is there an irl version of the kraken drive

[Findthepin1]

is there an irl version of the kraken drive? could it be built?

[Bill Phil]

If the universe is a simulation, then it could have glitches...

[Yukon0009]

Nope, the kraken drive is powered by glitches in KSP.

[Thomas988]

But wouldn't it be hilarious if there was a real-life counterpart? For decades mankind images massive starships powered by FTL drives to explore the cosmos, the one day some dude achieves lightspeed in his garage by stabbing a piece of metal with a landing leg.

[GreeningGalaxy]

Isn't it hard to say what the term "glitch-powered drive" would mean in real life? A 'consistent glitch' is kind of an oxymoron when you're talking about how the universe works - if it behaves consistently, we usually just call it a physical law. If you like, you could say that the Casimir effect is a glitch in reality, and that exploiting it to make a quantum vacuum plasma thruster is building a Kraken drive, assuming such a device is even possible. Personally, I'd be more inclined to call it a harnessing of physical principles rather than the exploitation of a glitch, but it really just comes down to terminology.

[Fel]

Isn't http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97806-Cannae-EmDrive an instant of a K-Drive? Seemingly limitless propulsion?

[Norpo]

In a sense, the hypothetical Alcubierre drive is like a Kraken Drive, in the sense that it doesn't really break the universe, but bends the rules of it. You're never really going faster than light, just bending space-time to make the distance shorter. But there's a catch, it requires negative mass, which doesn't exist (and if it does we have no idea how to get it). At least, that's my understanding of it.

Don't expect Ladder-Travelâ„¢ to be available for human use anytime soon.

TIL Miguel Alcubierre invented the kraken drive in 1994

[GreeningGalaxy]

Isn't http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/97806-Cannae-EmDrive an instant of a K-Drive? Seemingly limitless propulsion?

Evidence to whether that thing actually works or not is dubious at best, and anyone who says otherwise is just being overexcited. The argument "But the chances that someone overturned the law of conservation of momentum with their little steampunk brass can are still technically nonzero!" doesn't hold a lot of water. I could be proven wrong (I'd love to be) but I'm not signing up to invest in it until we see some peer-reviewed papers.

Alcubierre drive carries the implication of a causality violation/closed timelike curve (see the 'tachyon pistol duel' thought experiment), so it's also likely to be impossible. We're likely to learn lots about how spacetime works while we explore why it's impossible, but I'm also not getting my hopes up that someone will ever build a working device.

[magnemoe]

Evidence to whether that thing actually works or not is dubious at best, and anyone who says otherwise is just being overexcited. The argument "But the chances that someone overturned the law of conservation of momentum with their little steampunk brass can are still technically nonzero!" doesn't hold a lot of water. I could be proven wrong (I'd love to be) but I'm not signing up to invest in it until we see some peer-reviewed papers.

Alcubierre drive carries the implication of a causality violation/closed timelike curve (see the 'tachyon pistol duel' thought experiment), so it's also likely to be impossible. We're likely to learn lots about how spacetime works while we explore why it's impossible, but I'm also not getting my hopes up that someone will ever build a working device.

The most kraken drive part of the EM drive is that as you say its an brass can, and way more fun it did not followed the theory they thought it would in the first place.

The ladder drive is another exploit drive in KSP, basically an kerbal who climb an ladder and push against something will generate an force, now if your ship is light and your kerbal is placed so this force goes trough the center of mass you can fly with it.

[ChrisSpace]

If by 'kraken drive' we mean a way to move a spacecraft that does not require propellant, photon sails do not require any. However they have to be very big and fragile and have almost no thrust. And they don't work in the dark.

[vger]

Isn't it hard to say what the term "glitch-powered drive" would mean in real life?

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/31/nasa-validates-impossible-space-drive

If that ended NOT being a freak test, I'd say that classifies as a Kraken drive.

At least until they figured out why it does what it does. I'd say an IRL Kraken drive would be a device built that accomplished something amazing, BEFORE we were even able to understand it. It's basically the process of R&D, happening in reverse.

[K^2]

There is precisely one physical phenomenon that is anything like the Kraken drive in the real world. It is the Mossbauer Effect. In order for it to actually be usable as a space drive, however, the universe would have to contain a lattice. That might be possible if universe is a closed manifold with a satisfactory symmetry condition. It would then make a lattice with itself, in a sense.

Even then, however, getting a recoil is going to be very difficult, and by no means 100% efficient. So I can only see this as an improvement on photon drive efficiency. Not a total replacement. And, naturally, you'd need to have energy source that makes photon drive feasible to begin with. That's almost exclusively a realm of matter-antimatter drives.

Still, the wonderful thing about the relativistic rocket formula is that if we can boost a photon drive by even 50%, it would open up a world of opportunities for interstellar travel. So this might have practical applications eventually. But not any time soon. We simply aren't talking about the sort of delta-V where we can rely on anything fancier than an ion drive.