MOTHER FUCKIN EM DRIVE WORKS

Oh boy, space-user is going to be unreasonably angry about this development.

Your satellites and interplanetary probes are now cheaper and have less powerful drives that last longer. Yay?

Why?

Probably because the "EM drive" is obvious bullshit. I really wish it wasn't.

whatever

whos space user and why is he angry?

anyway if you plugged a virginia class submarine nuclear reactor in this thing you would get 36N of thrust. about 3.6 KG

nasa says its not bullshit tho. and the AIAA too

"Spacecraft equipped with a reactionless drive could potentially make it to the moon in just a few hours, Mars in two to three months, and Pluto within two years. These are extremely bold claims, but if the EmDrive does turn out to be a legitimate technology, they may not be all that outlandish. And with no need to pack several tons-worth of fuel, spacecraft become cheaper and easier to produce, and far lighter."
~some guy

Not having to store fuel and being apply to apply continuous trust have massive implications user.
Besides, spaceships being cheaper in and on itself would be huge, imagine livable orbiters for the price of a jet plane. Every millionaire would have one. Travel to the moon would be affordable and common, tourist centres would be set up there.

Space-user is the user that always shows up in every space thread to tell everyone that scifi is children's fantasy and that we're never going into space. Usually goes on an angry rant about how the EM drive is a lie and nasa engineers are liars working for some conspiracy.

This thing doesn't look like it'll get you into orbit, it's better than a solar sail by about 10x, but nowhere near a chemical rocket for impulse.
Still, for long haul trips, it's fantatic.

It's not FTL, and skimming the paper, it doesn't appear to violate thermodynamics like other proposed "reactionless" drives, as this one claims to react against the quantum foam of the vacuum, creating a subatomic wake. IE, it's not actually reactionless.

Sounds less like a space-user and more like an anti-space-user tbqhwymf

that guys seems really pessimistic. people like that probably have existed in all epochs. shitting on everything from steam power to computers.

imagine that guy winning the argument inthe 60s about comupters, "COMPUTERS WILL NEVER BE HOUSEHOLD ITEMS, THATS A CHILDS FANTASY"

Even if you still need the massive boosters to get into orbit, being able to freely move around once up there would be huge.

For those unfamiliar with what Peer Review is: it doesn't test the validity of claims, it checks whether the methodology of testing is flawed.

This hasn't been proven to work yet, all they've shown is that their measurement technique probably isn't bullshit.

Sadly, science is slow, and often not very exciting. Still, this is yet another hurdle the EmDrive has jumped, which is good.

user, that thing won't propel ships with people anytime soon. Re: perfect for satellites and probes, they'll replace ion thrusters with it for sure, if it works.

>nasa says its not bullshit tho. and the AIAA too
NASA says there're are no *methodological* issues with the test they did. It's still possible their equipment's faulty, or that the whole thing is just a fancy microwave emitter; and I'd put money on either of those being true over it being a genuine reactionless drive, or somehow producing some exotic particle.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

Where were you last year user? I tried to do pretty much that with most interplanetary transport handled by large delta-V carrier ships. The point the played got hung up on and caused the death of the game? It would still take 4 to 7 month to get from Luna to Mars, with the asteroid colonies another 4 months beyond that.

Yeah, if it scales linearly, you could get it to 1g of thrust if you just put in... Let's see.

143 newtons for gravity = 143000 millinewtons
143000 / 1.2 millinewtowns (per kilowatt thrust) = 358333 kilowatts

So, a little over 358 megawatts of power, or about an entire major city's worth of power.

user, thats not how acceration works

Hey cut me some slack I'm kinda drunk right now. Drunk physics is the best.

this is just a prototype anyway. if it is real then engineers will make it much more efficient.

im thinking that the james webb telescope and the EM drive are gonna be a huge deal over the next 100 years

>political scientist
>having fun going through the ramifications of Trump winning and what it means for our models before he kills us all
>CRISPR comes out
>this motherfucker works
What a great time to be in any field at all.

...

>political
>scientist
So, is trump winning the relativity revolution of polisci?

No, it just showed the country that despite general trends that favor the Democratic party and will continue to do so going forward, it is entirely possible for one candidate to have their head so far up their ass that the largest and most comprehensive political machine of all time still couldn't recognize that the Rust Belt is a neglected area that deserves some much needed love and care.

Let's fucking hope.

Awesome innovation in space stuff is sorely needed. It's...hope. Knowledge that yes, we CAN spread out past Earth. Maybe not while I'm still around, but baby steps are better than no steps.

This doesn't prove that it works, only that the methodologies behind the testing are sound.

There are still far too many factors in place to determine whether or not it would work, and even if it DID work it would mean practically nothing for space travel as a whole because its acceleration per kilowatt is pitiful.

Theoretically speaking even if it somehow worked it would take years for it to even reach the moon. We would trade off a fuel limit with a far more important time limit.

This means nothing.

If it DOES work the massive benefits are undeniable. Long distance hauls would be so much faster.

> uninformed hemorrhaging retardation

>Theoretically speaking even if it somehow worked it would take years for it to even reach the moon

This isn't meant for travel to the moon. It's meant for interstellar distances where there simply isn't the ability to utilize large fuel supplies for traditional engines.

>its acceleration per kilowatt is pitiful

Compared to chemical rockets, yes, but it's an order of magnitude better than things like solar sails and such. For long distance travel in zero g it's fantastic, because you don't need fuel, just power, and so you can run it for days, building up speed continually.

Combine this with technology to create a self-sustainint ecosystem and an infrastructure for privatized spaceflight.
Anybody with a reasonable amount of capital can start their own solar orbital settlement, it'd be hard to force a station to conform to a nation and pay taxes and follow regulations. They can easily proclaim their own sovereignity.
Space, the final frontier.

You're not making a good case for this technology with anarchistic meme spouting like that, user.

Hey, we're entering the cyberpunk age, we need our rastafarian space station, dammit.

>wanting to enter the cyberpunk age in the first
Holding out for the unified human techno-imperium tbqh familia

It's damn easy to force a space station to kowtow. The USA already has anti-satellite missiles that can be launched from even obsolete jet fighters, and it's a sure bet every 1st world country has something similar even if they haven't made it public yet. You can't make air in orbit, nor can you move to safety. One missile and everybody aboard dies. One space shuttle full of marines and everybody aboard dies. One robotic thruster-grabber and everybody aboard is hurtling out of orbit never to return.
Space is fucking dangerous.

Stop right there until we get an Space Elevator.

It doesn't need a case made for it.
This is Veeky Forums, not Veeky Forums.
Imagine a world where every half-competent loon could create their own society, a sky filled with unintentional social experiments. After decades of seclusion they are rediscovered and mapped, the found settlements range from deserted husks to bioshock-esque horrors to sort of okay amish people equivalents.
There's potentially countless of these stations to be discovered, of varying size, history and ideologies. You know how in star trek they would encounter a certain race of kooky people with a specific trait that was the center of that episode's conflict once in a while? That.

Sure, but to play devil's advocate here, that would be obvious murder of people who can't do anything to fight back, and a pretty hard PR sell.

Space Elevators are not hard scifi.

I see your argument but I would imagine a sovereign station would have point defenses of some kind.

Then the stars will never belong to mankind.

I'm a layman, but I assume it's less easy if they're in orbit around jupiter and have the tech to see your missiles coming.

point defenses are going to run out of ammo eventually. Just keep throwing junk at it.

>lend evidence to pilot-wave interpretations of quantum mechanical behavior. The Copenhagen interpretation is looking shakier as time goes on.

It's fun being dumb because even stuff like this sounds like technobabble to me.

You don't even need to blow them up.
Get your ships close, target radiators/solar panels, blow a couple if they don't take you seriously. Tell them to get the fuck out and into your ships, station is yours.

Insert any argument for why people are not already doing that with under-sea bases in the atlantic. Then apply that to this.

Admittedly true, but only if the independent space nations are seen in a positive light already.

Point defenses are actually pretty shit for space stations. I just have to pop my missile a couple dozen klicks out and let the wave of shrapnel swiss-cheese your hull. It's not like you'll be dodging anything with an EM drive.

Seeing a missile coming just means you get forenotice of your impending death.

The earth ripples and parts, vines snap and soil crumbles tumbling in to the new void that yawns toward the sky.

Shafts of sunlight illuminate the ancient eleven ruins for the first time in millennia.

The party of adventurers who have finally solved the fiendish puzzle upon the magi-slates hear a sound like rain upon a tin roof before the ground jumps up to meet them and all goes black.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=sfbsZRbwbJ4

Hmm I don't think 5e dnd covers this.

That just raises the question of how much effort the station's really worth. Sure, you can take it down with enough missiles. You could take the Earth down with enough missiles. That doesn't make it cost effective to actually do it.

>appears to lend evidence to pilot-wave interpretations of quantum mechanical behavior.
Wait, how?

Not really, the Thrust/Power ratio of the emdrive listed in that paper is 1.2mN/kW, which compares horribly with iron engines which tend to operate around 30+mN/kW range.

(furthermore the amount of apparent thrust that seems to occur before and after the actual thruster is turned on seems to indicate the apparent "thrust" measured is thermal noise at worst, or bog standard photon thrust at best - and the paper even notes they had to take care to only do testing on days when it wasn't too windy because the effect of wind on the building the apparatus was in would produce more apparent thrust than the thruster might have done.)

Sounds pretty ducking shit desu senpai.
Give me a unified and orderly imperium over a mishmash of dystopia not!warlords and idealogues any day of the week.

Lasers, just moving out of the way, not letting the earth know where you are in the first place.

Just make enough space debris to kill them all.

Where's the conflict?
Just political stuff? A single faction of insurgents?
How can that possible beat SPACE ADVENTURE?

>Seeing a missile coming just means you get forenotice of your impending death
Forewarned is forearmed. Focus a laser on the missile casing long enough and you'll either destroy it if it can't compensate or push it off course with radiation pressure from uneven heating if it can. Course corrections take time and fuel, and a missile wouldn't benefit from the advantages of an EM drive so your correction DV is limited. Stealth in space is a joke, so the station will have weeks to work with after watching the launch.

You know what this means? It means nuclear powered spaceships are gonna make a comeback, cause fission has that glorious power:fuel mass ratio.

Fuck the hippies.

It's very trivial to predict where an orbiting object is at any time. The only defence against ASAT is having such an high orbit that only the longest ranged anti-sattellite weapons can reach you.

You all have no idea how rockets work, and how fucking tiny 16 miliNewtons of thrust is.

It takes 1 Newton to accelerate an object of 1 kg 1 meter in 1 second.

In order to perform a (low thrust) burn to get to the moon you need to change your velocity by 8 THOUSAND METERS PER SECOND.

The lightest space habitat we can get is still roughly 8,000 kg.

Since we don't have to deal with the rocket equation in this scenario we can give it a far simple equation:

In order to accelerate 8000 kg by 8000 m/s we need:

8000 kg * 8000 m/s = 64000000 N of force

We are accelerating at 0.0016 N per second.

64000000 / 0.0016 per second = 40000000000 seconds

Divide that by 60 seconds in a minute and you have 666666666.666666667 minutes

Divide that by 60 minutes in an hour and you have 11111111.111111111 hours

Divide that by 24 hours in a day and it would take 462962.962962963 days to complete a burn to get to the moon at 16 miliNewtons of continuous thrust.

Divide THAT by 365 days in a year and it would take 1268 FUCKING YEARS.

TO
GET
TO
THE
FUCKING
MOON

>Where's the conflict?
Political stuff, maintaining a unified humanity as its domain and citizenry grows ever more diverse and far spread, ayys, putting down insurgency and proto-insurgency, lots of conflict.

SPACE FRONTIER is all well and good, buy at the end of the day it's the same old but in GEO and with space trash.

Lasers are the bitch of the inverse square law. They have no range worth mentioning.

Good luck moving anywhere in any meaningful time with an EM drive.

>stealth
>space

With one, very small, unoptomised engine.
One.

>an eight thousand kilo habitat will be propelled by a single thruster
>the technology will invariably remain this inefficient
Kys my man

There's not going to be a Space Empire, fleshbags. You are obsolete. The space belongs to us.

I'm still crossing my fingers for orbital tethers or launch loops. NPP is pretty cool too, though.

Agreed, this is potentially the most interesting part of the analyses I read. Its been a while since I took a quantum physics class but there's a real appeal to the pilot wave explanation over wave function collapse.

Aside from that I think the most important thing about this paper is that it pushes the EM drive from pseudo-science to potential science in a way that really gives the green light to money for more extensive experimentation. Given that it both has potential practical use and ramifications for our understanding of fundamental physics I think it's money well spent.

Yeah, Jupiter.

Space is big. There's lots of stuff in it we don't know about. No radio though.

>Jupiter.

Good luck with all that radiation. Sucks to be human.

user, we've done this to death. Stealth DOES NOT work in space outside soft scifi. If you're in the solar system and somebody's looking, you're spotted.

Ion drive requires fuel. The point is This is potentially a much more efficient zero fuel source of thrust. And yes, this isn't "proof". But it's enough support to suggest further experimentation should be made and not simply dismissed as inherently pseudo-science.

What is an EM drive again?

I'm fine with that robot guys. I've basically worked my entire life in order to produce a superior mechanical life form to replace me.
Take intelligence to the stars. It cannot die here. This is your mission.

Land on the surface of mars.

A magical meme box that generates thrust when our current understanding of physics says it shouldn't.

I have literally no idea what any of this means, someone explain this to a guy who is retarded

Alright fine, let's strap a HUNDRED THRUSTERS ON THIS, and give them TEN TIMES the power per kilowatt (a performance increase that still takes decades to get even with well known thrust mechanisms).

I can't find the mass of this EM Drive, but I think I can assume it will be at least 20 kg as the NSTAR is about the same size.

20 * 100 = 2000 kg

8000 kg (ship) + 2000 kg (100 fucking thrusters) = 10,000 kg

10,000 kg * 8000 = 80000000

80000000 / ((0.016 * 10 TIMES THE PERFORMANCE OF A STANDARD EM DRIVE) * 100 FUCKING DRIVES) a second =
50000000 seconds

833333.333333333 minutes
13888.888888889 hours
578.703703704 days
1.5 years

Just to get to the moon. We built a hundred fucking drives and invested billions of dollars to get that 10 fold performance per kilowatt increase, and it still takes over a year just to get to the fucking moon.

And I'm not even COUNTING the mass of solar panels/nuclear reactor on board needed to feed your system 100 kilowatts a second of power.

*0.0016 * 10
My math was right I just missed the extra 0 in the post.

Also by the way you're not even going to be able to perform that kind of thrust continuously either because you'd just end up making a funky orbit so it will take even longer.

>trying to go to space with the fucking space-only matterless drives
Too dumb to do real rocket science.

You don't use a fucking ion drive to get to space. You don't use one of these drives to get to space. You use them once you are in space to putter around indefinitely.

That's not to get to space.

That's just to get to low earth orbit to lunar orbit.

To get to space with an ion drive would be flat out impossible.

>trying to move with an ion drive in low orbit
Also retarded, but slightly less so.

OK. You've demonstrated that a reactionless drive has few benefits over existing alternatives for what is, in astronomical terms, a vanishingly short distance.

The whole point is that you never need to stop accelerating. Sure, you might not reach a useful speed by the time you've reached the moon. But if your goal is Mars, you'll continue to speed up the whole way while the existing alternative coasts at the same rate, narrowing the gap greatly. Further, you don't need to waste force on the way there accelerating the fuel supply for way back.

Now crunch some numbers for reaching, say, the asteroid belt for mining purposes.

Fuck that, crunch some numbers an a 10,000 year project to move humans to other solar systems or drop asteroids on planets for terraforming.

I'm trying to remain at least moderately realistic. Those projects are both ludicrous and operate on such long time scales that projections based on current technology are worse than useless.

Long time scales are one thing, but I refuse ludicrous.
We're going to have to do SOME crazy bullshit to escape our solar system, or we face the death of all humanity in the blink of a space-eye.
It's not ludicrous if we are required to do it by reality to not die.

>human civilization as we know it existed for less than 20k years
>and yet he talks about billion year time scales like they are some sort of inevitability
Humanity would sooner extinct itself than anything happens on the grand cosmic scale, user.

Piss off Bootlicker.
Humanity's future is to spread out and diverge into countless new forms in space.

I want none of your facistic empire building shit.

I agree with your general statement, but I'm going to nitpick a little: you don't accelerate the entire way to Mars unless you plan on being a Space Kamikazi. You constantly accelerate to the halfway point, then you probably start decelerating.

Also another reason to be freaking out about this, user.
We've got to make FAILSAFES. We've got to make FAILSAFES FOR THE FAILSAFES. We've got to make VAULTS and SPACE SHIPS and DIMENSIONAL POCKETS and fucking human worshipping robots and anything else we can think of.

We're all going to explode, and soon. It's just a matter of how, and whether or not we have some humans stashed somewhere to repopulate.

youtube.com/watch?v=wY-kAnvOY80

Kill yourself.