originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
a reply to: TheBadCabbie
We have airships that do this using helium bladders. They inflate the bags to float away and pump it out back to a container when they want to
“sink”. Like a submarine but in the air.
That is not even exotic tech. What happens when you combine it with 2D materials?? The under water becomes nothing more than an engineering
difficulty.
I wanted to quote you to start off my round three here, TEOT. Agree, it's not really all that exotic. None of it would really be all that hard to
produce.
Taking it a step farther though, and combining these systems with a space propulsion component, is something that is a little more exotic. I think Em
Drive is the space propulsion component of some of these triangles, the extra-planetary ones, that is. Fully developed, it could certainly move
things around up there, if the theoretical predictions are correct. I think they are based on my knowledge of the theory. Converging wave forms
exploited as the driving force should be exploitable to .5c with some efficiency. Even if it were only .1c though, that's still pretty fast. .01c?
Still pretty fast. .oo1c? Still, pretty fast. About 300km/s, at 1/10th of 1 percent of the speed of light, or .001c.
I think it could move you in atmosphere as well, though it could be problematic, or perhaps not very effective. In other words, you could probably
produce some thrust, but it might not be a viable atmospheric propulsion engine. I don't know.
If this has all come into the white world, it makes me curious what they've got that's better that they feel they can let this come out. Maybe it's
just the fact that the technology got re-invented by a civilian, and the plan was to let whoever came up with it independently have a go at it. I
don't know.
Em Drive, though undeveloped for the most part, is not a secret technology. The basic principle is that you bounce electromagnetic waves off of a
reflector, which pushes the reflector forward. The wave travels at nearly the speed of light, and loses a little of its energy as it bounces off of
the reflector. This 'lost' energy is transferred to the reflector, propelling it forward. Works better in a vacuum I think, and definitely works
better with superconducting materials(or is hypothesized to, at least).
Even without optimized conditions, Em Drive has produced thrust in laboratory testing. With optimized conditions, it is hypothesized to be a viable
space propulsion concept. Should get you to about half the speed of light eventually if you could make it efficient enough(in theory). The faster
you go, the less push that wave will have on the reflector, as the difference in velocity between the two become less and less.
Test models that I've seen looking into it are slightly cone shaped cylinders that look to be built from riveted sheet metal, flat plates on either
end. Put this together with a microwave generator and (preferably)a super-conductive coating. I think a crystal is also involved, that the wave
propagates through. I think the dynamics are that the wave emanates from the small end, bounces off of the large end, and some of the wave dissipates
through the tapering wall on its way back to the small reflector, producing a net thrust from the larger push on the larger plate. The wave is being
reflected between the two flat plates. I could be remembering it wrong, but if not that it's something very similar. They have a paper at their
website, which I was too lazy to re-read before writing this post.
emdrive.com...
The beauty of a resonant cavity thruster such as this is that you don't need a propellant you just need a power source. Nuclear power could run this,
of course. Fission, perhaps some secret form of workable fusion. As for what else might, I suppose that's a speculation for a future post. Removing
the need for a propellant from a deep space craft makes interstellar missions doable, as the need to carry large amounts of propellant for a mission
has long been a limiting factor. You think a Saturn V is big!
There are other not so unconventional space propulsion methods that are already in practice or have seen some public development. Ion drive for
instance, which was most likely involved with at least one historic sighting. Some people got cancer, some branch of government had a suit filed
against them, it was somewhere in the Southwest, and it sounded an awful lot like what an ion drive black project craft should have looked like to me.
You excite ions to produce thrust. This can be done in a number of ways, and I think some members have referenced this technology better than I can.
I thought it belonged here as part of my thought arc, so I wanted to at least give it a mention. You can excite ions with electricity, you can also
use magnetism or a combination of the two if I remember correctly. You can reach a higher speed with less propellant than a rocket engine, but
propellant is still required.
edit on 27-2-2018 by TheBadCabbie because: (no reason given)