Space Travel Engines and beyond

[Kuiper7986]

Rocket Engines:
The  rocket engine, either nuclear or other, is to exert a force, F, for a time, t, on a body of mass, m, to change the velocity, v, of the body by an amount, v. The calculation of these parameters is what demonstrates the advantages of the nuclear rocket over the chemical one and determines the actual configuration of the rocket engine.

Ion Engines:
The Ion engine, which is sometimes called the electrostatic engine, is the electric system that obtains the highest degree of conversion of electric power into thrust, high exhaust velocity, and a longest operational lifetime. This engine works on the principle of the ionization of the propellant gas through the use of direct electron bombardment or radio frequency fields to increase the temperature of the gas and cause the desired thrust.

Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion (M2P2):
An advanced plasma propulsion system that will enable spacecraft to attain unprecedented speeds, with minimal energy and mass requirements. It will create a large scale magnetic bubble around the spacecraft to ride the solar winds, and accelerate the spacecraft to unprecedented speeds.  


Gravitational Engine?:


I just thought this might be interesting...

[Syzerian]

so, you humans have finally discovered a faster and more efficient meens of space travel... about time
and you have thought up a way of beyond light speed travel which is the most basic form of teleportation. however you still have not thought of such devices that can create these gravitational vortexes. using gravity is the only real way to get desired speed although to get the real speeds (traveling light years away in just a few hours) you need a capital ship which extremely high shielding to be able to resist the extreme gravity where a mere fighter ship would be completely obliderated

[snow_RAveN]

looks like some 1 has lots of free time ( iam jelous )

theres still the \"you cant travel faster then light cause your gonna have infinte mass theory \" to consider

i dont think we\'r gonna travel faster than light or even move at 1/3 the speed of light at least for another 200 years

besides syzerian we can always invent \" inertia supressing devices \"  which would make the ships lighter and thus travel faster, while we figure out the gravity part ....
and if you look closer \" the mass of the crath has been canceled out by the anti gravity \" that means we dont have to make a ship with good shielding

[Xordan]

No, the point is that you won\'t have any mass. Nothing that has mass can travel faster than light So if you don\'t have mass, you won\'t have any problems. (Light has 0 mass as it\'s both a particle and a wave.)

As for the pull of gravity ripping you apart, that isn\'t a problem either, as you can easily make to two forums of gravity cancel each other out, if you have the technology to do travel this fast.

Of course, we don\'t have the technology to do this, and we won\'t do unless the public are interested in it more for the funding to go into it. And as most people\'s lives revolve around soap operas, it\'ll never happen.

Another funky thing about this is that time will slow down for you when you travel at these speeds So you\'ll age far slower if you travel lots then if you stay on the ground.

[karakth]

Travelling faster than the speed of light...Won\'t this send you backwards in time?

[Syzerian]

you need a large capital ship which has its own center of gravity about half the force of this planet. high shielding capabilities so the ship doesnt get completely crushed by the gravity vortex and so that microscopic particles dont rip your ship appart.
the capital ship has to deploy 4-6 gravitation field generators which create a kind of black orb of energy and the grav generators have powerful engines on them to stop being pulled into the vortex and being completely destroyed. these engines only last for about 30 seconds so the ship then has a small amount of time to get a good speed run up and make sure the path is clear of asteroids, planets etc and head straight for its location.
there is alot of maths involved in this form of travel to determine exactly where you will end up.

(this was going to be a very long post but i have to go now)

[Xordan]

*reads Syzerian\'s last post*

*sigh*

Size doesn\'t matter you know.

Although yes, u\'d need some super think armour plating, or some sort of shield device, or you\'re gonna have alot of holes in your ship.

Karakth: Maybe, but as nobody has done it, who\'s to say. The chances are that time would just go super slow, to the point that travel wouold become almost instantanious to the person travelling.

[snow_RAveN]

0.o

syzerian .. ermm ... nevermind .....

and maby ... time travel .. any  Test scores you want to change hmm ?

[Kuiper7986]

well humans aren\'t very far yet in this field. Right now at the most advanced tech we have that could be in use is Ion Engines. The Mini-Magnetospheric Plasma Propulsion is still in development. And as for Gravitational Engines, scientists right now don\'t really no where to begin, it\'s still all pen and paper.
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I got the rest of this info from a different website, this is not my own info, but I thought I\'d share it.

One of the reasons that prevent any object with a mass going at or faster than the speed of light is that the mass is not constant - it increases with velocity and it goes to infinity at the speed of light. So that eventually you need infinite amounts of energy to accelerate infinite mass past the speed of light mark. (and as far as I know we have yet to find an infinite source of energy.

We really do not know what would happen to time when an object passes the speed of light. The only thing we have to rely on is the Special Theory of Relativity (Einstein 1905) and according to it time in a moving reference frame (say your space ship) goes slower as compared to a stationary frame (say Earth) the faster you go. In fact the equation that governs this so called time dilation is given below:

So you see when you start off - at zero speed (0% of speed of light) your time is just regular i.e. the time slowing factor (xt) is equal to 1. As you speed up your time runs slower by the factor shown on the y-axis. As you are approaching 100% of the speed of light your time slows more and more until it is infinitely slowed down. (You should realize that everything slows down including your heart beats, your thoughts, etc.) So for an example if your ship goes at 98% of the speed of light and you take a one year journey, when you return to Earth five years have gone by.

This region of speeds below 100% of the speed of light is the region of our regular time or Real Time.

Now say somehow you were able to go faster than the speed of light (i.e. the v in the above equation is now greater than c the speed of light). The equation will then give us a square root of a negative number on the right hand side (which is an imaginary number.) Well I can factor out the imaginary unit number (i or the square root of minus one) and plot the result on the same graph. This region I call Imaginary Time since it is some weird time with an imaginary unit attached to it (so I don\'t really know what this time means.)

However you see that time in this imaginary region will speed up from infinity to the regular time speed of 1 and continue speeding up. At 140% or higher speed of light, time slowdown factor is less than one, i.e. time will go faster than in the stationary frame! So for an example if your ship goes at 200% of the speed of light and you take a one year journey, when you return to Earth only about 7 months have gone by. However I need to stress again that this is just a crazy thought experiment which produces some weird imaginary time and has no physical meaning.
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My own thoughts:
So what I believe is that maybe we can go pass the speed of light but only if the rules are bent, not broken.

[Watcher]

I have a question if telpoters are invented will that count as faster than light speed because they could transport matter across the whole unvers in a milly second.

[dfryer]

Yes, if they could transmit information between two points faster than light could, then they\'re \"faster than light\", and that could cause trouble.  One possible approach to teleportation involves the concept of \"bending space\", so that you\'re not travelling *fast*, you\'re just taking a shorter path, and hence not violating any faster-than-light rules.

Just think, if a negative-mass baseball hit you in the chest, it would knock you *forward*.

[Psybur]

I love reading these things. It\'s like brain candy.

[Silverblod]

All very interesting....somewhat flawed....but it still doesn\'t answer the important question....

How far can you stretch a rubber band before it breaks?

[Kuiper7986]

Info from a website not mine blah blah:
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Danish Boffins have made a breakthrough that will bring Star Trek style teleportation and super-fast quantum computing closer.
Eugene Polzik and his colleagues at the University of Aarhus have made two samples of several trillion atoms interact at a distance.

Quantum entanglement, or the art of entwining two or more particles without physical contact, was known by Einstein who called it \"spooky action at a distance.\"

While it is not exactly time for anyone to be \"beamed up\" (unless they are extremely small and not particularly atomically complex), it is the first step to using real-life quantum communication devices and computers that process data on other planes of existence. Certainly it makes the concept of teleportation a theoretical possibility.

The first experiments in technology of this kind was in 1998 when scientists from the University of California teleported a beam of light across a laboratory bench.

\"This is the first time that two samples have been entangled in this way using light, even though the samples are separated by some distance,\" Polzik said.

The work follows developments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where scientists are working on a secret US Army-funded project to develop the world\'s first quantum internet.

Entanglement will be used to create, store and distribute quantum data. It could pave the way to make super-fast quantum computers and link them into a quantum internet.

Quantum computing would also be able to crack the strongest encrypted codes in use, which explains why the army have taken such a strong interest.
---------------------My Own Thoughts----------------------------
Dang Quantum Internet? I don\'t know what the hell that means except maybe the Internet served by Quantum Computers. As for teleportation, yes we already teleported molecules (only), which makes teleporting humans and large cargo very theoretically possible. It\'s just that we are in this point in history that doesn\'t have the technology yet, but I feel it\'s getting close.

EDIT: That\'s pretty advanced. Quantum Data?
That means data will be stored in the smallest amount that can exist physically in a quantity independently, especially a discrete quantity of electromagnetic radiation. Data stored in the form of Quantum Packets, that\'s getting too deep for me.

[Syzerian]

Xordan: size does matter
you need something huge to create enough power output for the shielding and braking engines. when you pass though the gravity vortex however the ship goes from weighing nothing to weighing about 10,000,000 tons so you need the ship to have a it own gravitational energy.
but people must realise that going faster than the speed of light does not mean you travel back in time. time is just one of those man made things to make things easyer for the human mind to grasp.
and you are only going faster than the speed of light for a short amount of time, as you can imagine it takes a long time to go from light speed to 0.

i wonder if its possible to create a big ball of friction to slow a ship down from light speed without the ship completely decintigrating

bah, i know, im really bad at explaining things