If we can't move the spaceship fast enough, we'll move the space around it! No wonder all the sci-fi movies show the area around warp speed ships distorting. They must have been onto something. I don't want to know how a human could ever survive that though.
Warp drive may actually be possible, NASA scientist says
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Re: Warp drive may actually be possible, NASA scientist says
#32I don't see how this will work considering the contraction of space-time right in front of the spaceship within this warp-bubble, will also in-turn cause a natural dilution of space-time right in front of the warp-bubble.
Even if that was not true, how will the warp-drive propagate the warp-bubble field itself faster than C to grab onto space-time in a timely manner?
It would seem to me this would cause the space-ship to feel that it's traveling faster than C, but to an outside observer it would only be traveling at C or less.
Re: Warp drive may actually be possible, NASA scientist says
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that simple. You are vastly underestimating how much scaleup is required to sustain that acceleration up until you get a reasonable trip time. Here's the summary from NASA: "Here are four examples [large graphic][1] of what it would take to send a canister about the size of a Shuttle payload (or a school bus) past our nearest neighboring star...and allowing 900 years for it to make this journey. Well....If y…
Your references are about rocket designs, which have limits to how fast they can expel reaction mass before they blow themselves up. Orion isn't really a rocket as it does the violent reaction outside of the spaceship. With Orion, the limit is how fast the pusher plate can be cooled or how much momentum can be handled by the shock absorbers. Granted, even with fusion bombs there is still a limit to how much energy an…
Orion most definitely is still an action/reaction rocket. It works via radiation and particle pressure against the pusher plate. While its thrust is high, its overall efficiency is low because the majority of the fission energy result is not contained enough to influence forward motion of the spacecraft. High thrust is pointless for interstellar travel. High isp is essential. This is why fission or antimatter powered ion drives beat Orion. Orion is great for interplanetary however.
If you read the through the material on that site you will see they are familiar with Orion. While the public oriented site glosses over details, the companion site will provide you with papers with rigorous detail.
There is no escaping it: for practical interstellar travel, we must develop massless drive or some form of spacetime manipulation that changes the mass requirements.
Re: Warp drive may actually be possible, NASA scientist says
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Conservation of energy may or may not be valid in general relativity, at least in a naive understanding of conservation of energy. The technical explanation for this is, that conserved quantities are related to geometrical symmetries via Noethers theorem [1], and on a curved background these symmetries may or may not be there. ( A rather handwaving explanation would be, that there is no straightforward way to define…
"In fact it is possible" is a pretty strong way to talk about moving something that might not exist.
Agreed, the wording is rather strong. But at least it is shorter than: "According to current understanding of GR and the contents of the universe it should be possible."