"IS WARP DRIVE POSSIBLE?" - A discussion
- Thread starter CLARK NOVA
- Start date
Even the Pakled have warp drive! What are we doing wrong, folks?
We've hit The Great Filter. It was called.... 2020.
As an alternative to magnetic confinement, inertial confinement, and muon-catalysed fusion, NASA are working on lattice confinement fusion (LCF) as an approach for powering long-duration space missions and deep-space propulsion.
Lattice Confinement Fusion | Glenn Research Center | NASA
It will be interesting to see how far they can push this approach.
Lattice Confinement Fusion | Glenn Research Center | NASA
It will be interesting to see how far they can push this approach.
I have this image in my head of facehuggers refusing them too.
It would be nice if fossil fuels were all that was needed. I really wanted Planet 9 to be a grapefruit sized black hole—or two of them. There is your “warp” right there. Just build a tether out ahead of your craft then sever and do a burn to slingshot past at high sublight speeds.
A black hole with a Schwarzschild radius that small would have the mass of about 8 Earths. Not sure where you'd get one from.
Viktor T. Toth - Hawking radiation calculator (vttoth.com)
I think the warp bubble idea is merely hyperbole, unless the bubble that you are creating involves the entire removal of mass from the heaviest atoms being encountered while ensuring some particles remain that have mass to assist in slowing the vehicle down.
A larger bubble, two kilometers in diameter, would provide more than enough room for a ship to travel inside the bubble without fear of the bubble collapsing with a sudden in rushing of atoms with full mass from taking place.
A larger bubble, two kilometers in diameter, would provide more than enough room for a ship to travel inside the bubble without fear of the bubble collapsing with a sudden in rushing of atoms with full mass from taking place.
cold fusion/LENR has had so many quacks and charlatans it has made this kind of research difficult for anyone serious about it. I am glad they are still looking into it. Even if it turns out to be nothing, it is worth exploring.
They report that fusion-reaction neutrons were produced in this attempt unlike with cold fusion 30 years ago.
Last edited:
it's been kind of quiet on the fusion front, in general this past year. Helion and TAE both became very quiet as a general policy, but there are some interesting tidbits:
both TAE and Helion are on hiring sprees. That implies significant funding, and probably some progress.
Surprisingly, Helion is offering He3 for sale. That implies they are fusing pretty regularly now. Not necessarily at breakeven, but He3 is so valuable, they can run an old test reactor at energy loss and still make some money on those isotopes for medical and research markets. I have thought for some time that Helion is the one to bet on.
General Fusion seems to be fully funded.
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics ran into delays but have new switches and beryllium rods. They're about to hit major testing again. Rules for investment are changing and they are actually taking small scale investment. I like them. They're the little dark horse in all these projects.
Lockheed.. shrug.
on the bizzarro world side.. there's Blacklight power.. sorry now they are Brilliant Light Power. They used to claim they'd developed a lower state of the hydrogen atom called the hydrino. I don't know if they're still touting that. Their website mentioned dark matter or dark energy. I did not really read it. And amazingly they showed a live pre-recorded
test recently and announced that commercialization would be coming soon. Much like they did the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and..
both TAE and Helion are on hiring sprees. That implies significant funding, and probably some progress.
Surprisingly, Helion is offering He3 for sale. That implies they are fusing pretty regularly now. Not necessarily at breakeven, but He3 is so valuable, they can run an old test reactor at energy loss and still make some money on those isotopes for medical and research markets. I have thought for some time that Helion is the one to bet on.
General Fusion seems to be fully funded.
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics ran into delays but have new switches and beryllium rods. They're about to hit major testing again. Rules for investment are changing and they are actually taking small scale investment. I like them. They're the little dark horse in all these projects.
Lockheed.. shrug.
on the bizzarro world side.. there's Blacklight power.. sorry now they are Brilliant Light Power. They used to claim they'd developed a lower state of the hydrogen atom called the hydrino. I don't know if they're still touting that. Their website mentioned dark matter or dark energy. I did not really read it. And amazingly they showed a live pre-recorded
test recently and announced that commercialization would be coming soon. Much like they did the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and the year before, and..
^That all sounds promising. I assume there is still some way to go though before widespread deployment of fusion power reactors becomes a reality.
Probably so, but hearing the word breakeven and someone meaning it, would make my day.. uh.. decade.
I assume electrical energy is still going to be extracted using a Rankine vapour cycle and steam turbines or have alternatives been proposed? Using a Brayton cycle seems unlikely although this was proposed for certain pebble-bed and molten salt fission reactors.
Direct conversion using what method?
That's the only way to get rid of mechanical loss but..?
That's the only way to get rid of mechanical loss but..?
I don't know what each company is doing, but I believe that Helion and LPP both are intending to capture using direct output of the ion beam from the focused plasmoid in pulsed fusion from an inductor coil. This is aneutronic fusion using pB11. I suspect they would go for something easier as proof of concept, perhaps, but maybe not. Being aneutronic from the start means they don't have to worry about a lot of the shielding and environmental concerns. But of course it also means being able to reach those extremely high temperatures.
Lockheed was going to use something similar to the polywell confinement, which also is direct conversion from an ion source though I don't know anything about it.
Why? It's a really big universe.
That's what navigational deflectors are for.
Not stealing warp drive from others?
Well, that's one solution to the Fermi paradox. My own suspicion is that we are the only sapient lifeform in our branch of the multiverse but, of course, this is impossible to prove.
That's what the Trek Tech forum is for.
If your warp bubble is travelling faster than c, you can't scan ahead of it. However, perhaps some forms of warp bubbles could skitter on top of actual spacetime in a sort of Leidenfrost effect and avoid interacting with objects in it. It would make navigation very difficult.
Plagiarism seems to be the usual way that civilisations accelerate their advancement.
You bring up an interesting idea.
Is one object or ship capable of using a single warp bubble or is a ship able to create a warp bubble around several other ships that reduce local mass of space, that the other ships and objects are able to travel through using their own independent propulsive systems?
Similar threads
