11-27-2016, 10:41 AM
(11-23-2016, 02:41 PM)stevebowers Wrote: This drive produces a tiny, almost undetectable thrust, assuming it works at all. You'd need a lot of power to give a spaceship a detectable acceleration, but that is also true of a hypothetical photon drive.
Quite right. Two points:
Thrust seems to depend entirely on the amount of power poured into the gadget. Therefore, maximising acceleration needs a power supply that's light for the power delivered. One solution with near-future technology might be a long boom with the required fission reactor on the end of it, and shielding only directly between payload and power supply. Or, slightly more speculatively, a Polywell or DPF fusion reactor.
And the rather tiny thrust might be improved upon. If this thing works at all, it works on a physical principle not currently known. But tinkering might improve the thrust to power ratio, even if the principles are not known. An imperfect analogy is the steam engine, which was improved in efficiency by at least an order of magnitude well before the physics of heat engines was developed in any formal way.