The "Real Aerospace" Thread

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Senanthes
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Senanthes »

Coffee in space and Harrier: Legendary Mode... Which is more epic is up for debate. :D

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NuclearIceCream
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by NuclearIceCream »

The AV-8B thing was cool and all, but c'mon guys. Coffee in space. What can compete? :P

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Mr.Tucker
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Mr.Tucker »

Now here's something I find really interesting (and scary; Star Trek got a lot of things right):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M8yht_ofHc

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icekatze
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by icekatze »

hi hi

In its very early stages, Star Trek made an honest attempt at using real science. Originally, phasers were supposed to be lasers, but they were told to change it to make it sound more futuristic. And in the 60s, people thought that when you annihilated antimatter, most of the resulting energy would be in the form of photons, hence the name of the torpedos. (Of course now, they've got a whole branch of pseudo-science 'photonic particles,' to do magic stuff. Also, originally they wanted to use shuttle craft to get around, but didn't have the budget, so transporters were invented as a cost saving plot device.

I don't think anyone is going to break the speed of light, and I don't think scarce taxpayer money should be spent on something that is very likely a sham. If they do invent a warp drive that lets them go faster than light, I hope people are ready to come up with some rules to govern time travel.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by discord »

harrier is a awesome plane too.
but on his comment 'there is no way to train for a landing like this' i disagree, he previously stated that they pride themselves on being able to land in the exact same spot every time, sounds like training for that exact situation in me ears.

ice: Alcubierre drive points to it being theoretically possible to move between two points in space faster than light does, without actually doing so...

my personal theory on the subject involves a likeness with the speed of sound, there are surprising amounts of similarities actually.
basically there is some kind of drag or something, that makes it very difficult to go faster, overcoming that and you go faster, pretty straight forward, how is another matter entirely though, because classic reaction engine just will not get the job done, something else is needed, just like proper wing and body shape was needed for supersonic flight, not just more power.

WHAT exactly that something else is however, that i do not know.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Karst45 »

i think we will have to ask the orgus

Senanthes
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.

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icekatze
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.)

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Arioch
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by Karst45 »

Arioch wrote: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.

Arioch wrote: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 :D

Image


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.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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?

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icekatze
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.

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RedDwarfIV
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.
If every cloud had a silver lining, there would be a lot more plane crashes.

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NuclearIceCream
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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?

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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
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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.
If every cloud had a silver lining, there would be a lot more plane crashes.

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Re: The "Real Aerospace" Thread

Post by 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.

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