KerikBalm

Please provide the source, I am curious to know if this is the case. Of course, as I mentioned in a much earlier post, I'm still curious if the force could be explained by interaction with earth's magnetic field. The magnetic field is already used to produce torque on spacecraft to desaturate reaction wheels and such, and they were actually measuring torque, which they attributed to thrust

Your logical fallacy is: Strawman argument. I never claimed there was no thrust, I simply state there is no evidence for your explanation of the thrust. Your logical fallacy is: Strawman argument, Burden of Proof & false statements. Strawman: I never claimed it is thrust being produced by heating of air - simply that it is a possible explanation, and that there is not more evidence for the other explanation than for this explanation. Strawman: the christmas ornament thing. - ties into the false statement/generalization and burden of proof fallacy with the statement "heating air" doesn't produce thrust" There are ample theoretical, practical, empirical, working demonstrations ofthrust being produced by asymetric heating of air. Project Pluto certainly doesn't prove an EM thruster works. This EM drive had an energy supply, air as a potential reaction mass, and a cavity where the air had access and where the heating from the energy input was focused. There is a solid theoretical basis for that functioning as a thruster, similar to as in many electric drives that use microwaves to heat the exhaust gas, for example. Your logical fallacy: Appeal to authority, False/misleading statements The end of the story (for now) is there are plausible explanations to explain the thrust that do not violate conservation of momentum, and no evidence for the explanation that does violate it. Please supply the source. The only thing I've seen in the actual publication simply says ambient air pressure or something like that. Otherwise, I suspect you are essentially fabricating data/making false statements.

To be fair, there is equal evidence that it could be magical pixies. To claim it as evidence of a working EM drive/quantum virtual particle/whatever thruster is extremely unscientific. The results do not support any conclusion. There is no evidence to refute a null hypothesis of the thrust being produced by heating of air. This test shows no evidence that the thing works. End of Story until they do a proper test. There is no need to go into space to do a proper test at this time

yea, but thats what I have in KSP, it kicks the PE of my orbiter up, and the PE of my lander down, and gives a little "free" dV. I was also thinking this would be better with long cables. Suppose you have the craft 10km apart, attached to each other by a cable... they both start reeling it in, at a really high acceleration that they get to orbital + speed before impact (and they fire a small thruster to avoid impacting each other). They would then meet again near their apoapsis - although this isn't true if they reach escape velocity, or if they encounter the moon. I guess it could save some propellant. In the case of a cable and two craft both going to the moon (they'd have to manuever as they approach the moon differently) - a lot of propellant. It would be nearly "propellantless", I don't know where this "quadratic" thing from the OP comes from, you just need a higher "exhaust velocity" for the other craft - a longer cable perhaps? - The earth would "recoil" ever so slightly. For destinations within earth orbit, its essentially the same as a space gun. If your craft can withstand the required accelerations... why not just use a space gun? Heck we can fantasize even more about using a space elevator or orbital ring, so that the muzzle of the space gun is outside the atmosphere. In the end, this isn't a rocket idea, its a ballistic launcher idea, and the idea of ballistic launches from a stationary position is not new. What is described in that paper is about as feasible as useing a spacegun to launch a capsule equipped with airbags to "land on" (survivably impact) the moon.

Basically, when the moon is between the sun and earth, the earth appears "full" and the moon is "dark"/"empty"/ "new" When the earth is between the sun and moon, the moon appears full and the earth is "dark"/"empty"/"new" The phases are basically opposites of each other. This is easy to replicate in KSP. Or you could look at the date of the 1st moonlanding: July 20, 1969 http://www.calendar-12.com/moon_calendar/1969/july Based on the phase of the moon viewed from earth, the earth must have been pretty full viewed from the moon. Also note that the "earthrise" pictures were taken from lunar orbit, not the surface. As the moon is tdially locked, the earth is stationary in the lunar sky.

http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/70047-Hammerthrows-anyone Same concept, splitting a craft in two, using each craft as reaction mass for the other.... Much much lower accelerations though.

"I don't think Oberth applies as the Emdrive is purportedly not a reaction drive." Well, supposedly it is, its just the reaction mass are these ephemeral virtual particles. Note that while hovering, or laying on the ground, there is no net acceleration- there are opposing forces yes, but no (net) acceleration (on the craft, in the hovering jet example, there's a whole lot of acceleration of air happening). The potenetial/kinetic energy of the craft does not change (except for lost fuel in the case of the hovering jet) If this EM drive works, there will be acceleration, the craft will gain kinetic energy. If it gains kinetic energy greater than the input energy, we've violated conservation of energy, as well as conservation of momention - although I think it was already stated on this thread that you can't really violate one without violating the other. This whole thing sounds ridiculous. If it really works (there is absolutely no good evidence that it does), I'll just throw up my hands, say that they've found a bug in the simulation, and ask our Universe's programmers to make me rich with a harem of beautiful women, or download my consciousness to their reality.

I often hear criticism of KSP's realism here, but I think that is unjustified. Compared to any other space game out there (except Orbiter), KSP is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of realism. Just because the astronauts are cartoonish, and there are jokes about snacks, doesnt make the game unrealistic. To me, its realism is a large part of its attractiveness. So what, if they scale some things down to roughly 1/10th... or that we don't have a dozen different types of fuel, and hundreds of different engines to choose from. Its a simulation, and simplification is required in those. So the atmosphere is like soup... its in development, and I remain confident that something like NEAR will be incorporated in the future. Making it RL scale (as in the RSS mod) would result in too much load for people's computers, or the terrain being too borng and low res when one actually lands. Its a computer game, and we don't have computers powerful enough to simulate the entire earth - to me KSP is nearly as realistic as is prealistically possible.

In the same vein as the arsenic life paper, NASA published a study with shoddy controls, and the media wet their pants over it. At least this time the actual paper itself doesn't make unfounded claims (those unfounded claims are only peripheral or alluded to in the paper, not explicitely stated). The test was not performed in a vacuum, thuse heating of air is a potential source of the thrust. The test was performed on a device expected to be non-functional (ie, a negative control), but the same thrust was reported. This means the study lacked proper controls, and any effect should therefore be really small if it is there at all. Others may claim that the negative control was in fact still equally functional, and that the device still may work - but as I said, they lack controls. So, the deal is that there is a lot of jumping to conclusions and media hype, and that this thing still probably doesn't work.

The body doesnt need to... a dead man lying in the ground expends no energy, yet doesn't sink to the Earth's core.. wonder why? A harrier produces force by moving air, a relatively small amount, really fast. The KE imparted to the air is how much energy it needs to keep hovering. Because KE= 1/2 mv^2, a helicopter which moves a larger volume of air at a slower speed, expends less energy to hover. In the case of a person doing squats, there is considerable movement at the molecular level, manifesting as heat production. Basically, the less you need to move things to generate the force, the less energy you need to expend. A rock lying on the floor doesn't need to move anything to generate the force to counter gravity, and thus needs no energy expenditure.

I'm curious what journal he tried sending that paper to. There are some interesting ideas in that, but #1) They are not new, and thus not really publishable #2) The ideas are not rigoruously developed and sufficiently explained for publication even if they were new. Publishing is a hard task, even for PhDs, a lucky undergrad might get in on a paper with lots of authors (and won't be first author, that's a near certainty), but in your case, you may have been too ambitious.

Indeed, you don't subtract that. The time spend and distance covered accelerating is the same as that which you spend decelerating. d = (v0t + 0.5*a*ta²) + (vt * tt) + (vtt + 0.5*(-a)*ta²) v0 = 0, so get rid of that d = 1/2(a*t²) + 1/2(a*t²) +(v*t) ----- sorry that I lost the subscripts d = (a*t²) +(v*t) v=1.49896229*108 m/s (just going to call it 0.5c) for acceleration, t= 0.5c/a d = (a*(0.5c/a)²) +(0.5c*t) = 0.25c^2/a + 0.5c*t d is fixed, so t just varies with a. Note that you get negative values for t if a is insufficient to allow for acceleration to 0.5c before reaching the halfway point.

I've never been to: Gilly Ike (in the SOI, never landed or even orbited) Dres Jool (In the SOI, never in direct orbit or the atmosphere) Tylo, Bop, Pol Val (in the SOI, never orbited) Eeloo An asteroid Which means I've visited (all with manned return) Moho, Eve, Mun, Munmus, Duna, and Laythe. I guess I should really visit Eeloo (it is a challenge after all, even if it shouldn't be harder than Eve or maybe Moho) and Tylo for the challenge, and Gilly or Pol for the low grav fun... and do an asteroid redirect.

Currently, their only uses are for gathering science when one lands near the intersection of multiple biomes, and moving around on the surface if you want to land 2 craft, but didn't land precise enough. I just did a duna mission with a science rover (anticipating multiple biomes) that lacked rocket engines of any sort- just parachuted down, and fixed the wheels (would have worked the same with struts) after impact. I then landed (I fly manual, no mechjeb) a probe controlled 2 person lander as close as I could, it was still off by over 2.5 km. The rover certainly helped save RL time getting the kerbals and science data back to the mothership. I do the same for Eve - my eve ascent vehicle thus doesn't need to be designed to carry science instruments (and ideally, jettison them before ascent), and can land at a high elevation - let the rover-lander carry the science and get the landed/splashed down science data - sure, you could just "take data" and walk your kerbals up a mountain, but using a rover saves time. I also find them useful for getting science from hard to reach biomes - like canyons (although its not that hard to land in them) or the slopes of minmus (which pose a tipping over hazard, although the eva and surface samples are easy enough to get)

I cannot follow your reasoning as to why that would be. Heated gas expands, even if it starts at 1 atm, or 5 atm, and the gas in a jet engine after going through a compressor is much higher than 5 atm anyway.

Well, Ion gliders are pretty useless IRL, its kind of silly that we use them in KSP, I'd much rather see an electric fan. An engine that reduces the prevelance of ion gliders is a good thing IMO. As for the challenge, you can still use ions, perhaps for circularization - and you can use other engines, perhaps to get your craft up to speed so that the air augmented engine can produce more thrust. I'd say your submission doesn't need to use the engine at all, but as already noted, its quite impossible with the stock parts, so... I can't imagine such a submission would be competitive What I'm worried about, as far as gameplay considerations, is making the aerospike obsolete. Sure, the vacuum ISP is worse, and the TWR and dry weight is worse, but I'm not sure that is enough. "although isn't the atmospheric pressure on Eve enough to cancel the compressing effects of the high airspeed?" Ummm I'm not sure where you are going with this. Do you mean: 1) the compressing effects of a ram scoop are not needed, and it should be "air augmented" and producing full thrust from a standstill? or 2) do you think it will not work with a very dense atmosphere? 1) If there is air there, it can be heated to expand and produce more thrust. 5 atmospheres is not all that much, the pressure in a jet/rocket engine/airscoop easily exceeds that by large amounts, and except for the very first moments when the rocket is fired, there shouldn't be enough air entering to provide any noticable air augmentation 2) as long as it can be further heated to cause expansion, it can be used to augment thrust. In theory, this should be like a "super aerospike", producing equal vacuum ISP and better atmospheric ISP to conventional rocket engines, with the downside of a much higher weight - making it good in theory for escaping the atmosphere, but poorly suited for interplanetary journeys due to the high dry weight. If the mixture is run fuel rich in an oxygen containing atmosphere, it is essentially a jet engine, very similar to the Sarbe. However, you can still run such an engine - with added oxidizer, in an atmosphere that has no oxgen. Its not as good, since you need to bring your own oxidizer - but its stil better. If we can have LV-Ns, why can't we have these rockets? They've been in intermittent use in missiles since the late 60's (although typically running fuel rich and also exploiting atmospheric oxygen, and also typically using solid fuel)

Yes, Eve SSTO is impossible with stock parts, but if we had access to parts like an air augmented rocket engine, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-augmented_rocket I think Eve would become much more accessible. So this challenge is to use a specified modded rocket engine to acheive fully reusable SSTO flight from Eve's surface. Mods allowed: FAR/NEAR, mechjeb, and the specified rocket engine*. *detailed .cfg at bottom, but important parts are as follows: Better efficiency than nukes in an atmosphere. Somewhat similar to the stock turbojet, its TWR is poor at very high, and very low speed. quick stat summary: Mass: 2.4 Atmophere ISP curve: 1 atm= 1200 ISP 0.3 atm= 1000 ISP Vacuum ISP= 360 Velocity curve: 0 m/s = 50% thrust / 175 kN 200 - 800 m/s = 100% thrust / 350kN 2250 m/s and above = 50% thrust / 175 kN (Ideally, thrust would be 175 kN in a vacuum, and could increase when the engine has more air available, but for now, I'm going with this) Scoring is simple, highest payload fraction to orbit from "sea" level. If no entries accomplish that, then lowest altitude takeoff that acheives orbit, and if no-one acheives that, highest perapsis. Rules: * No infinigliders, avoid use of control surfaces (lets say less than 1 control surface per 5 tons of craft) -thrust vectoring should be sufficient * No ladder/kraken drives/ other exploits * The craft must be fully re-usable - it must be ready to go again after docking with an orbital fuel depot, meaning; - No solid rocket boosters - The craft must be capable of landing on eve, and then attaining orbit after landing, so include parachutes and struts and fuel for retro burns as neccessary. * No other mods other than specified, of course, you may hyper edit your craft to orbit around eve to try the descent and then SSTO Lets see what you can do There are of course limitations to the KSP engine, but for my simple "simulation" of an air augmented rocket, I'm using the following: -Duplicated the rapier engine folder, renamed it "AirAugmentEngine" edited the config file to be as follows: PART { name = AirAugmentEngine module = Part author = C. Jenkins and KerikBalm mesh = rapier.mu rescaleFactor = 1.5 node_stack_top = 0.0,0.741545,0.0 , 0.0, 1.0, 0.0 node_stack_bottom = 0.0,-0.2048244, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 0.0 mass = 2.4 dragModelType = default maximum_drag = 0.2 minimum_drag = 0.2 angularDrag = 2 crashTolerance = 20 maxTemp = 3600 TechRequired = hypersonicFlight entryCost = 35000 cost = 3600 category = Propulsion subcategory = 0 title = Air-Augmented Rocket Engine manufacturer = C7 Aerospace Division and Rockomax Conglomerate description = Air-Augmented Rocket Engine is a joint venture between C7 Aerospace and the Rockomax Conglomerate. Designed to fill a gap in the design requirements for extra-kerestrial atmospheric operation, this engine uses extra-kerestrial atmosphere as reaction mass, heating it using standard rocket fuel, to produce more thrust per unit fuel. attachRules = 1,0,1,1,0 EFFECTS { running_closed { AUDIO { channel = Ship clip = sound_rocket_spurts volume = 0.0 0.0 volume = 1.0 1.0 pitch = 0.0 0.2 pitch = 1.0 1.0 loop = true } PREFAB_PARTICLE { prefabName = fx_smokeTrail_aeroSpike transformName = smokePoint emission = 0.0 0.0 emission = 0.05 0.0 emission = 0.075 0.25 emission = 1.0 1.25 speed = 0.0 0.25 speed = 1.0 1.0 localOffset = 0, 0, 1 } MODEL_MULTI_PARTICLE { modelName = Squad/FX/shockExhaust_blue_small transformName = thrustTransform emission = 0.0 0.0 emission = 0.05 0.0 emission = 0.075 0.25 emission = 1.0 1.25 speed = 0.0 0.5 speed = 1.0 1.2 } } engage { AUDIO { channel = Ship clip = sound_vent_soft volume = 1.0 pitch = 2.0 loop = false } } } MODULE { name = ModuleEnginesFX engineID = ClosedCycle runningEffectName = running_closed thrustVectorTransformName = thrustTransform exhaustDamage = True ignitionThreshold = 0.1 minThrust = 0 maxThrust = 350 heatProduction = 650 useVelocityCurve = True fxOffset = 0, 0, 0.25 PROPELLANT { name = LiquidFuel ratio = 0.9 DrawGauge = True } PROPELLANT { name = Oxidizer ratio = 1.1 } velocityCurve { key = 2250 0.5 0 0 key = 800 1 0 0 key = 200 1 0 0 key = 0 0.5 0 0 } atmosphereCurve { key = 0 360 key = 0.3 1000 key = 1 1200 } } MODULE { name = ModuleAnimateHeat ThermalAnim = HeatAnimationEmissiveRapier } MODULE { name = ModuleGimbal gimbalTransformName = obj_gimbal gimbalRange = 3 } MODULE { name = ModuleTestSubject // nowhere: 0, srf: 1, ocean: 2, atmo: 4, space: 8 environments = 15 useStaging = True useEvent = True } }

No, because its NASA, we expect proper controls, and the scientific method, not leaping to unfounded conclusions. Extraordinary claims with extraordinarily bad evidence.

It reminds me of the "Arsenic Life" paper - it sounds amazing and like it comes from a reliable source, then once you look carefully at it, you see really shoddy work and no good evidence of the claim.

Not tested in a vacuum, wtf? they put it in a vacuum chamber, but left it at ambient pressure? wtf then there's the possibilty of magnetic field interactions... Better tests are needed before spending ~10,000 m/s of dV to get it into orbit

I like your mouse over idea, combined with a total at the top

I think it depends on the capsule, and the use of the degree rotation buttons - although that may only get you "close enough"

You sound like a creationist that doesn't understand thermodynaics. Theremodynamics in no way says we cannot exist, entropy in no way says that this is impossible - that you claim it does shows that you do not really understand it.

Meh, its not so bad, Laythe's thinner atmosphere makes the nukes not so bad relative to chemical rockets as far as ISP is concerned (whereas with the very thin atmosphere of Duna, you can just ignore that the atmosphere is there for ISP consideration). I'm guessing you had TWR problems though? Did you not know that you can use jets on laythe? thats sort of the whole point of visiting (to me anyway, aside from a beach vacation I guess)? Meh, not knowing mod related things like interstellar doesn't make you a noob. And visiting eve is fun - in the kerbal way of fun where massive explosions during launch are also fun. Regarding the many mentions of checking staging: thats being lazy or careless, not noobish And those that try to use parachutes on the mun.. really? i mean... really? For me, stock KSP, the most noobish thing I think I was doing, was constant full throttle ascents at way over terminal velocity... it took so much just to get to orbit, I was wondering in amazement about how people managed to get to other planets. Also, when I read about asparagus staging, and decided to try it, my fuel lines were all screwed up, I thought, based on what I read, that it would automatically drain from the outermost tanks first - my fuel lines weren't all going the same way, I had massive problems with imbalanced thrust and staging orders.

sussually take a couple hundred m/s extra, I try not to do more - well, for return trips and landers, I'm in the habit of setting up fuel depots and always use orbital rendevous.