Antimatter.. how good is it for propulsion?

[farmerben]

 

How about a needle shaped ship full of superconductors?  The entire length of the ship is covered in magnetic coils.  The nose of ship is giant anode.  The tail of the ship is a giant cathode.  We can create over 1,000,000 volts worth of difference between the ends.  

Now ignite a nuclear explosion.  Positive charges are moving outward at as much as 10%c.  But electrons are moving way faster.  So an enourmous number of positive ions smash into the cathode.  An enourmous number of electrons fly out to the periphery of the magnetic field and return to the anode at the nose.  

 

In space we don't have to pulse the engine particularly rapidly, so we can set up a more challenging set of reactions.  Instead of thinking in terms of pellets or cans, lets use balloons full of gas or liquid.  Carbon, Nitrogen, and Oxygen tend to be highly scattering to most types of radiation, which means they capture that energy as hot high kinetic energy charged particles.  

 

The ships can carry thousands of tons of ice, replenished from asteroids.  Inside the ship is factory that can turn carbonaceous ice into polyethylene for balloons.  We can also make mirrors by spraying aluminum spray paint onto polyethylene.  It's not a high quality mirror.  But it could be very large in size and very inexpensive.  This could focus optical energy back onto the spot where our tritium is.  We could even build an onion out of mirrors.  Each onion layer going outward can focus light at a different point, following the wavefront as it moves forward.  

 

In interstellar space, vibrations will die down in a few hours and very simple lasers can tell the ship computer the exact geometry of our propellant before we set it off.  Given several hours to work, machines could Zamboni a fresh surface of frozen sewage for each shot, protecting the cathode.  

 

 

Edited June 20, 2019 by farmerben

[Spacescifi]

1 hour ago, farmerben said:

 

How about a needle shaped ship full of superconductors?  The entire length of the ship is covered in magnetic coils.  The nose of ship is giant anode.  The tail of the ship is a giant cathode.  We can create over 1,000,000 volts worth of difference between the ends.  

Now ignite a nuclear explosion.  Positive charges are moving outward at as much as 10%c.  But electrons are moving way faster.  So an enourmous number of positive ions smash into the cathode.  An enourmous number of electrons fly out to the periphery of the magnetic field and return to the anode at the nose.  

 

In space we don't have to pulse the engine particularly rapidly, so we can set up a more challenging set of reactions.  Instead of thinking in terms of pellets or cans, lets use balloons full of gas or liquid.  Carbon, Nitrogen, and Oxygen tend to be highly scattering to most types of radiation, which means they capture that energy as hot high kinetic energy charged particles.  

 

The ships can carry thousands of tons of ice, replenished from asteroids.  Inside the ship is factory that can turn carbonaceous ice into polyethylene for balloons.  We can also make mirrors by spraying aluminum spray paint onto polyethylene.  It's not a high quality mirror.  But it could be very large in size and very inexpensive.  This could focus optical energy back onto the spot where our tritium is.  We could even build an onion out of mirrors.  Each onion layer going outward can focus light at a different point, following the wavefront as it moves forward.  

 

In interstellar space, vibrations will die down in a few hours and very simple lasers can tell the ship computer the exact geometry of our propellant before we set it off.  Given several hours to work, machines could Zamboni a fresh surface of frozen sewage for each shot, protecting the cathode.  

 

 

 

Sounds interesting. What would be it's lifetime?

Since the most powerful magnetic coils I saw online have a problem with actually breaking (the metal coils actually snap) under uber magnetic fields.

If it is scifi that is one thing.

But uber magnetic fields can be created, seemingly counter productively, with dense plasmas. 

Stars.

If only we could miniaturize that stuff!

[Cheif Operations Director]

19 hours ago, Starstruck69 said:

Effectively this is a sort of inverse of Newtons law of attraction and i see your point here. All mass will be effected by gravity and the pull of such force is related to the mass and distance between them. 

Mathematically you have a good point but unfortunately Einsteins Special and General relativity (GR)is a tad more complicated when applying to the real world. GR supercedes Newtons work when we talk about gravity.

of course the point you made can be seen in aircraft such as the harrier, that hovers by pushing equally the opposite vector to the pull of gravity and as such v=0m/s. (in theory). In laymans terms we calculate F and apply an equal force to neutralise.

If only it was that simple. See below.

GR:

As we can see from GR the left side talks about the geometric position and the right side the energy/mass relationship. If we took this into account i would think it will be very difficult to know just exactly how much we have to thrust to neutralise the gravitational effect. It would be  a best guess and very approximated to be honest because we need to keep feeding one side to get an answer out of the other. Also this of course presumes we are working in a vaccuum so no drag, friction etc is accounted for here. There are 10 usable equations above that we can substitute in to find what we need. For example, the effect of gravity on say the x axis, or on the y axis, z axis etc etc. It gets tediously complicated, but doable.



As for antimatter/fuel ratio i have absolutely no idea. If somebody calculates though i would be very interested to see it.

 

Yea I need to look into this more to get it. You could not really be weightless in a harrier jet however I mean it hovered and it did not overcome gravity. If you could get the jet to power at the exact rate of gravity you could most likely do it.  You could also have a range to create a virtual but not real artificial environment. If your slightly over you drift downward and if your slightly under you drift upward. Alternate between the two and it most likely not impossible.

[farmerben]

14 hours ago, Spacescifi said:

 

Sounds interesting. What would be it's lifetime?

Since the most powerful magnetic coils I saw online have a problem with actually breaking (the metal coils actually snap) under uber magnetic fields.

If it is scifi that is one thing.

But uber magnetic fields can be created, seemingly counter productively, with dense plasmas. 

Stars.

If only we could miniaturize that stuff!

Good question.  

I think normal materials can stand up to 5-10 Tesla in continuous operation.  But we might go to 100 Tesla with some sacrifice.  Tell me more about magnetic plasma.

It does become challenging to protect the crew, payload, and the bomb detonators themselves from EMP.  How rapidly we can generate the magnetic field is a factor for the pulse rate of the entire system.  

At a precise moment in the firing sequence we cut power supply to the magnetic coil, this creates a sudden pulse in the ship's electric field.  Photon radiation in vacuum is going fastest, voltage spiking on our anodes is at the speed of light in a conductor (maybe 2/3 c), many of the electrons in space are travelling faster than that. 

We could sacrifice a Helmholtz coil around each bomb, provided that doesn't ignite or crush the bomb.  Any material we use to insulate wires will become a conducting plasma as soon as the flash of light hits it, but the magnetic field will remain the same for a moment.  

 

I found another trick called 'hyperpolarization", a simple type of nuclear magnetic resonance.  Circularly polarized infrared light on sodium throws off polarized electrons which can transfer spin to some gas nuclei.  Therefore in principle it is possible to spin up tritium and helium 3 with precision timing.

 

It turns out I was right about onion mirrors, but not exactly the way I thought.  We actually have polarized neutron mirrors!  This means that neutron absorbers like U238 or B10 don't need to be homogeneous. They can be striped into plastic films!

 

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/11/4/043013

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/862/1/012028

 

 

Edited June 21, 2019 by farmerben

[Starstruck69]

7 hours ago, Cheif Operations Director said:

Yea I need to look into this more to get it. You could not really be weightless in a harrier jet however I mean it hovered and it did not overcome gravity. If you could get the jet to power at the exact rate of gravity you could most likely do it.  You could also have a range to create a virtual but not real artificial environment. If your slightly over you drift downward and if your slightly under you drift upward. Alternate between the two and it most likely not impossible.

Precisely that yes. The craft will be in a state of flux and constant adjustment is required. I could think of a few ways round this but current technology limits us to be this precise.

The maths adds up though and is relatively straight forward to calculate, no pun intended.

Its a bit like trying to catch the horse after it has bolted the stable, even superfast computation cannot predict the future..

If we take a proactive and not a reactive approach, then maybe we could pick a point in spacetime and mathematically calculate exactly what we need from there. However again i think the precision required from our propulsion engineering will restrict the accuracy we need here and we hit a technological barrier.

It can be done on paper though so i would not be at all surprised to see this in the future.

Edit:

A russian scientist by the name of Evgeny Podkletnov wrote a few papers on this in the early 90's, if i can dig them out i will post them up for you.

From memory his work involved a spinning disk and a superconductor. The basis of his study was that a spinning mass can rotate spacetime around it, relativity allows this to happen and we could if we wanted demonstrate it mathematically with GR. It might be worth starting here..

https://teslaresearch.jimdo.com/aerial-transportation/unconventional-methods-for-propulsion/antigravity-podkelnov/

Bear in mind though i am not sure what is peer reviewed here. I know some of his papers are, not sure if this covers all of the content in the videos. I like to watch videos like this but the paper is the key to truly understanding it. In my opinion of course, others may disagree.

Edited June 21, 2019 by Starstruck69
What to google

[farmerben]

Why not use 1000 tons of U238 tiles for the anode?  I think it would survive beta radiation just fine.  

We want both the anode and the cathode to be as massive as possible.  The spine of the ship can be a tube.

The payload compartment is a gadolinium piston inside a giant steel cylinder filled with N2 gas initially at 1 ATM of pressure.  The circular rings at all 4 ends are built like tires of oxygen at 10 ATM.  As the pressure rises above 10 ATM in the nitrogen the role of the oxygen tires changes.  It performs the way a recurve bow does in archery, providing more give at the ends.  As the cylinder becomes fully compressed it suddenly has more effective volume.  

The mass of the tires improves damping force and emergency braking.  The first sign of trouble would be O2 getting into the N2 supply.  

We could use cables on the payload compartment and giant wheels at both ends.  Then we can tune the wheels by moving attatchment weights, and control torque with electric motors.  

 

Edited June 21, 2019 by farmerben

[WinkAllKerb'']

tl-dr 

not good at all as far as i can metaphorically tell, what existing antimatteer do emit aka gravi waves ... ?¿

always smaller, always bigger than what we can see, ear, taste etc. {feel} aka @lifespan @timescale + dumb selfish biped inside

void  might be sooner full of gravi waves than you expect may be and why not

Edited July 13, 2019 by WinkAllKerb''
typos