Steel

The OST doesn't actually prohibit private companies from claiming things, just sovereign states, so the OST is certainly not what is holding back the private sector from leaping into space.

According to a recent study by the NASA Eagleworks team, they seem to produce a small thrust...

Nope, they did not just use "the engines from the tsr2". They based the designs for the Concorde's engine on the 22R engines (because they were one of the best turbojet engine designs available to them at the time), but then developed them to be suitable for civil aviation. Concorde could be easily surpassed today if we had the same conditions for the genesis of the design: several national governments pushing for SST vehicle development and willing to pump huge amounts of money in to fund an ultimately economically unviable form of transport. It has no noteworthy or groundbreaking technology in it by comparison to what we have available now, and the only reason it hasn't been surpassed is because there have been no further attempts to build anything like it since it's eventual decline due to it's failure to make economic sense.

Not really a debunking video, simply a statement of the facts presented by the revered "NASA" paper

Ok let's cut some confusion, HOTOL is a 1980s project, Concorde was designed in the 60s. Also I'm fairly sure the designs aren't a state secret considering Concorde was a joint venture between the UK and France via two separate aerospace companies (one of which wasn't state owned). Moreover, Concorde isn't an amazing marvel full of technological secrets that are still cutting edge to this day, it's 1960s design that has been surpassed in most ways by todays technology, so goodness knows why two governments would go to great lengths to keep the designs top secret. EDIT: Also I've just done some brief reading, as far as I could tell Alan Bond never worked on Concorde, he was working with Blue Streak missiles and dreaming up SSTO concepts when all of that was going on.

Well Juno went out to Jupiter on solar panels so its not that bad, and a lot of quantum physics is surprisingly well understood these days, it's just tricky is you want a lot of power

It may want to be realistic, but at the end of the day, space-going small form-factor fusion reactors are pretty much in the realm of science fiction right now, and 0.625 m fission reactors are non much better. Thus, "realism" is as much a guess at some vaguely OK looking numbers as actually based on any solid science or engineering.

you mean like a rocket?

There probably isn't a rule of thumb for this, mainly because you've just asked for a rule of thumb for a scenario that is absurdly specific! Rule-of-thumbs tend to come out of experiences that happen often so people begin to intuit how to do things well. Flying a Tomcat up to orbital velocity with a magical fusion drive at a constant angle is not one of those experiences! Now to attempt an answer to your questions: It will likely need to give a TWR above 1 so that it can, if needed, overcome the effects of gravity. In theory if you're on a suitably high suborbital hop you can use incredibly weak engines to get into orbit, but in your scenario you'd want something comfortably above a TWR of 1. How far up you can go is entirely dependent on your velocity. The Karman line is actually defined as the point where you would have to be traveling faster than orbital velocity to generate enough lift from a wing to support itself. As for your specifics, I can't really give you an answer. There are so many variables in play here (speed, AoA, heating, engine thrust, aircraft TWR e.t.c) that there isn't really a single, satisfactory answer. Someone could tabulate the air pressures and densities at various altitudes and work out whether you could generate lift with your criteria above, but I don't have the time at the moment! One final point: an aircraft like a tomcat actually relies remarkably little on its wings to sustain flight at high altitudes and high speeds anyway, and is mostly just a missile with sightly larger wings (i.e the engine does most of the work keeping is flying, the wings are just there in case you want to change direction).

Well it certainly had something to do with the fact that the N-1 was not initially designed to be a moon lifter, rather a heavy lifter to LEO. This meant it had to be adapted

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Bohm's approach also require FTL communication? Also, let's just clear this up: even if one interpretation appears to make more sense to us, doesn't means its any more "correct" than, say, Copenhagen or Feynman. At present, regardless of which of these three interpretations you use, you will get result in the same measurements in experiments. Surely this suggests that actually none of them are truly correct?

23:42 UTC now

I'm pretty sure there's too little information given to solve the problem

All those posts are from before the forums changed, so they're pretty much broken for all eternity now

If aerodynamics and physics worked such that we could effectively get rid of drag then we'd have no trouble getting to orbit in small SSTOs by now. This concept, as far as I can tell, intends to use ionised air to reduce the drag contribution of the boundary layer around the aircraft. This would give a notable reduction in drag (and probably more importntly the skin heating) but certainly would not almost eliminate it.

You're right, NASA has not directly commissioned the research AFAIK, these guys just have a remit to investigate niche propulsion technologies

I have to say, this guy scares me a little. How on earth he managed to get jobs in aerospace and defense companies without a basic understanding of Newton's laws or basic mechanics is a mystery.

This is situations where you have to sit back and say: Just because a government is throwing money at it, doesn't necessarily mean its not a load of crap. Let's bare in mind that the NHS (and so indirectly the UK government) also spends millions a year funding homeopathic treatments which also have no foundation in science EDIT: I can't believe I missed this earlier, but if it did magically work the way he claims, the force would push it in the opposite direction to the direction he is saying. He claims that there is a greater force on the larger end than on the smaller end. Thus, the net force would be acting towards the larger end. However, he then says that this pushes the drive in the opposite direction to the way the net force is acting.

Let's start with how he says it generates thrust: He says there are two different forces at each end due to different group velocities. In fact the forces on each end are the same because radiation pressure is dependent on the phase velocity (not the group velocity as he claims), which is the same (and is equal to c) going both ways, regardless of how the cavity is shaped. Secondly, the part where he derives the equation. He uses F = ma. This is fine, until the part he changes a for v/t. This is ok so long as (a) you're 12 years old and trying to work constant acceleration for your physics homework and (b) if you keep in mind that v should in fact be Δv, the change in the cavity's velocity. He somehow confuses the v in v/t (which is the cavity's change in velocity) with the group velocity of the wave - which we already know has nothing to do with the force anyway. Just because the two things have the symbol v in them doesn't mean that they refer to the same thing or can be used interchangeable (also he uses E = mc2 to come up with some sort of weird "effective photon mass" thing in his derivation, which is particularly bad). The final straw for me is when he says this force is doubled due to Newton's third law. If what he said is true, every time you bounced a ball against a wall, there would be the force on the wall by the ball and then this force would, for some reason, be doubled by the wall's reaction force against this (at this point I realised this guy had no grasp of even basic physics, let alone how his own invention supposedly works) Also the bit where he talked about conservation of momentum is just so badly wrong that I have neither the time, nor the energy to go through the whole thing.

Quick off topic correction: we in the other topic are not saying that there is rarely maths in programming, just that knowledge of advanced mathematics is not required to learn and that any maths you do end up having to do tends to be fairly simple Also, log2 isn't used so much simply because, on the whole, humans (who mostly do the programming) don't work well in base two. Also, most of the time you're ever going to use a logarithm in any high level language, it will be a natural one.

The science is in fact NOT solid. Despite what the video says, radiation pressure is dependent on the phase velocity, not the group velocity of the light. These are two very different quantities. EDIT: Also the part where he "derives" the "thrust equation" for an m-drive is just horrible to watch for anyone who has any understanding of science and maths. EDIT 2: wow, it gets much worse! This guy apparently has zero understanding of conservation of momentum or Newton's laws

As I said, if you're going to be writing custom Maya nodes then yes, you will need an understanding of the maths. However, for the 99.9999% of programmers who don't work in advanced 3D, it's not really necessary.

Ok so if you want to write everything yourself, especially for something like 3D animation, you will need to tackle the maths at some point. However, this is where the programming community comes in: It's pretty much certain that in whatever you do, someone else has already been there, done most of the hard work and written you a nice library. What's more, it will almost certainly be better, faster, and have more features than what you might put together yourself. This means all you have to do is search for the problem you're having, find the library and use it. TL;DR: you absolutely DO NOT need to know vector calculus and linear algebra to program unless (a) you are doing something complex like working with 3D animation at a low level (and let's be honest, there are very few applications outside this, scientific computing and game development where you are going to need any knowledge of vectors whatsoever) and (b) you want to start writing every function you ever use yourself

It's not that 10 of these wouldn't produce ten times the thrust of one, it's whether the same design scaled up to use 10 times the power would produce ten times the thrust. Considering how little understanding we have of how or even why these things work, it's not scientific to assume that just because a relationship is linear for a thruster using 40-80W that it will scale up if you build a thruster to use 1000 W or more

1.2 N is the force you would feel on your hand due to gravity if you placed a 120g mass on it.