Warp and Reactionless drive topic

[viperzerofsx]

I've kinda been skeptical of recent work with warp and reactionless drives but it seems Reactionless drives keep passing tests their put under. I was under the impression that there where serious control issues in early tests but I don't know if that has been resolved.

than this happened
http://www.inquisitr.com/2040259/did-nas...arp-drive/


anyone know what is going on?

[Rynn]

This story has been doing the rounds on the Internet over the last few weeks. As far as I can tell there's nothing to it. It's just nonsense that one obscure website published and a bunch of other crazy ones followed. I haven't found anything on any credible site. I believe NASA was investigating claims regarding an emdrive producing microscopic amounts of thrust but that was a few years ago and I haven't heard that anything came from it. Finally a buddy of mine that until recently worked for NASA posted saying it was pure crap.

On the basis of all of that I dismiss any of these stories. When NASA makes an announcement themselves (and if anyone has a link to them doing so I'd be really interested) then maybe it's time to take an interest. Until then these things are just another case of too good to be true click bait.

[Drashner1]

Yeah, what Rynn said.

Beyond that, just because something is (or appears to be) an FTL phenomenon in no way means it has anything to do with warp drives or space warping in any way. There are any number of FTL effects (including photons moving faster than light) known or predicted to exist and accounted for within Relativity theory. Has been since the 60s or 70s IIRC. The one thing they all share in common is either that no useful information can be sent using them, let alone any kind of material object or they require conditions so extreme that we can't come anywhere close to producing them in the lab with the technology and energy levels we can currently produce.

Todd

[viperzerofsx]

I really appreciate the response, the hype train for this seems to be going off the rails while its been passing experiment after experiment, but everyone who has looked at the thing seems to say it is nonsense.

[Drashner1]

I'd like to hear just what experiments are supposed to have been done as a starting point.

Beyond that, even if it were to turn out that some sort of FTL/space warping effect were going on, that it is going on inside a device doesn't really lead to any kind of method of moving a ship from A to B in a hurry. You might get a way of moving light beams (or particles, or even macroscopic objects) from A to B in a hurry if A and B were connected by a conduit set up like this devices. There might be applications in that, but spaceflight wouldn't be one of them. There is also the issue of how much energy it might take to do this on any kind of scale we would find useful.

As you say, the hype of this stuff makes everything rather iffy. And too many popular science publications do a crappy job of actually reporting what is actually going on or being reported vs the story they think their readers want to hear or that they have produced after they've dumbed it down (I mean made it accessible to the layman - the two are not the same thing btw).

Todd

[stevebowers]

We do take the position in OA that some sort of metric engineering and reactionless drive is possible.

I don't think that Sonny White or Roger Shawyer have got there yet, but there is a distinct possibility that this research will help to map the borders of this sort of technology. Whether those borders contain anything useful in the real world is another matter.

[Tachyon]

I've kinda been skeptical of recent work with warp and reactionless drives but it seems Reactionless drives keep passing tests their put under. I was under the impression that there where serious control issues in early tests but I don't know if that has been resolved.

than this happened
http://www.inquisitr.com/2040259/did-nas...arp-drive/


anyone know what is going on?

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

It's exceedingly likely to be another instance of:

http://news.sciencemag.org/2012/06/once-...-neutrinos

[four]

Here's a detailed analysis of the topic on nasaspaceflight.com

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2015/04/e...-em-drive/

Notably, NASA has confirmed the findings of reactionless thrust in a vacuum, and the calculations suggest that to travel to Alpha Centauri, and stop there, would take 130 years. A flyby of Alpha Centauri would take 92 years.

Now, if these findings are false, it's a pretty big false finding, considered that the results have been achieved multiple times by both NASA and a Chinese university. I think there's a strong chance the findings are true- it's not like the OPERA FtL neutrino anomaly, in which it was only measured by one team.

Assume the findings are true. What does this mean for OA?

I think this is a pretty big turning point for Orion's Arm. Do you continue adapting the past timeline to real-life events, even when they significantly alter the course of history, or is there a point at which you decide to stop following with real life and continue as an increasingly-retro 2000s sci-fi?

Because this finding would completely change the course of OA history.

[stevebowers]

Not necessarily. The effects observed are so small that they fall roughly within the error bars of the equipment- if they are real, they don't promise very much in the way of propulsion or metric engineering -yet. It might take hundreds or even thousands of years to get something usable from this.

[radtech497]

Not necessarily. The effects observed are so small that they fall roughly within the error bars of the equipment- if they are real, they don't promise very much in the way of propulsion or metric engineering -yet. It might take hundreds or even thousands of years to get something usable from this.

Given that the "current era" in OA is more than ten thousand years later than the RL present, surely "something usable" would have emerged by OA's "now," especially with S:6 archai available to search for answers.

The above, of course, is only true if the observed effects are real and not just noise.

Radtech497