The EM drive

Fuck that piece of shit, Mach Effect thrusters are where it's at.

If they work as they seem to do, they're an easy way to create relativistic kill vehicles and therefore probably explain the Fermi Paradox.

Russians supposedly tested a similar device in low Earth orbit in 2009, as well as the Chinese in 2015-2016. The inventor, Roger Shawyer, mentions a joint meeting and tech transfer with DARPA/NASA/USAF in 2008 on his website and a thruster contract with Boeing in 2010. Supposedly he's working on a stealth-mode project with Boeing, which is why not much information is coming out (although he did recently get a UK patent for it).

So either its all bullshit, or MIC spooks got a hold of the drive and are perfecting it.

last I heard, NASA's Eagleworks lab tested it and they found it to work but they couldn't explain why, their best guesses were a flaw in the testing or a fairly out-there theory called pilot wave theory, and it's going to be tested in space at some point
I really want it to work, we need a better way off this rock

youtube.com/watch?v=EJvIzxAdtFk

youtube.com/watch?v=CzKyfiBmTho

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It needs to be tested in space.

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So they're like dark forest photoids or some shit?

Why didn't Elon put one of these in space instead of the car?

Cause it doesn't work.

Why is everyone obsessed with thinking about the meme-drive as a propulsion system? Moving spacecraft with a reactionless thruster is cool and all, but if it would work it could literally be used to build a perpetual motion machine of the first kind and thus a free energy generator.

And if it indeed does work (100% doesn't) it would be a paradigm shift much greater than "a way off this rock"

It's possible that it uses the average background mass of the universe as a reaction mass. If so this would constitute a preferred frame and it's possible that you would have diminishing returns as you move faster an faster relative to the background. This might be a way to preserve energy conservation while still locally violating momentum conservation. It would still need to be powered by a beamed energy system, but would be orders of magnitude more efficient than a light sail.

>I still remember the trolling from some time ago.

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The US Navy is giving it a shot. They've got better equipment than Eagleworks so should be able to settle it.
youtube.com/watch?v=BnJ0_9MRcDU

>h2
>o2
Retard. That will just make water.

No it will make hydrogen peroxide.

Things can't burn in vacuum though.

If you werent sitting in the sest

No even if it works it wouldn't violate conservation of energy, only conservation of momentum. You still need to generate energy for it to work.

It would violate energy conservation.
Imagine it driving a car along railroad tracks.
The tracks are only there so we don't argue about frame-of-reference.
The performance of a space-drive shouldn't depend upon its motion. Anything otherwise would allow a preferred reference frame to be found.
So you turn it on and the drive consumes power at a fixed rate and produces a fixed thrust.
Speed increases linearly with time. Power consumed is proportional to how long the experiment runs.
But the kinetic energy of the railcar increases as the square of the time.
Past some critical speed, KE is going up faster than the charge in the battery is going down.

Everything else pushes against something. The roadway, the air, the water, and it takes more and more power to keep up a steady acceleration.

This applies even to rockets -- if you figure in the kinetic energy of the exhaust as well.

That's a "way out" and several SF writers have used it. I refuse to believe in any gizmo that doesn't push against SOMETHING.

But that doesn't square with Shawyer's claims. His writings specifically note that it takes power to climb or accelerate, but none (except for inefficiencies which, presumably, come out as heat) to simply hover. You can't have it both ways, even if (by extreme coincidence) the Earth was ALWAYS stationary with respect to the average background. Shades of Michelson-Morley!

I'm not sure I follow you, the car wouldn't accelerate linearly in the frame of the track. I don't see how your thought experiment differs from a usual rocket.

In what way is a "drive," that produces so little thrust that it can't be determined whether it is producing thrust or not, a better way off anything?

No, it makes nerve gas.

Assume the on-board battery drains at a constant rate.
Unless the drive-efficiency is a function of its motion thrust must also be constant. Constant thrust = constant acceleration (until you start to approach lightspeed.)

Shawyer says thrust drops as it gains kinetic energy, but that's silly. The KE gained in going from 0 to 60 MPH is different from the KE gained in going from 10000 to 10060 MPH -- and that's what a Martian would see.
KE is only meaningful relative to something else. You can't carry around a meter which tells you your own KE. Everything comes out right if the KE is measured against whatever it is you're thrusting against.

Shawyer is obviously measuring KE from the instant you turned the drive on. But motion has no "memory". Turn if off for a second and start fresh.

Another way to look at it. Shawyer says it takes no energy to hover. Only to gain speed.
OK. Build an "aircar" with just enough lift to equal its own weight. You pull the supports away and it just hangs in mid-air, right?
Now get underneath the car and give it a brief upward shove so it rises at 1 ft/sec. Thrust still equals weight, so it won't accelerate. It'll go up indefinitely at constant velocity.
But it's gaining Potential Energy!!! Where is that coming from?

In a rocket, the energy released by the burning fuel becomes the KE of both the rocket and the exhaust. The "ideal" rocket, which ejects nothing but photons, also has a "crossover velocity"; if it went down the tracks at greater than that speed, it'd be a source of free energy. However, the crossover is lightspeed. It can never go that fast, so it's not a problem. But any reactionless space-drive which produces thrust using less energy than a photon rocket must violate energy conservation.
I hope this is clear.

Far from defending Sawyer (since I think it's bunk and he's a crackpot), but the magnitude of an effect is irrelevant. If real, it could be improved. An infinitesimal violation of Newton's Third would be just as bad as a wholesale imbalance.

Heinrich Hertz had trouble detecting radio waves at a distance of a meter or so. (And, when asked, didn't think they'd ever amount to more than a useless laboratory curiosity.)

>If real, it could be improved...

But we KNOW rockets are real, and {If real, it could be improved" would apply there as well. With the benefit that we KNOW it rocket engines work, and it are already much better as a drive , so you're starting from a better place.

loose wording, if it works as advertised it would give much better acceleration in terms of mass and energy required than anything else once it's free of our atmosphere and gravity well

Shawyer is a complete crackpot. That's why I disregard EM drive for the most part. If it works then it's in a way entirely unrelated to his insane theories.

This is also why I have more patience for Mach Effect thrusters. The theory makes a decent amount of sense, and appears to square with the experimental results at least to some degree. The same mass-background clause could apply to preserve energy conservation.

No one wants to spend millions on something that might do absolute dick.

shawyer's explanation of the thrust actually has it independent of energy.

what's really tantalizing is that if it does work, it means there must be other things like this we haven't found yet
early experimentation was basically throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks, whereas modern science always tends to be based on something previously done or observed
if we can get funding and expect results from doing random-ass shit we could find out things we never would have found out otherwise (because why would anyone do them?)

they made it a secret because otherwise they would have to praise me by name in public

I feel like I've seen this exact post before

Holy freakin' crap I butchered that post. Very jet lagged, please excuse just this once.

If he can produce force (over a distance) and it doesn't depend on the energy input to the device, that's screaming "I've invented perpetual motion!!". I didn't think even Shawyer was that nutty. Citation, please.

Edison tried I-don't-know-how-many different materials before he found a filament that wouldn't go "poof" in an instant.
But that's slow, inefficient, and impossibly expensive these days.
No one with any sense is going to waste time investigating the permanent magnet motors, or the over-unity devices, or the anti-gravity machines which keep showing up on YouTube. They don't work!!!
Similarly, I don't think you're going to secure funding for a project to see what happens when you bombard cheddar cheese with protons at 10e9 electron volts. If you learned nothing of interest, shit-at-the-wall methodology would be to try Camembert next.

The whole point of science, of building theories which fit all the facts and which make testable predictions, is to avoid trial-and-error fumbling.

...

no, what i meant was that it doesn't depend on whatever kinetic energy you have. his original paper that tries to set out a theory of the drive states that thrust is a linear function of input energy.

OK. That's the point I was trying to make. If thrust is proportional to the input energy then acceleration is constant and does NOT vary with the motion of the vehicle. Which contradicts other parts of Shawyer's "explanation" and get us into trouble again.

I'm just going to make up some numbers. Suppose 1 kilowatt produces 1000 newtons of thrust and the railroad car masses 1 metric tonne. 1 tonne weighs 10,000 newtons (on the Earth's surface), so we expect it to accelerate along the tracks at 1/10th of a gravity. It picks up 1 meter/second-squared.
We'll assume it started from rest (relative to the tracks).
After 100 seconds, it's moving at 100 meters/second. Are we all in agreement?
The power consumed by the thruster (from the on-board battery) is 100,000 watt-seconds or 100,000 joules. The kinetic energy of the railcar is 0.5 * 1000 kg * 100^2 = 5,000,000 joules. This energy (including the 4,900,000 joules which seems to have come out of "nowhere") can be recovered by letting it run into a concrete wall at the end of the line.
More practically, if the railcar carries a magnet (a permanent one. No batteries up my sleeve) it will be braked as it passes through wire loops encircling the track and now we have 5 megawatt-seconds of electricity. We turn the car around and use a little of that juice to send the car hurtling back to its starting position.
Repeat this cycle indefinitely.

Of course, I made up the power-to-thrust numbers. But ANY values will work so long as the thruster produces more "oomph" than a photon rocket with the same input power.

China says almost everything is good to go.

Nuh Uh it makes crystals

Mach effect thruster at least has some potential "outs" for how it works if it is exchanging energy with the rest of the universe in a weird gravertinal way, if that's the case then it's not violating CoM any more than a sailboat does, even if it looks like itis locally.

>Edison tried I-don't-know-how-many different materials before he found a filament that wouldn't go "poof" in an instant.But that's slow, inefficient, and impossibly expensive these days.No one with any sense is going to waste time investigating the permanent magnet motors, or the over-unity devices, or the anti-gravity machines which keep showing up on YouTube. They don't work!!!Similarly, I don't think you're going to secure funding for a project to see what happens when you bombard cheddar cheese with protons at 10e9 electron volts. If you learned nothing of interest, shit-at-the-wall methodology would be to try Camembert next.The whole point of science, of building theories which fit all the facts and which make testable predictions, is to avoid trial-and-error fumbling.

Quoting this so that people who missed the point have one more chance.

>This needs to be tested in space.

To the same extent that a drive that folds cheese to release quantum fluctuation pulses, but that won't work on Earth because reasons,needs to be tested in space.

the idea isn't that it doesn't work on Earth, the idea is that the small amount of thrust detected may be due to pushing against air or the Earth's magnetic field
it's been tested in a vacuum with magnetic fields that cancel out the Earth's magnetism and it still worked, but if we really want to be sure neither of those were the cause, we should take it somewhere that naturally has no air and negligible magnetism

Needs to be tested in space -- because small forces will accumulate over time and are easier to measure.

I am reminded of Larry Niven's "Known Space" stories. In common with a lot of SF writers, his hyperdrive doesn't work too near a Sun, "because reasons". Someone notes that humans never would have discovered it because we'd never have thought to do the experiments beyond Pluto. We bought the apparatus from an alien race which DID live in the cold and dark between stars.

So you go beyond Mars and the cheese experiment doesn't work. OK, we've got to go even FURTHER!
Excuses! Excuses! Reminds of the ESP "experimenters" who (like astrologers and stock market pundits) can always find SOME reason it didn't work out. Negative vibrations or Jupiter being in an unfavorable aspect.
Unless you can point to some SPECIFIC reason, some difference between experimental setups, Science is all about repeatability. Conservation of mass, energy, momentum, angular momentum, etc. are all based on Symmetries (Noether's Theorem) which states that those laws apply uniformly throughout space and time. Local conditions may affect things. A pendulum swings a little slower at the equator than at the poles because gravity is less there, but you can compensate for that.

Yes.
Even in LEO, there's still some mag field. Proposals have been made for running currents through long tethers to raise or lower satellite orbits.

If emdrive STILL produced thrust, it would be worth the expense to run the experiment even further from Earth.

Of course, if it produced micro-thrusts in orbit around the Earth, it would still be useful even if the forces were due to interactions with the Earth's field. There's a need to tweak satellite orbits without expending reaction mass. But it would be no good for flights to other planets.

I thought several science agencies have tested though?
I think NASA and some Chinese aeronautics company did.
They found that force was being generated, but were unsure how it was being generated.

I can't speak for the Chinese.
They found force, then retracted the claim due to flaws in the experiment.
They may have made the claim again.

Eagleworks says they found force, but it's right on the limit of measurement.
As several people have already said, a test in space to eliminate several other sources will be needed to convince one side or the other.

All sorts of rumors, of course, that both the USAF and the Chinese have already made tests in space but are keeping it secret. Your guess is as good as anybody's. If anyone on Veeky Forums knew if that was true, they certainly wouldn't say.

>Needs to be tested in space -- because small forces will accumulate over time and are easier to measure.

This is also true in space. There's possibly even more miscellaneous shit to account for in microgravity around Earth Orbit than there is on a lab bench.

>I refuse to believe in any gizmo that doesn't push against SOMETHING.
It's pushing against the privileged frame of reference that makes faster than light propulsion work.

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You can't violate momentum and not violate energy conservation as well due to relativity.

I still can't believe it just
>implies there's negative inertia in front of it

>implying newtonian mechanics applies to photons

Thanks user, makes perfect sense, your point about the photon rocket is exactly what was confusing me.
I love discussing those little elementary problems about things I never thought of in physics.

>Fermi Paradox
Radio leakage is undetectable with our current instruments.

>a test in space to eliminate several other sources will be needed to convince one side or the other.

There is one side that will never be convinced,it will just become a new "suppressed technology" conspiracy theory.

I may have expressed myself badly.

There is no reason to waste time and money "testing in space" every crackpot idea that has not real theory to back up how it is supposed to work. Do we need to test pic related in space, to make sure it is not a magical space drive? I mean, there is no theoretical reason why it should be, but maybe it is and forces are so small we need to let them accumulate, IN SPACE!

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>his hyperdrive doesn't work too near a Sun, "because reasons".

They figured it out eventually. There are life-forms in Niven's hyperspace, they congregate in the area of said hyperspace that corresponds to where large masses are in vanilla space, looking for matter to fall through or soemthing, and literally eat ships that enter hyperspace near them.

I always thought that was one of Niven's less successful moments, "there's a hyperspace singularity around stars, we don;t know why" was good enough. Ship eaters just sounds stupid to me.

Also, loved the Blind Spot effect.

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>did they test it in space?
no
>any new research results?
not aside from some inconclusive hobbyists with ghetto experiments.

Don't even bother holding out hope, if somehow someone asspulls a valid and positive result they'll tell you. Not worth your brainpower to think about.

>Things can't burn in vacuum though.
Wrong. I used to think that too but you'll learn the hard way if you don't change the filter for too long and leave it running.

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Literally the only thing it has going for it is normie hype. It's a magic device with no consistent evidence of working and no science-based theory of how it SHOULD work. It's a hobby project and that's all it'll stay for now, because the money spent sending it to space has a far better chance of advancing science if it was instead used to send some extra snacks to the ISS.

If it ever proves itself to actually be worth investigating further in the first place then you can be sure we won't take long at all to send it to space.

It doesn't fit any respectable theory ergo it doesn't work and is worthless.
Stop wasting scientists' time with this nonsense.

>If I shine a flashlight at a peice of aluminum foil, and the flashlight is teathered to it by some string, the force will only push on the aluminum foil, and not the flashlight too!
>Photons violate the conservation of momentum

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>applying force on the same reference frame

Cover it up because infinite energy = universe sized black hole

That's what the O2 is for.

Agreed. That was un-necessary. Lerner's contribution?
Y'know, I think Niven stole the idea from Heinlein. "He Built a Crooked House".
They raise the window shade a little. Nothing. Raise it further. Still nothing.
Finally, it's all the way open. And still nothing. Not even blackness. Nothing!
I'd still like to know what a photograph would show.

No hyperdrive near Suns is common in written fiction since you could otherwise have sneak attacks on planets and you CAN'T have space battles if the outnumbered side can cut and run.
But you almost never see that trope in movies and TV (I can't think of any examples, in fact) because days spent crawling to a jump-point slows the action too much.

I certainly hope your satirizing brainlets. Maybe On Veeky Forums it's sometimes difficult to tell.