Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Eric Blank]

We can always rest better knowing someone up there will be able to find spare parts for their malfunctioning microwave oven.

Although if this works, then any craft with a microwave oven on board has a teenie tiny backup engine, right? :v

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Acceleration out of the solar system in a mere 100,000 years!

[Max™]

We can always rest better knowing someone up there will be able to find spare parts for their malfunctioning microwave oven.

Although if this works, then any craft with a microwave oven on board has a teenie tiny backup engine, right? :v

Well, no, if it's working how it is supposed to then it is using the geometry of the chamber to produce an imbalance between the photons hitting one side and the other.

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Orion =/= Project Orion. I am sad.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I should hope everybody would know well ahead of time if we were actually going to attempt an Orion Drive.

[Max™]

What a surprise to all the nuclear weapon monitoring sites though, huh?

[TempAcc]

I read it as onion drive.

[Starver]

Truly, that term seems to be multilayered.

[Max™]

Nah, onion drive is a whole other class of crackpottery, in that there is something weird and wrong taking place with the shaped-microwave-chamber-magic-box drive, and we're trying to figure out what the hell is going on... while the onion thing is some sort of awful hybrid of ancient aliens, the davinci code crap, and roswell conspiracy theories, rolled up in a big bundle of crappy engineering ideas and the sort of doodles a bored stoner would be embarrassed by if they made them while baked out of their mind.

[Max™]

I would think it more likely that at best it is similar to the only reactionless drive I can confirm would work.

If you put three masses at the end of a triangular frame, and then alter the shape of the frame you could change the center of mass in a way that the--I guess drag would be the right way to get the idea across--from the two extended masses is enough to reduce backsliding from the motion of the third mass being extended but not when it is returned again.

The catch being you need a gravity well of pretty significant depth to get enough curvature to work against though, so this would be an awful choice for anything involving say, travel between gravity wells, and it wouldn't work at all in a totally flat region of spacetime.

[Il Palazzo]

I would think it more likely that at best it is similar to the only reactionless drive I can confirm would work.

D'you mind describing it in more concrete terms?

[Helgoland]

Imagine it as swimming through space.

Would make for pretty cool restrictions on space-travel: No zooming around in straight lines, instead you gotta stick to a route with reasonably curved spacetime - kinda like currents and trade winds in the age of sail.

[Max™]

I would think it more likely that at best it is similar to the only reactionless drive I can confirm would work.

D'you mind describing it in more concrete terms?

You mean the em chamber thing? Cause if so I'm saying I expect at best for it to be something limited to very specific applications which are conducive to the operation of the drive, and it generally being difficult to extract much useful thrust even under the best case scenarios for said operation.

Though I am curious how the device was oriented relative to the local gravity field during testing now. I can't say for sure if that would explain any of it, especially as I recall it being really small, but photons moving deeper into a gravity well are blueshifted, ones leaving it are redshifted, which is a similar sort of "feature" about curved spacetime which you could try to utilize I guess?

Even then all I can think of initially would be to try and have the redshifted photons hitting one portion of the chamber, blueshifted hitting another, and tune it so there's an imbalance, but photon pressure is pretty damn wispy, and I'm struggling to find any sort of arrangement which would be good for much besides moving around side to side in a region of curved spacetime.

As for the swimming, here ya go:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Sergarr]

So apparently we will have to wait some more until getting artificial transplants.

[martinuzz]

Apparently the occult dark mages were right about some things.

Blood of the child grants longevity.

Or at least, the theory amongst biomedical scientists has been for a while now, that blood of a young person is more capable of repairing damaged tissue, because the proteins involved in cell repair in older blood suffer from aging themselves.

At least one studies into Alzheimers, reported in JAMA Neurology magazine, now shows that mice will recover noticably after being infused with the blood of younger specimens.

Other researchers are skeptical though. They point out that no control studies has been done using older donor mice. They point out that the observed result could just as well be caused by better blood circulation in the brain during the transfusions.

So don't start drinking your children just yet.