The "Real Aerospace" Thread

[Karst45]

i think we will have to ask the orgus

[Senanthes]

Funny... When Alcubierre first presented his theory, he got laughed off the stage, so to speak. Now, it's becoming the go-to for what may prove to be our ticket to the stars in time. Gotta love irony.

The theory is on wiki, and makes for decent (read; informative) reading for the curious.

[discord]

sen: Alcubierre warp drive is probably not gonna work out as is, since his idea has power and material requirements that are just a tad bit extreme, but it points to it being theoretically possible.

and jives well with my 'idea' that something fundamental needs to change for it to work.

[icekatze]

hi hi

The sound barrier and the speed of light are not anything alike. The speed of light directly related to the relative passage of time as a fundamental property of the universe, something that has been strongly supported by numerous experiments.

All velocities are relative. From the perspective of the observer, the speed of light is always the same, always as far removed from your own velocity no matter how fast you go. If you manage to dilate space and time so that you reach your destination before light does, you will effectively travel backwards in time. (Obviously, the time travelers from the future do a good job of hiding themselves.)

[Arioch]

The conspicuous lack of time travelers from the future is a pretty good clue that time travel isn't possible.

In a similar way that the conspicuous lack of alien starships whizzing by every day is a pretty good clue that warp travel isn't possible either. But I'm glad that we have people who are willing to try to make it work anyway.

[Karst45]

The conspicuous lack of time travelers from the future is a pretty good clue that time travel isn't possible.

not that we know of. But some Science fiction novel/show, like shooting to the moon by Jules verne or Herge: Tintin & Explorers on the Moon. were not so far from reality in a time were they had almost no knowledge in space science. (ok Herge may have access to more knowledge than Jules verne but still.

In a similar way that the conspicuous lack of alien starships whizzing by every day is a pretty good clue that warp travel isn't possible either. But I'm glad that we have people who are willing to try to make it work anyway.

Well some claim to have seen some starship, but they are disregarded as "crazy" And the army say it weather baloon




and what about the man in black. What if it was true and they made that movie because well... who would believe you if you claim that a movie was real.

[discord]

ice: drag in the medium known as 'air', drag in the medium known as space/time, the speed of light is simply the highest known possible speed without changing either the rules or something else and i believe there is some way of working around that issue, evidence? none.
but the universe would be a much sadder and more boring place if it is impossible though.

and no, getting from point A to point B faster than light does not mean going back in time, just being faster, there is currently no known way of doing that and the idea that time moves backwards beyond C is simply a mathematical model breaking down beyond what is known to be measurable, since as far as i know no one has measured reverse time flow yet.
the part about needing more than infinite amounts of energy to do it however seems equally annoying imho, as i said, some way around and not through the problem is needed.

seriously though, throw a craft at the sound barrier and they break apart, until a 'trick' made it possible, same thing with the light barrier, if we could get enough energy into the damn craft, seems similar enough to me.

arioch:
going back in time is probably pretty damn close to impossible, whereas going forward at differing rate is pretty simple.
and if possible will probably not be able to affect it's own past(multiverse splitting of a new possibility thing seems likely in that case).

on alien starships buzzing around? the universe is rather insanely huge, could be plenty of them in the north eastern part of the andromeda galaxy though, who would know?

[icekatze]

hi hi

I know that relativity is difficult to grasp, but it is very strongly supported by rigorous empirical evidence, to a large number of decimal places. The speed of light is not a matter of drag in the medium, it is a fundamental component of the way space time works. Time literally moves at different rates depending on your speed and mass.

And yes, going faster than light absolutely means going backwards in time. Everything in serious physics involves mathematical models, and those models aren't breaking down, they're telling us exactly what would happen to your frame of reference if you did go faster than light.

Also: no serious engineer since the 1900s really thought there was anything impossible about the sound barrier. Bullets broke the sound barrier and had been measured for a while, thats why many of the early X-planes were shaped after bullets. Plenty of documentaries have romanticized the test flights, but it was always a matter of the technical challenges of the vehicle, not overcoming the laws of nature.

[RedDwarfIV]

... seems people are having some serious difficulties understanding what actually happens when you use a warp drive. The entire point of Alcubierre's design is that because an object cannot move faster than light, the drive moves an area of space instead. Since the object is not travelling faster than light, relativity does not affect it.

Two weeks for Earth is two weeks for the starship, at least so long as the starship doesn't travel too far away (Satellites in Earth orbit have to correct for relativity just moving 9Km/s. Pretty sure a starship will have problems is it goes to the galactic core or the end of the galactic arm where objects will be moving faster and slower respectively than the Sol system does.)

So no, there is no going backwards in time using an Alcubierre warp drive.

As for relativity, as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass increases exponentially. To travel at the speed of light is to have infinite mass - no engine could impart enough thrust to move a van-sized object with the mass of the Sun, so you can't reach light speed that way. This is also why an object traveling at 0.99 lightspeed will have an order of magnitude less energy in an impact than an object travelling 0.999 lightspeed.

[NuclearIceCream]

I was worried I would have to correct some miss conceptions about the drive but I was having difficulty figuring out how to word it correctly. So I'm glad someone else did.

[Senanthes]

Thank you RedDwarf. Saved me some typing tonight.

The short of it is, it's the only theory so far that's being researched as being viable in any way, to the best of my knowledge. Frankly, that's a big step above just throwing in the towel because it looks like an impossible problem on the surface.

Also, after about half a minute of searching...
http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-p ... light.html

The power problem may not be a problem. It's all theory right now, but frankly, what new development hasn't started out that way?

[Nemo]

From where I sit, it is all hype. They're putting together show pieces like that IXS Enterprise model before doing the ground work on the engine itself. I can think of no more literal example of putting the cart before the horse. They're just ginning up FTL drives to funnel money into pet projects and experiments. A bit like quantum entanglement research press releases invoking Star Trek transporter tech or FTL coms and such.


Eisenhower's warning rings ever true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtIZBcWBcis

[Senanthes]

Could very well be, Nemo. I can't, and won't, argue with that. My point is only that we shouldn't talk ourselves out of trying, be it with the Alcubierre theory, or something else. It's just the only thing out there that isn't a complete work of fiction right now, but I don't discount the idea of something else coming along in time.

[RedDwarfIV]

The point of that IXS Enterprise drawing was to show what a theoretical warp-drive spacecraft might actually look like. It has two rings because White's design uses an alternating output to significantly lower the power requirements. The rings are thick, because again, donut shaped warp rings use significantly less power than a band-shaped one. The spacecraft barely pokes out of either end of the rings because alternating the field makes the area of space available inside the warp 'bubble' smaller, and if you had anything poking out, it'd get cut off when the drive was activated.

These are all things that White had to work out to get the drive to the status of 'theoretically feasable' instead of 'theoretically possible'. The image was made to display all these advances in the theory of warp travel.

And frankly, these days, if you don't hype something related to space travel, you don't get funding, meaning you'll never get any work done on it at all.

[Nemo]

Dwarf, those are all solutions for technical challenges for a problem that doesn't yet exist. The way they're going about deriving that funding sends off alarm bells for me. If you want my buy in you must demonstrate a practical set of steps forward, focusing on the first small step in line. Its not a positive outlook, I'll freely admit, but whenever I see a pie in the sky promising tech being put forward that has this kind of end goal focus I immediately think money pit/scam.

[icekatze]

hi hi

The entire point of Alcubierre's design is that because an object cannot move faster than light, the drive moves an area of space instead. Since the object is not traveling faster than light, relativity does not affect it.

This might make sense if it weren't for the fact that it is all relative. From the perspective of the traveller, one is always moving below the speed of light. A ray of light always moves away at the speed of light in all reference frames. And from any other reference frame, bodies in motion never move faster than light. But from an outside observer, the person warping space is moving faster than light.

The reference frame of the traveler is not a privileged reference frame.

[Mr.Tucker]

Dwarf, those are all solutions for technical challenges for a problem that doesn't yet exist. The way they're going about deriving that funding sends off alarm bells for me. If you want my buy in you must demonstrate a practical set of steps forward, focusing on the first small step in line. Its not a positive outlook, I'll freely admit, but whenever I see a pie in the sky promising tech being put forward that has this kind of end goal focus I immediately think money pit/scam.

Hmm....I fail to see what's so alarming about the way he's deriving funding. He's a NASA scientist, being funded by NASA to do work on a theoretical piece of space technology. I hear no alarm bells. It's NASA' s job to do that (otherwise who's gonna do it? the BBC?). For the moment all he has are tabletop experiments involving demonstrating very small scale instances of the effect, plus some papers on a larger scale model which is some ways off. If it works, good. We work on it more. If not, well what effects preclude it? It' the reason to do research, to know if something works or not and why. The atomic scale White–Juday warp-field interferometer is probably the first step in this research. If the findings are conclusive, more steps follow. He never said it'll work, just that it's theoretically possible. And if you wanna get students at a conference excited (like the audience here), you're gonna have to show them something other than graphs and equations . Which is why he presented that image (freely admitted as being an artistic rendering, with some highlighted engineering details). Again, I see nothing concerning.

HOWEVER I see people have automatically gravitated toward his warp field experiments. When I said i was excited, I was far more excited about his lab's work on Quantum vacuum plasma thrusters . And.....people seem not to have noticed that half hour of his presentation.

[Arioch]

I think the implied promise in the recent "IXS Enterprise" NASA media campagin that a Star Trek-style starship is just a few years off is silly, embarrassing, improper, and likely to backfire in the long run in terms of rallying support around the space program. I think false promises and exaggerations hurt more than they help; people don't like it when you lie to them, and they remember it. However, I understand that the NASA people have to fight for funding, and I don't see anything more sinister in their (misguided) attempts to secure funding than just that.

[Mr.Tucker]

"Media campaign"? Not very sure about that. Artists like Mark Rademaker or Mike Campbell have been creating designs based on NASA studies for 40 years. Look at Sagan's habitats from the 60s. Just because the media hypes them up occasionally doesn't mean NASA does. NASA didn't say "Give us the money and it'll be ready tomorrow". Anyone with an inkling of intelligence would realize it's just a rendering of something 200-300 years off, if at all. To quote:

"The image above is Dutch designer Mark Rademaker's CGI design concept; created to illustrate how NASA engineer Harold White's IXS Enterprise "Warp ship" might look. White has been researching into possible methods of propelling space craft beyond the speed of light. The strongest theory involves the disruption of space-time in front and behind the craft. White claims he has calculated a plausible method that improves upon an earlier theory by physicist Miguel Alcubierre, and is working towards a proof of concept for the idea. Rademaker's design shows large rings that would be used to create a "warp bubble" and was originally submitted for the Star Trek "Ships of the Line" 2014 calendar."

[RedDwarfIV]

hi hi

The entire point of Alcubierre's design is that because an object cannot move faster than light, the drive moves an area of space instead. Since the object is not traveling faster than light, relativity does not affect it.

This might make sense if it weren't for the fact that it is all relative. From the perspective of the traveller, one is always moving below the speed of light. A ray of light always moves away at the speed of light in all reference frames. And from any other reference frame, bodies in motion never move faster than light. But from an outside observer, the person warping space is moving faster than light.

The spacecraft moves at the same speed it was moving before it creates the warp bubble. The spacecraft is not moving. The space it occupies is. Relativity doesn't enter into it. As I said, that's the entire point. If relativity did affect it, then you'd run into the same problem as trying to get a spacecraft up to lightspeed - infinite mass.

Just because it looks like the spacecraft is travelling faster than light to someone on Earth, does not mean it is.