p1t1o

You make it sound incurable, is there a fix on the horizon, however far away that may be? Apologies if that is a silly question.

Of course, but did you have a look at the claims?

Realchutes has triple canopys last time I used it...?

I'm occasionally asked science questions in my social circle, being the token scientist. This is an example of how it usually goes: "Pete so how does this work?" "Are you sure you want the full explanation, its pretty specific you won't be interested if you're not into it." "Yeah I wanna know!" "Ok. So the chemical reaction heats the...." "OH MY GOD BOOOORING SORRY I ASKED"

Silly, those won't work. I propose a global initiative (we still have 6 minutes) to paint an appropriately oriented "go faster stripe" on their house. The cumulative effect should do the job. If you go deep into the maths, this is exactly how Cannae/EM drives work.

Do we have the dV needed to circularise?

Without being too judgmental, the website has quite a few hallmarks of pseudoscience, and I will eat my hat if it turns out that a cannonball dropped through a hole (omitting air resistance, which at the bottom of a 6000km hole, would be very significant) right through the Earth slows down and stops at the centre without crossing the midpoint. Not sure what the point of recreating the experiment in KSP would be, other than aesthetic, the only result you will get will be the one dictated by the model used by the software, and I doubt that it allows for this kind of experiment (the software would have to be calculating the gravity induced by all parts of a mass, and not just simulating it with a point-mass.) There *have* been some deviations from the original theories of gravitation found in modern times, though they involve incredibly small discrepancies in accelerations in extremely low gravity fields. The idea that there might be some gross deviations from current models, with large masses moving unpredictably is quite unlikely, we would be seeing strange things happening all over the place - for example we would see strange things happen to bodies in space, as a system of orbiting masses (like the Earth-moon system, or the solar system itself) can be seen as a model of a "hollow" mass. You'd get masses falling in from above or below the plane of the ecliptic and settling there without any outside force, which would look, for all intents and purposes, quite a lot like an alien spacecraft arriving.

At first I was like "Ha! Good Quation!" but then I thought its probably in case one of the staff accidentally sticks themselves with it and I realised that that was actually quite plausible. Mind. Blown.

I abstained from voting because whilst I really like Ven's mod, I doubt its likely - or appropriate - that squad will just dump the majority of their part models and textures in exchange for some 3rd party ones.

I came for the Stiltskin, and was disappoint

I live in the UK where the weather bears no respect for anything, including season, distance from sun or how many sacrificial goats you go through. The Earth could be projected out of Sol System into deep space and in the UK it would still be overcast and damp.

What do electric sheep dream of? @PB666?

Didn't exactly that happen to some Russian satellite or other? Someone purportedly snuck a thruster aboard or something?

@PB666 Guess I'll keep not holding my breath then. Cheers bud, peace.

@PB666 Has anyone definitively shown that it really produces thrust at least?

Yup. I'd have thought that you could get hold of at least benchwork (like 0-10 kilo range) quantities of potassium nitrate though? No? Of course, for decades. I dunno how they'd ("they" being the Russians, Chinese and USAians) respond to a launch out of the blue though, say if you launched from the middle of the sea without notifying anyone. I doubt you'd have a cruise missile converging on you, but I doubt they'd ignore it either.

Interesting, so its about as high quality as the rest of the literature I've seen on these things then. Do you know of any actual, reliable, high-quality papers on these thrusters?

@PB666 @gpisic Google translate of the conclusion: They do recognise that measurements below 3mN are not admissable and very innaccurate. However (if the paper is legit and not government fiction) the paper does report thrust measured at ABOVE 3mN ~(ie: in the accurate range) with external power and error quoted at 14%, and no/very little/unmeasurable thrust detected with the battery, error quoted as 99.6 - 129.7%. So what they write is at least internally consistent, they do not rule out thrust with the battery, just that it is below their measurable range. Still, you'd expect similar results with the two different power sources, which they did not get. Still very weird that they are operating in milliNewtons and not microNewtons. If it was micronewtons the whole time, the paper would be very much saying what GPISIC first said it was, give or take. **edit** Even so, would you expect such different results with two different power sources?

lol I was agreeing with you buddy! I was correcting gpisic. But now you make this mistake I will correct 1milli = 1000 micro

Ah. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw, but they show data from "independant" (ie: battery operated) and "dependant" (external power source) and they measured (If Im interpreting the graphs correctly) 7-10mN in the dependant experiment and noise between 0.6mN and -0.6mN for the "independant" experiment. But yeah, its abut as strong a claim as anything else written about this. At least it doesn't make heavy reference to blogs and blog contributors like almost every other piece of literature on the subject. Sorry, you're missing something mate, 7.6 MICRO-Newtons are expected, which is 0.0076 MILLI-Newtons. The paper does appear to show results that you describe, ie: a lack of measurable thrust with battery power and a measurable one with external power. But the 3 MILLI-Newton limit is puzzling (a translation error perhaps? There are plenty of points in the paper measured below 3 MILLI-Newtons) and the thrust level is orders of magnitude higher than those measured by other parties, which is also puzzling. The whole paper would make a lot more sense if it said 3 MICRO-Newtons in the abstract. FYI: MICRO is prefixed by using the greek character "mu", however the letter "u" (as in "uN" for MICRO-Newtons) is often used.

Works for me, took a while to download the 6mb pdf though, maybe try "save link as". Body of the text is also in chinese, but the abstract is in english.

I'd give it a little longer. Not that these results dont confirm what I have suspected all along, but just so that I dont jump the gun, I'd give a few months for people to debunk the Chinese/German results. But secretly Im like "FINALLY". Unless it really does turn out to work, then I'll be all like "I KNEW IT!!"

Realchutes has them too.

lololol! Thank you for that image of my other half wailing on some coffee cans XD On another note, I dont play the drums but I have been reliably informed that I look like I do when I dance. Thankfully this is exceedingly rare.

All good points. Though my personal opinion is you cant separate the "good" people from the "evildoers", in any given population you will find a roughly similar proportion of both. I believe in gun control - whether absolute or not is another debate ("control" doesn't have to mean a total ban), but if one believes in gun control, one must also believe in rocket control. Much in the same way that I believe people should take lessons and get a license before being allowed on the roads. But lets not derail this thread with a boring debate on rocketry ethics, considering the scale of the topic, its hardly a burning issue.