Game Skyrim Forum

Who needs Venus? Out with the old and in with the new!

Minor details!

That's right! Minor details!

Who is with me??? Tear down Venus and start that Dyson Sphere!

Are you saying warp space time as in the warp drive engine thing we have now that's in testing phases? Or warp time forward or backward like time traveling?

How about we just mine the whole solar system and maybe the next few solar systems and manufacture a spaceship as big as our own solar system? Complete with huge lush green forests and snowy mountains that are not possible on Earth.

Are people not excited by this warp drive discovery we have right now? I mean the next 40 years to 50 years advancements in the technology for warp engines are going to be absolutely amazing.

This is a huge achievement for us human beings as a species.

Once we have advanced the warp engines enough for spaceships, then we should look forward to technology advancements for antimatter engines and dark matter engines.

I have a master's degree in mechanical engineering, and took several courses related to space travel including astrodynamics and rocket propulsion, and here's my two cents on this.

I do not know if EmDrive will be a revolutionary breakthrough or not, but it is not intended to go faster than the speed of light. It won't even go at remotely relativistic speeds- the rumors I've caught are that it'd supposedly be able to deliver astronauts to Mars in 10 weeks, which while a massive improvement on the current typical time to reach the Red Planet, isn't exactly what one would call warp speed. That's not to say that it wouldn't revolutionize space travel if it lived up to its hype- fuel weight is one of the biggest limitations when dealing with chemical rockets (there's a reason that only a small part of what you see on a launch pad actually makes it into orbit). At the same time, fuel efficiency or pure thrust isn't everything. How much power does it require to operate? What is the thrust/weight ratio of the thruster?

Ion thrusters are interesting technology. The problem with them is that while they are enormously efficient in terms of propellant mass, they can only produce minuscule thrust due to the equally minuscule rate at which the propellant mass is expelled. This makes them useless for quick maneuvers or launching a spacecraft off the ground, but they can move a satellite from one orbit to another much more efficiently fuel-wise, although it'll take a long, long time to do so.

Well it seems the EmDrive passed some peer review tests showing it has some promising results to warp space at NASA's Eaglelabs.

So that has to be something.

I've heard a lot about these kinds of ideas and rumours for decades. Whilst I genuinely hope for Star Trek to be reality, I highly doubt that will come to fruition any time in the near future. It's a long way away, if at all.

Regarding warp drives, the theories have been solid for well over a decade, the primary issue being materials that could withstand travelling at such a velocity without complete structural collapse. Of course, if it were only so simple as being a question of finding a tough enough material or alloy, we also have to consider the concept of kinetic and inertia dampening fields, for which the science behind the idea has not yet yielded a satisfactory theory, let alone a practical method of implementation.

Then there's the actual question of "warp" speed, and whether that is truly sufficient to explore outside of the system. Even within the Solar System, lightspeed isn't as fast as you'd probably think it is.

I believe I recall the tests involving passing a laser through a tube filled with bromine gas which increased the speed that the laser travelled at by a factor of 5.6(?). Creating an engine that could harness that and convert it into effective propulsion is yet again, quite a challenge, and one that we are unlikely to see accomplished within our lifetimes.

Regarding the construction of lightspeed engines, I believe the theories that are plausible are derived from the same concept behind things like optical computing and photonic logic.

To build something out of light removes a lot of matter from the equation, but again, we hit the hurdle of the matter of the vessel itself and anyone within slowing everything down, which is why we need a ship-wide field that can be generated and sustained. Yes, it relies on quantum mechanics to essentially create a bubble for the ship to travel in, but I believe it's feasible. Arguably unsafe for people until extensively tested, but still, the scientific community may need to bite the proverbial bullet with that issue and find some willing volunteers.

Anyway, all very fascinating, but don't get your hopes up. For now, molecular science and the study of things like dark matter are what will see us come to a greater understanding of quantum mechanics and how our own reality exists. Perhaps then we will understand "energy" better as a concept and as a thing in our universe.

IT'S NOT A [censored] WARP DRIVE!!!

The Em drive is at best a reactionless drive that some parties (not NASA Eagleworks IIRC) have said to have detected space warping inside the drive's operational core, somewhere where it is useless as far as a usable warp drive goes. An Alcubierre drive requires a warp bubble around the craft, a bubble that must be formed outside the craft as the boundary of the bubble will tear matter apart at the subatomic level.

Far as anti matter goes, it will always require some other source of power to generate the antimatter and unless we utterly break the conservation of energy, we'll always use more power to make antimatter than we can get from using it. We might, might, find a cost effective way of harvesting the stuff from the Van Allen belts of Earth or the gas giants.

Dark matter has no known use in spaceflight far as I know, it's just stuff that doesn't interact electromagnetically and makes up a majority of the mass of galaxies. Because it doesn't interact electromagnetically means it's a [censored] and a half to work with as pretty much all of our technology is dependent on electromagnetic interaction between things.

I did catch on to what Didact said.

There's one thing people are missing that they seem to not of read from my topic when I made it.

After 2018 when NASA launches their SLS spacecraft, they will move on to Research and Development (R&D) of warp drive engines. They have a budget for this to be funded until 2050.

Here's a rendering for the 2018 launch of the SLS spacecraft.

http://i.imgur.com/yzb2lRk.jpg

This EmDrive and the peer reviews that passed at NASA's Eaglelabs has them convinced. Otherwise they wouldn't be funding this Rea search and Development (R&D) for it until 2050 for no reason.

They want to advance the technology so we can achieve a real warp drive engine in 2050.

Or is NASA wasting taxpayers money by setting this budget for Research and Development (R&D) for warp drives to be achievable by 2050.

Do you guys think it's a waste of tax payers money?