheers

Erno

A magnetic field has no effect on em-radiation (lasers etc.).

Deflection of charged particles produces em-radiation, which depending on the energies involved can be just as dangerou

At the quantum level, an effect known as 'Delbruck Scattering' can occur where it is thought that an extremely large EM wave can break a photon down into a electron and a positron, both of which do carry a charge and can therefore have their paths altered by an EM field.

But there can be a scattering effect where the particle and anti-particle annihilate each other and form two lower-energy photons which then travel in different directions.

"Pair production is invoked to predict the existence of Hawking radiation: Where the electron and positron in pair production (so that the energy of a photon can be converted into an electron-positron pair), might be sometimes wretched apart before they have a chance to mutually annihilate each other --- This process can be achieved by Hawking radiation...where one particle may escape while its antiparticle partner is absorbed by the black hole "

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a reply to: Erno86

An electromagnetic field of sufficiently high strength will cause spacetime curvature. For magnetic fields this isn't a simple issue, because in practice you cannot separate electric and magnetic fields. However given that anything capable of generating a very strong magnetic field will cause curvature that means light rays will not follow straight lines.

originally posted by: BASSPLYR


How would electricity flow etc? Maybe it wouod be better to sheild your mass fromthe rest of the universe?

Ahem. See here: A 100-year-old physics problem has been solved.

Asymmetric resonant waveguides. Might want to shield the outside system from the inside system. And yes! (to shielding your mass. That would be a great trick! I have been sidetracked on another tangent and haven't re-read backup on QED and QM in general so I just use the generic term, "quantum magic" and leave it at that).

I know it has been mentioned here and there, but it turns out pulling is better than pushing when wanting certain effects. If it applies to carbon fiber supercapacitors might be applied to a ship. Like if you have an electric envelope with a shielded mass inside of it, then you could pull yourself through space. Maybe like charges, then a phase or potentiometer (like a volume knob!), that draws you towards the source which you keep throwing out further in front of you. Woosh!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

My...liek a certain craft that looks liek a dorito?

originally posted by: Krakatoa
As for the question on faster than light communication, that is explained (in Star Trek) as being "transmitted though subspace". We can interpret that today as using quantum entanglement as the medium to transfer the information faster than light. Another thing that recently was proven to be possible using entangled photons (if memory serves).

I don't think this is their intention with subspace communication, as it is depicted on the show. On the show, even with subspace communications there is still a time delay if you're really far away (which is why Voyager couldn't just call home to let everyone know they were fine when they got stuck in the Delta quadrant), although it's still much faster than regular EM communication. In contrast, if you developed a communication method that utilizes quantum entanglement, the only delay would be in encoding/decoding the message. The actual transmission time would be instantaneous, regardless of how far you're sending the message.

originally posted by: MuonToGluon
a reply to: intrptr

Memory Alpha Star Trek Wiki

Great site, it explains in detail every bit of tech and how it's suppose to work, including plot holes being unexplained or some certain tech that was detailed wrong through out the different series.

This post should come with a disclaimer, if you are a Trek and/or science junkie, you can get stuck on that site for long periods of time. There's lots of interesting behind-the-scenes info too.

originally posted by: MuonToGluon
a reply to: Phage

That was the transgenetic wars (or whatever it was named) wasn't it? Klingons stole the sequences and inserted into their DNA...some virus intermingled and boom, Klingons go dead now.

Think the main Scientist was plated by Brent Spiner in Enterprise.

Okay, how the hell do I remember this stuff I read a decade ago about Star Trek!? But I can't remember how to tie a knot >_>

Yes, there was a 2-parter in season 4 of Enterprise that explained this. The Klingons #ed themselves up playing with embryos left over from Earth's Eugenics Wars.

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Interesting. How would you deal with the light speed relativity issue if you wanted to go FTL

a reply to: yuppa

Yup.

That would be one example. But I read somewhere that graphene needs atmosphere to work. That keeps its lubricity up. Especially if you are using the flakes--take away they atmosphere and they become little saws which is not good. So maybe another version to zip around the neighborhood? Or a large version when you want to go RVing at another star system or something (prolly need a bathroom for the long trips!)

a reply to: BASSPLYR

That is something I was wondering too! Maybe you don't? Like I said, been busy on something else and haven't properly thought this all through. I do like the guide thingys! And was thinking of what ad how they could be used but went in another direction.

I would have to assume, a spaceship capable of such incredible speeds would be surrounded by a magnetic field to deflect particles with a charge, as the Earth does with solar wind. A ship traveling at .99c would create an incomprehensible bow shock wave.