More data on reactionless drive

S

sideranautae

Mongoose
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/31/nasa-validates-impossible-space-drive

A tangent from Alex's thread: http://forum.mongoosepublishing.com/viewtopic.php?f=89&t=78540

The UK based scientist who invented the drive comments on why the drive NASA tested is less powerful than his and the Chinese drive.

This is such a HUGE breakthrough in physics (as well as sinking at least one Law we learned in physics) that it isn't possible to predict what it will bring. Also interesting how this is superficially similar to the MT reactionless drive explanation.
 
I see the web site Inquisitr talks about the drive and includes one of the pictures of IXS Enterprise.

Now we need someone to say they have the initial workings of a fusion plant and we're set!
 
Reynard said:
I see the web site Inquisitr talks about the drive and includes one of the pictures of IXS Enterprise.

Now we need someone to say they have the initial workings of a fusion plant and we're set!
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Heck, even a fission PP would mean manned exploration of the entire solar system. You could get to Jupiter on 1/100 G M-drive in a couple months...
 
Lord High Munchkin said:
It's the radiation shielding and the bone depletion that'll get you in the end....
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Problem solved by continuous accel & with this device you can easily carry enough heavy shielding.
 
I heard a radio programme about health implications on the ISS, bone reabsorption was their chief worry. It was the issue they were all concerned with as regards any trip to Mars (and possibly beyond).

I'll grant you that the radiation shielding is less of an problem with greater available load with this drive (for example water tanks on the outside of the vehicle), but loss of bone hmm... a couple of months up on the Space Station takes a year to get over once back on Earth (it's the hips apparently).
 
Here's the original report from NASA:
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20140006052

There are two important facts in there which make the whole thing highly dubious. One is that they did a control experiment with a similar device specifically designed not to produce thrust, yet it appeared to do so. When your control placebo shows the same result as the item being tested, start getting suspicious.

Especially since they did the test in a vacuum chamber but didn't actually use it as a vacuum chamber, they left it at standard atmospheric pressure. Not exactly a good simulation for a drive intended to operate in space. :D
 
After reading the report, I think that further investigation is certainly justified. There is a good chance that the reported outcomes of the preliminary investigation will be turn out to be the result of faulty equipment or subtle experimental error, but if not this could be a major find. Other groups will need to reproduce the experiment and reproduce the findings for them to become widely accepted. And then the debate over what it all means will get underway.
 
Lord High Munchkin said:
I heard a radio programme about health implications on the ISS, bone reabsorption was their chief worry. It was the issue they were all concerned with as regards any trip to Mars (and possibly beyond).
but loss of bone hmm... a couple of months up on the Space Station takes a year to get over once back on Earth (it's the hips apparently).
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With continuous accel available, bone loss is eliminated.
 
Prime_Evil said:
After reading the report, I think that further investigation is certainly justified. There is a good chance that the reported outcomes of the preliminary investigation will be turn out to be the result of faulty equipment or subtle experimental error,
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Nope. The Chinese have now produced a working engine, The UK company and NASA also has them working with thrust. BAE is now funding advanced engines. Boeing has the design specs and is working on long range plans for lunch vehicles using the engines.

NASA now acknowledges that is produces thrust but isn't sure why (principles involved). The UK company figured it out. It is NOT a reactionless thruster. It is a microwave cavity thruster. It doesn't act as a closed system but as an open system due to Relativity because of the near c speed of the microwaves in the waveguide. Thus the pressure differential in the large end of the waveguide vs. the small end produces a net thrust because both ends have different frames of reference. Unlike gases operating at low speeds using the same framework which would make it a closed system with no net thrust but only pressure in a closed vessel.
 
It's another frikkin' olde tyme ion engine!!

"is working on long range plans for lunch vehicles using the engines"

Meals on super thrusters!
 
If it can produce 1 g of thrust or more, we can have a "grav vehicle". Well not really a grav vehicle, it accelerates at 9.81 meters per second squared straight up as gravity pulls it downward at 9.81 meters per second squared down, both accelerations cancel out producing a vehicle that hovers without a visible exhaust jet. Something that lists off the ground and hovers for as long as an energy source is provided. I would start worrying if the Chinese were building vehicles like that.
 
I'm curious what they're planning to do about power generation and delivery. That's the main issue with electrically powered high thrust engines. What kind of power generator do you use? How much fuel would it consume? How do you transform and deliver the required power to the microwave generator without melting the circuitry?

I just did some rough calculations based on a hypothetical 50 ton vehicle. Just reaching orbital velocity, ignoring the requirement to actually launch and get into space requires around 1.2 trillion joules of energy. Generating and delivering that amount of electrical energy inside a 50 ton vehicle will be challenging.

It turns out that outside nuclear reactors, rocket fuels are among the most energy dense fuels we have. Consuming those to produce useable power means burning them, and the nice thing about rocket engines is they very conveniently turn all that released thermal energy into thrust.

I have serious doubts about its utility as a launch system. On the other hand, this would make a truly excellent high efficiency, low to medium thrust drive system for orbital or interplanetary applications. If SpaceX succeeds in their reusable rocket efforts, and we have this for space propulsion, we could be headed for a very exciting future.

Simon Hibbs
 
simonh said:
I just did some rough calculations based on a hypothetical 50 ton vehicle. Just reaching orbital velocity, ignoring the requirement to actually launch and get into space requires around 1.2 trillion joules of energy. Generating and delivering that amount of electrical energy inside a 50 ton vehicle will be challenging.
Simon Hibbs
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Well I'm pretty sure you can get into orbit in less than 16.52892562 hours, which if my maths haven't failed me is when you would run into the barrier of https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=I5cYgRnfFDA#t=15
 
Relevant XKCD.

Or to be sensationalist "Ex NASA engineer casts doubt on microwave thruster", though of course Randall worked on robotic probes, not space propulsion systems.

Simon Hibbs
 
Ok, I've done some reading on this and I'm calling bullshit. It's Fleischmann and Pons all over again.

It appears they never evacuated the chamber because the electronics wasn't vacuum rated, the descriptions of evacuating the chamber were just a description of how the chamber is used normally, not how it was used in the experiment. There was no attempt to measure or exclude air convection effects due to heating. They didn't even shield the experiment from the earth's magnetic field, so it's quite possible this was a result of interaction with the magnetic fields generated by the electronics. Also the disabled experiment designed to not work produced exactly the same effects*.

Let's be clear, the theoreticians and designers of these things have absolutely no idea how they work, if they do work. They haven't made any credible effort to exclude pretty obvious conventional sources of error, and they don't even know how to disable the device effectively. It's all pure pseudoscience from start to finish.

Simon Hibbs

Edit:
* Apparently they cut slots into the ends of the resonating chamber so the microwaves would escape and not bounce back and forth along the length of the chamber, but this version produced exactly the same results. Their response to this isn't to try and determine the source of what is now pretty clearly experimental error, instead they're trying to come up with an even more tenuous techno-babble explanation for why the disabled device works as well.
It must be asymmetric interference with the quantum plasma vacuum foam! Or maybe it's relativistic distortion of the chamber's eigenstate. Or maybe the quark fairies are giving the experiment a push by beating their tiny quantum wings!
 
they checked it and it worked. Are you calling NASA incompetent? If it actually works, then maybe the universe we live in is fake or being simulated. This is just the sort of result I'd expect coming out of a simulated or fake universe. Maybe we're living in the beginnings of a Traveller Universe generated in a giant computer if these results are genuine. If an engine that shouldn't work according to our physics actually does, what does this mean? Imagine a setting where this reactionless drive and the warp drive actually work. Lets put the components together. Cold Fusion power plants with reactionless drives and warp engines.
 
Tom Kalbfus said:
they checked it and it worked. Are you calling NASA incompetent? ...
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Sorry, but I'm not going to accept an appeal to authority like that. NASA is a big organisation with a lot of labs and researchers working on all kinds of stuff. Their experimental results and published analysis must stand on it's own merit just like anyone else's.

No press release has ever been published by NASA on this, the only thing that's happened is that this research team has released one paper, which has not been peer reviewed or published in a journal. All we can do is examine that paper and judge it on it's merits. On that basis there are many serious flaws in the experimental apparatus and in their analysis of their results. We either recognise those as being flaws or discount them as being insignificant. That's up to our judgement.

For my part if I can think of several factors that could cause this result to be invalid and the published paper says nothing about eliminating or accounting for those factors. To my mind, that's a problem with the credibility of the paper. If they did account for those factors and did eliminate them from the possible sources of error and just didn't bother to report that in the paper, then at a minimum the authorship of the paper was incompetent. If they didn't consider those sources of error in the design of the experiment, or in estimations of error factors, then the experimental design was incompetent.

This is just the sort of result I'd expect coming out of a simulated or fake universe.
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These are exactly the kinds of results I'd expect in a universe with air convection due to heating, and in which the interaction of high powered electronics with the earth's ambient magnetic field can cause lateral forces of similar scale to the ones they measured.

Simon Hibbs
 
Maybe, but I'm just having fun, while the story lasts. If NASA conducted an experiment where something actually levitated or went into space, it would be hard to account for that with experimental error alone. I would say if they did an experiment where accelerations in excess of that produced by gravity were generated and something went into space without propellant and the object was tracked by radar, it would be hard to say that was experimental error. Another way to test it would be to launch the apparatus into orbit and see if it can change orbits without expending propellants. Experiments done on the surface of the Earth are flawed. Why are they measuring micronewtons or millinewtons, when they could be generating forces of hundreds of newtons which nobody could dispute. When ever there are measurements in such tiny increments, someone could always say, oops, the apparatus was not in balance, experimental error, if something is actually hovering and going into space, it would be hard to disprove. As for cold fusion, somebody should have built a car that ran on the energy produced, instead of a table top experiment.
 
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