Newtonian ships or not?.

[Randallw]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
In order to 'maneuver like a plane' there would have to be an atmosphere for wings to work on. Or alternatively, you need to be moving at a signifigant fraction of the speed of light in order to get similar effects from the 'vacuum' of space

Ha, I knew saying plane, someone would think of spaceships with wings . Let me use examples to show what I mean. Hard Science ship, a ship that accelerates at a fraction of c and needs to do stuff like turn halfway through the journet to decelerate. Pulp ships, the good old Star Wars or Star trek ship. Disregarding their faster than light speed, when they move at sublight speed they can turn whenever they want and stop suddenly without regard to inertia.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by narf poit chez BOOM:
your post stired up a thought...what if the heat generated by interstellar dust was used to pre-heat the reaction mass?

A fascinating thought. But any 'reaction' drive suitable for interstellar travel is going to need to have a very high impulse (thrust per weight units of fuel) ratio. This means something with very high energy like a fusion reactor with an opening pointing out the back. It sounds good in theory to run your coolant around the spaceship skin and then route it to some sort of 'converter' to preheat the fuel -- but how are you going to convert plain old radiant heat carried by a 'coolant' medium into the extremely intense sort of energy needed for fusion reactions? A pelet of fuel (probably hydrogen in a little glass 'bubble') has to be heated to thousands of degrees in a tiny fraction of a second -- probably by lasers. If this extreme conVersion can be done at all it looks likely to be very involved and complex. And once you figure out all the tricks necessary to do this, are you gonna have any space left in your ship for cargo between all those heat-exchanger coils and electrical generators and what not? So though it sounds good on its face I wonder if it can be done in practice.

This sort of reminds me of the idea of putting generators on the wheels of an electric car. Yeah, it should work (and some electric cars do recover a small amount of energy this way) but the inherent inefficiencies put some pretty steep limits on its effectiveness.

Maybe there are simpler ways to do it? Do thermocouples actually 'use up' energy and reduce their heat levels by generating electricity? A ship with a skin made of thermocouples is an interesting concept. Peltiers reduce temperature by moving the heat around but you still have to dispose of it somewhere, somehow and the Peltier effect USES energy and creates more heat.

It's a very difficult problem.

[ March 27, 2004, 04:02: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by Randallw:

quote:

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Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
In order to 'maneuver like a plane' there would have to be an atmosphere for wings to work on. Or alternatively, you need to be moving at a signifigant fraction of the speed of light in order to get similar effects from the 'vacuum' of space

Ha, I knew saying plane, someone would think of spaceships with wings . Let me use examples to show what I mean. Hard Science ship, a ship that accelerates at a fraction of c and needs to do stuff like turn halfway through the journet to decelerate. Pulp ships, the good old Star Wars or Star trek ship. Disregarding their faster than light speed, when they move at sublight speed they can turn whenever they want and stop suddenly without regard to inertia.

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Planes don't move without inertia. You are talking about something completely unknown and probably impossible, but yes we do see that in many shows like Star Trek. This is 'simplified' SciFi for the sake of making a short and simple television show or movie.

[President_Elect_Shang]

FTL via worm holes:
http://www.quantonics.com/Faster_Tha..._Discover.html

Good info:
http://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/PAO/warp.htm

There should also be an article in the London Sunday Times on 4 Jan 2000 in which some US scientists managed to accelerate light pulses past the speed of light. I would have loved to include the link but the London Times charges for its archives. You guys just aren’t that important for me to start forking out my cash! Anyway I feel that one day we will have starships able to move faster than light. I am not saying that a human crew will be on it, maybe robots.

[Phoenix-D]

Actually it is possible to go past the speed of light, just not the speed of light -in a vaccum-. IIRC the 2000 experiment didn't break c, just the speed of light elsewhere.

There's actually a specific type of radiation that you get when you break the local speed of light, much like the shock waves when you break the speed of sound.

cherenkov radiation

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Well, like I've said before, just maybe not on here, people once thought 60 miles an hour would tear the skin off your face. They thought the speed of sound was unbreakable. Well, I don't know how many other things we've done have been labeled impossible, but probably a lot.

I don't truly beleive that impossible is the right word...I think 'non-existant action/direction' is better, that is, if you think of any action we take as an action/direction, there are places you can go and places you can't and if you can't, it's not because you're blocked, it's because that action/direction doesn't exist.

Also, the nature of light itself lends some credence to the theory of holes? in or around or something the speed of light barrier.

[JurijD]

acutally as I´ve said before... FTL travel doesn´t need to happen for us to clonize the galaxy. I´d say in a couple hundred years MAX technology will be developed enough to enable us to build giant ship that can travel at sub-light speeds and carry a couple 10-thousand people to the nearest solar systems. And if you give those people there say 100 years and then have them send out more ships... you could colonize the entire galaxy in a couple 100-thousand years... if we never develop FTL travel.

so the real question is: why hasn´t anyone done it yet) how come I don´t have a weird little green man for my neighbour... no wait I do.. at least the weird part

[ March 27, 2004, 12:22: Message edited by: JurijD ]