So that Medusa ship you mentioned in the OP, it's like Orion in reverse?
Also I still think that the microwave laser energy transfer idea is not the way to go. You loose lots of energy in transit and a small alignment mistake and you could roast a small country. I say shoot penning traps to an earth orbiting space station from the moon each containing milligrams of amat, then bring 'em down to the surface and plug them into our massive automated amat reactors that are conveniently situated in the middle of f'ing nowhere.
[QUOTE=Shugo589;21638360][url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive_%28Star_Trek%29#Warp_core[/url]
Nothin' new for followers of Star Trek :smug:[/QUOTE]
That's nothing like the system in the OP, what you are proposing is an [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive"]Alcubierre drive[/URL]. Those two methods are really different.
One (the amat sail) works just like a ship with a sail, using the ennergy of action/reaction of the sail with the ama thrown at it.
The other techinque is, well to use a good example, like surfing. You create a wave of warped spacetime (infact a bubble around yourself and your spaceship) and you travel inside this bubble. This would also allow "FTL" travel (not really, the bubble is allowed to travel FTL, since it the bubble is not out of matter, rather then spacetime).
Positron sounds like some robot or pokemon or something.
This totally defies conservation of matter.
[QUOTE=crazyjames;21638217]It does seem like we are getting closer and closer to obtaining anti matter[/QUOTE]
We already have, but it needs more energy to create it than the reaction reveals later. So it is highly inefficient. Even if you could transform 100% of Energy into 100% anti-matter, the matter-antimatter reaction just will give you about 50% (+-20) useable energy back (rest is converted into neutrinos which can't be used).
[QUOTE=farmatyr;21631313]I love these threads, makes me think about the future of the human race.[/QUOTE]
We are the future. :sweden:
Hopefully we'll see these things in our lives!
[QUOTE=aVoN;21648635]We already have, but it needs more energy to create it than the reaction reveals later. So it is highly inefficient. Even if you could transform 100% of Energy into 100% anti-matter, the matter-antimatter reaction just will give you about 50% (+-20) useable energy back (rest is converted into neutrinos which can't be used).[/QUOTE]
Is there any chance of ever developing something that can catch neutrinos? (Not necessarily to recover the energy, just to see if it can be done)
[QUOTE=bravehat;21635156]There is also the issue that anti matter of any kind comes in contact with any matter of any kind we get a nice big rapish explosion.
Oh well back to the drawing board.[/QUOTE]
And the explosion creates more antimatter, if I remember rightly, so it would basically start a chain reaction.
[QUOTE=Eudoxia;21651723]Is there any chance of ever developing something that can catch neutrinos? (Not necessarily to recover the energy, just to see if it can be done)[/QUOTE]
Neutrino Detectors "catch" neutrinos. They interact very weakly with protons resulting into flashes detected by photon-multipliers. This effect is very very weak. Google for Super Kamiokande if you want to know more (one Detector).
Wouldn't a quantum string made of Antimatter suck P. hard to come into contact with
I was at a lecture with some CERN guys the other day and they said it'd take about 1.5 million years to harvest a single gram of antimatter from the LHC working 24/7
[QUOTE=rieda1589;21657365]I was at a lecture with some CERN guys the other day and they said it'd take about 1.5 million years to harvest a single gram of antimatter from the LHC working 24/7[/QUOTE]
That's because of the huge energy requirements, but with antimatter farms close to the Sun relatively large amounts could be created. A Valkyrie would require a very very very very large scale farm and that would require the invention of self-replicating nanorobots that cannot be destroyed by Brownian motion, high temperatures, low temperatures, and rapid changes in temperature.
[QUOTE=Eudoxia;21657414]That's because of the huge energy requirements, but with antimatter farms close to the Sun relatively large amounts could be created. A Valkyrie would require a very very very very large scale farm and that would require the invention of self-replicating nanorobots that cannot be destroyed by Brownian motion, high temperatures, low temperatures, and rapid changes in temperature.[/QUOTE]
Do you realize how enormous the solar panels and accelerator would need to be to be able to collect and utilize that much energy? Consider the costs of a panel that could span the surface of the Earth a few hundred times
It's NOT practical
[QUOTE=rosthouse;21631287]Only real drawback with this method: You need to create a few gramm of amat first. And that's no easy task.[/QUOTE]
Especially when it's worth about [I]300 Trillion USD [B]a gram[/B].[/I]
[QUOTE=Quo Vadi;21657446]Do you realize how enormous the solar panels and accelerator would need to be to be able to collect and utilize that much energy? Consider the costs of a panel that could span the surface of the Earth a few hundred times
It's NOT practical[/QUOTE]
Last time I checked, Isaac Asimov, Charles Pellegrino and Jim Powell ALL did the math for that and showed that it worked and could produce enough fuel for a Valkyrie in a year.
It's somewhere in Charles Pellegrino's website.
[QUOTE=Eudoxia;21657471]Last time I checked, Isaac Asimov, Charles Pellegrino and Jim Powell ALL did the math for that and showed that it worked and could produce enough fuel for a Valkyrie in a year.
It's somewhere in Charles Pellegrino's website.[/QUOTE]
You're not getting the point. The engineering ramifications of such a thing are SO impractical it's ridiculous, even with self-replicating nanobots (which probably won't be created for a very, very, very long time)
[QUOTE=Quo Vadi;21657497]You're not getting the point. The engineering ramifications of such a thing are SO impractical it's ridiculous, even with self-replicating nanobots (which probably won't be created for a very, very, very long time)[/QUOTE]
...buzzkill :saddowns:
[QUOTE=Quo Vadi;21657497]You're not getting the point. The engineering ramifications of such a thing are SO impractical it's ridiculous, even with self-replicating nanobots (which probably won't be created for a very, very, very long time)[/QUOTE]
It will be quite the challenge I guess.
Even if antimatter Valkyries turn out to be infeasible, MPD's can reach very high speeds in a moderate time (One third lightspeed is very good), and we might solve some of the problems with the Bussard ramjets. The stars will be ours and nobody will stop us, because :science:
[QUOTE=Eudoxia;21657577]It will be quite the challenge I guess.
Even if antimatter Valkyries turn out to be infeasible, MPD's can reach very high speeds in a moderate time (One third lightspeed is very good), and we might solve some of the problems with the Bussard ramjets. The stars will be ours and nobody will stop us, because :science:[/QUOTE]
I dunno, Bussard ramjets need frigging massive electro-magnetic fields to collect all that hydrogen and since the power required to generate a magnetic field increases exponentially with its size (that's just off the top of my head, correct me if I'm wrong) you would need truly ridiculous amounts of power. And If you had all that power to begin with, wouldn't you be better off putting it to work directly propelling your ship with a MPD or something? If that's one of the problems your talking about, it just doesn't seem solvable...
The problem being in making a single gram of anti-matter is that the factory would have to run for several million years.
We have made a single trillionth of a gram of anti-matter in our history thanks to CERN.
[QUOTE=Saphiric;21663659]I dunno, Bussard ramjets need frigging massive electro-magnetic fields to collect all that hydrogen and since the power required to generate a magnetic field increases exponentially with its size (that's just off the top of my head, correct me if I'm wrong) you would need truly ridiculous amounts of power. And If you had all that power to begin with, wouldn't you be better off putting it to work directly propelling your ship with a MPD or something? If that's one of the problems your talking about, it just doesn't seem solvable...[/QUOTE]
Well there are many other problems with the Bussard Ramjet.
- Compressing Hydrogen with magnetic fields to create fusion creates more drag than thrust
- Requires p-p fusion
- Not much Hydrogen around us
- Has to move at a certain speed to become functional
- etc.
[QUOTE=Eudoxia;21636985]Why wouldn't it work? The antimatter catalyzes fission reactions.[/QUOTE]
Cause the anti-matter would annihilate.
And the Uranium is unstable as it is, it naturally decomposes, and good luck trying to redirect the radiation so it gives directional thrust.
[QUOTE=bravehat;21668748]Cause the anti-matter would annihilate.
And the Uranium is unstable as it is, it naturally decomposes, and good luck trying to redirect the radiation so it gives directional thrust.[/QUOTE]
The idea is so use microscopic amounts so that some annihilates, and the resulting reaction causes the Uranium to suffer fission.
But wouldn't the sail degrade and over time just become totally useless.
Oh no, wait I forgot, no friction or slowing forces in space.
Still I think Ion thrust would make more sense.
and what do you do with this so called Antimatter?
...you make it react with normal matter, and watch things go boom and harness that boom energy to do stuff.
If I remember correctly, I heard that the sun has a chance of producing 2lbs of anti-matter during a solar flare. We could monitor the suns surface activity and if we predict a solar flare, move a satellite into position to collect the anti-matter in a magnetic field and transport it to a space station for collection.
[QUOTE=OhSnap!;21665113]The problem being in making a single gram of anti-matter is that the factory would have to run for several million years.
We have made a single trillionth of a gram of anti-matter in our history thanks to CERN.[/QUOTE]
But nothing that CERN does is specifically designed to produce amat, it's just a byproduct. Something built with the intention of producing amat would be much more productive.
[QUOTE=Firefox42;21670520]If I remember correctly, I heard that the sun has a chance of producing 2lbs of anti-matter during a solar flare. We could monitor the suns surface activity and if we predict a solar flare, move a satellite into position to collect the anti-matter in a magnetic field and transport it to a space station for collection.[/QUOTE]
Problem with that already; I think the anti-matter would be traveling too fast for even a strong magnetic field to capture. I'm not sure though, maybe there is a way to calculate how strong the field would have to be in order to capture it.
[QUOTE=stealth7d;21680847]Problem with that already; I think the anti-matter would be traveling too fast for even a strong magnetic field to capture. I'm not sure though, maybe there is a way to calculate how strong the field would have to be in order to capture it.[/QUOTE]
well, we wouldn't need much of it. just a gram or so would be more than enough.
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