Update - Fuelless microwave space drive now invalidated by 3 separate studies. Oh well.

Yeah, the crazier stuff you here about pushing on virtual plasma or quantum foam is just crazy reaching to ignore for now. That is people coming up with really weird buzzwordy reasons for why this alleged force may not violate conservation of momentum, because that's a big one right there. The actual principles needed to calculate the forces and whatnot are all purely electromagnetic.

But yes, even that aside, at it's simplest it appears to directly contradict conservation of momentum. All those ridiculous and crazy theories are being put forward by people who think that those theories are less crazy than a violation of conservation of momentum. And they might be right.

Thanks for the clarification Yonder.

Malor, the other conclusion to be reached is that the *explanation* is wrong.

Given the simplicity of the setup, I am wondering why isn't it yet recreated in a crudest form already by someone. A copper chamber, an industrial power microwave emitter, and a few dozen kilowatt. You either get your propulsion, or no propulsion, or maybe some "cascade resonance"-type of an event, which will be great to stream on Youtube.

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

Given the simplicity of the setup, I am wondering why isn't it yet recreated in a crudest form already by someone. A copper chamber, an industrial power microwave emitter, and a few dozen kilowatt. You either get your propulsion, or no propulsion, or maybe some "cascade resonance"-type of an event, which will be great to stream on Youtube.

The theory paper specifies that the copper chamber needs to be filled with a vacuum. Depending on how much the atmosphere would hamper the field that may make things harder. Also, the dimensions of your copper chamber (the "waveguide" in the paper) must be matched with fairly (very?) tight tolerances to the frequency of your microwave emitter. So these are things that would have to be purpose built for each other.

That said, they are things (especially if vacuum is "nice to have" not "need to have") that can be built really easily by many entities. Like... really easily. So I suspect that we will start to see some stuff like that (I'll be completely honest, I've absolutely thought about giving it a shot!) The problem is that none of those results would be that trustworthy. A null result could just mean they screwed something up and built it wrong, a small positive result could be due to an improper test setup, the sort of legitimate grievances people have with this last NASA test, and a large positive result... Like a youtube video of a little cone and a microwave on a skateboard moving uphill (come on internet, make that for me, pretty please!) could easily be pranks.

But yeah, though it's not going to be trivial to built, in comparison to the difficulty of building other forms of space engines, just, damn. One of the many things that contributes to this thing being way too good to be true... probably.

Conservation of momentum is so... so... Newtonian. IMAGE(http://rps.net/QS/Images/Smilies/yuck.gif)

The beauty of this is that it *seems* that it would be easy to disprove it. That's part of what makes me intrigued by it. Normally, fake energy systems don't show results with a wide variety of power outputs (I think I'm saying that correctly). They have some dependency which when modified removes the effect entirely.

Look at the Steorn Orb engine. It's so finicky that no one but the company can make it work, and maybe not even them. Cold fusion? May be a real effect, but it's so tiny as to be functionally useless, and it eats platinum. And so forth.

But this one's been replicated a few times - not enough - with different setups and widely varying power outputs, and compares favorably to systems that we know work. It's intriguing. And it's relatively simple, which doesn't leave a lot of room for subtle mistakes.

I'm right there with you on that. Someone at Ars Technica was comparing this to (other?) crackery like cold fusion, but there is a really important difference between it and stuff like that. Those devices always seem to be ridiculously complicated and/or proprietary. The company has to make them themselves and then test them themselves, or have other people test them with their guidance, very rarely without it. This is completely different, it's a simple design that these independent agencies are thus able to build and test THEMSELVES. They can still test them poorly, and there are many weak facets of the NASA test (I haven't gotten to see the Chinese paper yet) but at the very least we know that the inventor didn't hide a battery in there or something (not that a battery would help in this case, but you get the idea).

Another side effect of how easy these things are to build (in addition to the obvious increased volume of the "too good to be true!!!" alarms in my head) is that it also removes most of the motivation for pure fraud. This isn't "my private device can do this really cool thing, you should throw piles of investment money at me, no one else is every going to figure this out!" it's "dude, every space agency in the entire world could start building these in bulk if this pans out" territory.

So yeah. If I had to pick a number of my confidence... I dunno... 20%? The relentless optimism of youth versus Conservation of FREAKING Momentum. We won't have long to wait though. They are so easy to build that I'm pretty confident that within a year they'll be quite thoroughly debunked or there will be a very good start to vindicating them.

Hmm, I just thought of a fun little exercise for this weekend: calculate how long it would take a Voyager 3 with this drive to catch up to 1 and 2. I bet it wouldn't be very long at all.

Forgot about this thread for a while and just re-read the last few posts.

So... Any news on what's happening with it in near-future? Did anyone announce any new replication projects in progress?

Gorilla.800.lbs wrote:

Given the simplicity of the setup, I am wondering why isn't it yet recreated in a crudest form already by someone. A copper chamber, an industrial power microwave emitter, and a few dozen kilowatt. You either get your propulsion, or no propulsion, or maybe some "cascade resonance"-type of an event, which will be great to stream on Youtube.

I haven't heard anything new. As far as I know the larger model that that NASA team said they would make to retest and pass along to other agencies is still going forwards.

Cross posting the new adventures of the little engine that (possibly) could from the Space & Astronomy thread for those that haven't seen it yet:

fangblackbone wrote:

NASA may have just stumbled onto creating a warp bubble: (mind asplode)

http://www.inquisitr.com/2040259/did...

http://www.iflscience.com/space/warp...

tldr: when testing the engine, light passing through the resonance chamber was measured moving faster than the speed of light, though further testing is needed to verify that the results.

This is one of those things that's just so cool it probably won't pan out.

That's potentially amazing. Thanks for sharing it here!

There's a big thread on reddit on this. From what I can glean, ruhk's point of view seems to be the prevalent one - don't get too excited.

Still very interesting. Thanks for putting it here!

Sorry, I thought these posts were part of the space and astronomy thread.

Those extra-dimensional beings are going to be super pissed. Not only we are siphoning the vacuum energy from their world (or creating black holes in it, or stealing their staplrs etc), but now we are also shooting freaking lasers into it. Great.

Everyone check your watches for ominous twitchings.

Tesseract, take me away!

I was following threads, and apparently, one of the worries with an Alcubierre drive is that could potentially "scoop up" particles as it traveled, endangering the crew inside, and then releasing them simultaneously when the field is shut down. Boom!

So that's what gamma ray bursts are!

That's awesome, Lou.

I was expecting that finger to go -> ... elsewhere.

jbavon wrote:

I was expecting that finger to go -> ... elsewhere.

Maybe a future version will intercept "the moon".

They talk a bit about possible applications in that article, but to my mind the more interesting question is how the heck does the thing work? Assuming that they keep nullifying competing hypotheses about how the test models are operating, it seems like there's still no consensus about how the thing actually works.

That article stated that the closest application would be in the ISS, but that's not actually true. People think of this as being a space engine because it would be great at that, and NASA is doing it, but making the large assumption that it actually works, the first guy that developed it has gone extensively into possible applications, and the force you can get scales up nicely enough that elevators, cars, maybe even trains might possibly maybe be able to use them to levitate.

It's totally stupid and impossible though. Really weird that they haven't been able to demonstrate that yet... (Don't get your hopes up Yonder).

Yeah, we were talking about it at work today. With all the checks they've been doing it's starting to look like it's doing something.

Maybe there is some other physical effect that they aren't accounting for and it isn't a reactionless drive, but even that would teach us something. There's something new here; we just need to figure out what it is.

tanstaafl wrote:

Maybe there is some other physical effect that they aren't accounting for and it isn't a reactionless drive, but even that would teach us something. There's something new here; we just need to figure out what it is.

Agreed! I'm hopeful that they will with time, and I'm excited to hear what they learn.

This is just the movie Event Horizon waiting to happen.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

This is just the movie Event Horizon waiting to happen.

My wife still won't forgive me for selecting that movie as the first one we'd see at Disney's then newly built super cineplex. (Back when stadium seating was a novel thing.)