First, and Second

[the_gneech]

First, Happy Birthday eskermikey!

Second, from raka: Hyperdrives: A Real Possibility? A three-hour trip to Mars? Sweeeeet.

-The Gneech

Comments

[frostdemn.livejournal.com]

A three-hour trip to mars would indeed be nice, but what about the martians? I'm not worried about the lack of oxygen, but I hear some of them are pretty hostile!

[frostdemn.livejournal.com]

Another thought comes to me... What if the vessel's name is the "Minnow"?
And think about it: It's a Three-Hour Tour...
And what about this: It'll likely cost a lot, so who would be able to actually go on this trip? Likely a movie star and a millionaire. And a scientific professor of some sort.

[jamesbarrett.livejournal.com]

*facepalms* ;) -Frisk

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

All I've got to say about that. (http://www.gilligansisle.com/planet.html)

-The Gneech

[frostdemn.livejournal.com]

I was about to mention it would be "Gilligan's Planet", but you're all too quick for me. :P
But I can just imagine it happening. XP

[darkwolfie.livejournal.com]

Oh gods! Another chance for the Harlem Globetrotters to get on a TV show!

Beaten to the punch line...

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

"A Three Hour Tour...
A Three Hour Tour..."

[hossblacksilver.livejournal.com]

That's only because Earth blocks their view of Venus. That and that creature stole the Imodium Q-90 detonator. n_n

[frostdemn.livejournal.com]

Funny thing that. I'm fairly sure the number was 36, for one thing.
Secondly, when I heard it on TV, I kept thinking he was saying "Illudium Pyu 36"...

[frostdemn.livejournal.com]

"Illudium Pyu 36 Space Module" if I'm not mistaken, actually.

[kelloggs2066.livejournal.com]

Problem I see:

Okay, your device puts you into space where the speed of light is faster, so you wouldn't run into relativistic problems.

But you're still not moving.

Thing is, relativity really isn't much of a problem for us right now.
You don't need to go faster than light to get to Mars in 3 days. If you're going faster than light, then you should be able to get to Mars in under 8 to 20 minutes.

You'd still need those great big rockets to get you moving that fast.

Without really big rockets or huge amounts of thrust, it's like we're on a bicycle and they're talking about rasing the speed limit from 80 to 120MPH.

[nicodemusrat.livejournal.com]

A good point. The article says that the "engine" would produce thrust through the creation of a gravitational field. How that translates into thrust is not adequately explained.

Personally, I think the whole thing is bunk. It's based on controversial physics theories that have been around since the 50s and yet are still entirely unproven/undemonstrated, AFAIK.

[wbwolf.livejournal.com]

My thought about this is the theory sound really similar to the hyperdrive gates that were used in both Cowboy Bebop and Asimov's Foundation series.

Omnibus reply

[galadrion.livejournal.com]

Ooh, lots of things to comment on! Well, here goes...

First of all, I don't really have any problems with the "Gilligan's Planet" thing, or further employment opportunities for the Harlem Globetrotters. On the good/bad scale, these things are pretty much a wash for me.

Getting to Mars in three hours: not a bad idea, really. I do have one problem with the idea, though - acceleration forces. I don't have the figures handy to work out the problem, but I would guess that such a trip would involve accelerations well over the five-to-six g astronauts currently experience during launch, and those forces are enough to knock out most people even when sustained for less than twenty minutes. Now you're talking about subjecting crews and passengers to such forces for three hours? They're going to be in sad shape at the end of the trip...

Crossing eleven light-years in eighty days: hm. This involves a peak speed (at turn-around) of over a hundred lights - alternate physics are definitely called for here! And, if I haven't fumbled an exponent somewhere, it implies an acceleration fairly close to fifty-five gravities - as constant boost. For an eighty-day trip. Oy. If this drive doesn't manage to counteract thrust stresses, ain't no one from this planet gonna make that trip... Further speculation along these lines I will refrain from for now; I simply don't have the information.

Weapons technology from this: you know, I once did this for a Traveller game. Basic idea was a ten-ton drone ship (on the close order of the size of today's jet fighters) with a 6-G maneuver drive and enough fuel to sustain it for... well, more hours than it would need. Pop into a system at the hundred-diameter limit (as close as a jump drive will approach a gravity well in that game), release the drone with instructions to accelerate all the way to the planet. Releative velocity on arrival is something around 0.4 c (it varies a fair amount), resulting in an energy release sufficient to shatter tectonic plates, among other things. This is literally a planet-buster kinetic missile. One thing's for sure, though: you won't shoot someone before "pulling the trigger", since the projectile won't even approach relativistic speeds for a measurable time after you release it. Time dilation effects don't even become really noticible until you crack something like 0.8 c, and even at 55 G acceleration, it takes time to build up that sort of velocity. (But calculate the joules released by that ten-ton bullet at 0.4 c. You don't need relativistic speeds to do some serious damage. Off-the-cuff calculation shows 1.44e22 joules, or according to Google, 3.6 million megatons - a helluva bang, no matter how you look at it.)

[kamau-d-lyon.livejournal.com]

Interesting. There's a lot to be done and proved before this is more then just print on a page however. The other side of it is that while it would be nice to have such a propulsion system are we ready for it? And I mean that on a number of levels from proper precautions against bio-hazards (both to our world and the worlds we'd visit) to being socially ready for what we might find out there.

[chef-troy.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that if you're going to make a star drive by arranging exceptions to natural law, the best way to do it would be to figure out a way to negate or at least diminish inertia. Without inertia, it would take relatively little thrust to attain enormous speeds. Also, no G-forces... if neither the ship nor anyone in it has a tendency to remain at rest, you wouldn't feel any resistance.

That sounds safer to me than the approach in the original post. I mean, what if you accidentally went into a dimension where the speed of light was slower? It might take forever for those ships to reenter normal space.

[hossblacksilver.livejournal.com]

Well, I recall reading somewhere where some scientists managed to slow a beam of light down to around 35 m.p.h. I can't recall where or when I read it though. :/

[hossblacksilver.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but the problem would be the pilot who'd have his toy dinosaurs up on the control panel.

Well, that and a man called Jayne. n_n