An idea for spacetravel?

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Interesting ... but the space elevator will not work unless you can deal with the discharges of plasma and super lightning .

You may recall there is a layer of charged particles that surrounds and flows in and out of the Earth at the poles .
the North is (-) and the south pole is (+) .. This is a god awful lot of energy

Remember the Tether experiment ??

They were trying to see how much energy they could gather ... well it turned out they got a lot more than they bargained for .. the energy was so great it vaporized the titanium fittings .. that's how they lost it .

The Sun puts out tremendous amount of plasma/electrical energy the EM field of the Earth collects part of that ....

The thread Here shows what happens when a conductive path is created this energy wants to flow to ground ..

Dont be there when it does .

We could tap a portion of that energy at the North pole and probably power the entire planet .

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reply to post by yourmaker


Sounds like an interesting concept to explore and see about developing.

As I recall, that "Super-Gun" that Saddam was condemned for having way back when was nothing but a *GIANT* electromagnetic artillery piece, wasn't it? ..in fact, wasn't the guy who designed it originally looking for make a non-chemical method for propulsion into and beyond Earth Orbit? Heck... it's not like people aren't throwing billions around like tips on a bar as it is...why not build the real thing and see what happens? A Rail gun with only one purpose. Not killing, this time, but simply the propulsion of objects into orbital space?

Thanks for the replies, as I posted I'm not very good at physics so I was wondering if at all such a construction could work physically. Especially friction, launching it with enough momentum so it reaches orbit but at the same time not burning up. The energy would be generated by solar power by the way, not fuel or chemicals. The antenna would use it to be raised or stretched then the other part of the construction would pull the antenna down much like a catapult or a bow. The tricky part is letting the antenna go and pulling it back at the right moment so most of the energy from the bent antenna would be transferred or used to 'eject' the pod.

If the elevator was lowered very slowly, would that not bypass the energy created by friction? It might take a few days and create problems for airtraffic but those could be compensated for. Maybe those who thought of space elevators assumed it should be something very fast. Or maybe only the last part when it touches ground it could be accelerated, might even work with a hook or magnet to pick up an object. I've seen pilots fly high altitude refueling, that kind of precision work only a different scale where the spaceship might be 10x bigger than an F16. Or why can't the space ship not match the rotation of the earth so they would be same speeds and this might create less friction? Or is that because the rotation is just way too fast for any vehicle at the moment.

reply to post by Dragonfly79


That illustration left me confused. Why doesn't the chain let go of the antenna when launching things into space?

The spring board mentioned earlier would be a great addition for extra momentum, under the antenna. Except no detonations, just a giant construction of springs would do which could be retracted and let go by using solar power instead of explosive chemicals. It would be more durable even though there are masses of explosive stuff, it's mostly because of costs and safety.

Originally posted by Tearman
reply to post by Dragonfly79

 

That illustration left me confused. Why doesn't the chain let go of the antenna when launching things into space?

When the pod is launched and the sprung chain released so the bend antenna flips it should be controlled so there is more momentum and it doesn't fly off in the wrong direction even though there is a huge margin for error if it is just about launching into orbit of Earth. Launching to Mars could be possible but involves more calculations. A huge spider like web in orbit of Mars and Earth to catch the pods and also generate solar power could be used when calculation patterns advance and become more complicated overtime.

Originally posted by R0CR13
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Interesting ... but the space elevator will not work unless you can deal with the discharges of plasma and super lightning .

We could tap a portion of that energy at the North pole and probably power the entire planet .
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Couldn't it be possible somehow the chain collects that energy into batteries on the ground. Like the Franklins' kite and a Leyden jar or Doc's weather experiment. Then that energy could be used to power future spaceships and launch the life support part seperately from the rest of the spaceship so they can reattach in orbit. Or use it for the space elevator by launching the full battery into space.

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reply to post by Dragonfly79


The only "battery" capable of capturing such a large amount of energy IMO would be a superconductive coil the size of a football stadium .

en.wikipedia.org...


We are talking about energy on a massive scale .

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So if robots would be send out into space to mine ore and build spacestations around each planet we could have monorails on solar power for travel maybe in between planets something remotely like this:



Remove the planets once it's all done and then the spaceship/mobile spacestation is ready. Then propulsion is needed but the spacestation first. By then people will probably have sentient AI which they will proclaim god with the programmers being the saviours of mankind and at that point anything might happen, maybe it'll transform into a giant robot and explain how it has computated an engine and everlasting power source.

Originally posted by R0CR13
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reply to post by Dragonfly79

 

The only "battery" capable of capturing such a large amount of energy IMO would be a superconductive coil the size of a football stadium .

en.wikipedia.org...


We are talking about energy on a massive scale .
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Allright that could be done, not that it would be the size of the moon or something. Which might also be a launch platform I considered but maybe it might change orbit slightly and ruin everything on earth. And there are enough developments with batteries so a battery might become more compact.