Portal Powered Propulsion system

[PTNLemay]

I was going to post this in another thread, then realized it had little to do with the thread's actual topic of discussion... so I'll create whole new thread for this. It's one of my favorite "non conventional" rocket propulsion techniques. While not strictly "realistic" or "plausible", I find it's quite fun.

You take a pair of wormholes, small discs kind of like in stargate. Or better yet, like the portals from the Portal games. You place one somewhere really really hot, like on the Venusian surface, or even inside of a sun if it's strong enough to handle that. That'll be the "in" portal. You then put the other one inside the reaction chamber of your rocket, which will be the "out" portal. These have to be one-directional for it to work. Or at least the portals have to obey entropy (where a hot material will want to flow into a cooler environment). Assuming it does work that way, the superheated gas/plasma will enter via the portals into the reaction chamber of your rocket. A carefully shaped nozzle would then expel the gas out to produce the thrust. What you get is a rocket with effectively endless propellant.

"But wait!" you tell me, "Won't you're ship melt the moment the waste heat starts to seep through into the hull?" If left uncontrolled, yes. And as the old adage says, you can move heat, but never destroy it. And since heat radiators are bulky (and we're already cheating physics with one pair of portals) we move the heat off of the ship using more portals! We move the heated coolant off of the ship to somewhere really cold where it can dump the heat. After that the coolant returns to the ship to pick up more heat, creating a closed loop.

Here's a quick and simple diagram of my portal powered propulsion system.

Edited October 7, 2013 by PTNLemay

[dharak1]

Pretty cool! What happens to the sun? I would imagine it to look like a hole in the sun spilling out tons of hydrogen. Would this not result in a MASSIVE explosion in space if used on the sun? If it was on Venus it might work.

[OtherDalfite]

Glad to see I'm not the only person thinking about non-conventional uses for portals. While mine isn't really a propulsion system, it could work as a mass driver system.

What you would do is set up a vaccuum sealed room with absolutely no gasses. Keep portals as close or far as you like and put one portal on the floor and one on the ceiling. Place an object in between the two, drop it with almost no lateral velocity, and watch as it gets limitless amounts of speed, only limited by how much gas is in the room or it getting off track. Since there is no air to serve as a resistance medium, it gains velocity from purely gravitational pull of it's parent body. Now if only we could manufacture portals the size of airplanes.

[Canopus]

If you can create portals you wouldn't need that type of engine. Think about that.

[dharak1]

For all we know portals are only light speed travel. In the game the farthest you go using them is only a few hundred meters at most. There could be a strange ether state that you stay in for a split second in between transport. For portal it would be the time it takes to travel from wall to wall at the speed of light. Say you were going to proxima centauri. You would enter the portal and stay in that state for more than 4 years.

[OtherDalfite]

If you can create portals you wouldn't need that type of engine. Think about that.

Moving things to somewhere else seamlessly with quantum tunneling is one thing. Making fuel out of nothing is another.

[Canopus]

Moving things to somewhere else seamlessly with quantum tunneling is one thing. Making fuel out of nothing is another.

If you have the ability to control wormholes you don't need fuel.

[OtherDalfite]

If you have the ability to control wormholes you don't need fuel.

I suppose you may be correct there. But it may be good for traversing deep space, where aiming a portal may be a bit tough.

[Awaras]

I suppose you may be correct there. But it may be good for traversing deep space, where aiming a portal may be a bit tough.

And aiming the portal over dosens of AU towards the sun/pluto is a piece of cake then?

[andrewas]

The idea is that you carry a portal to destination. But since its already been demonstrated that you can fire a portal to the moon, its probably easier to fire just a portal at the destination planet, at least for in-system work, leaving the portal drive to be used for interstellar travel. Although, some planets may not have a portal-compatible surface like the moon does. Johnson never does really explain how that works.

[Ralathon]

Or you could just go to the moon and make a chamber. 1 portal on the floor, 1 on the ceiling. Toss your payload down the portals so it starts to accelerate to arbitrary speeds (no air friction on the moon). As soon as your payload moves at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light you move the ceiling portal outside so it launches your payload into space.

Once your payload reaches its destination you repeat the process in reverse, catch it in a ceiling/floor portal link so it is falling upwards against gravity. Once it slows down enough just grab it.

[magnemoe]

For all we know portals are only light speed travel. In the game the farthest you go using them is only a few hundred meters at most. There could be a strange ether state that you stay in for a split second in between transport. For portal it would be the time it takes to travel from wall to wall at the speed of light. Say you were going to proxima centauri. You would enter the portal and stay in that state for more than 4 years.

In portal 2, you open an portal to the moon by shooting at it, it might have been an light speed delay before it opened on this side.

Shooting at the sun would be pretty dangerous, not sure it would work at all with no solid surface, surface of Venus would work well enough, for more trust, add water to the 400 degree, 80 bar gas. 400 degree is not so hot you need active cooling either.

[PTNLemay]

Pretty cool! What happens to the sun? I would imagine it to look like a hole in the sun spilling out tons of hydrogen. Would this not result in a MASSIVE explosion in space if used on the sun? If it was on Venus it might work.

The worst-case scenario would be if the portals got stuck open and that the sun-out came into direct contact with the moon-out, so you'd just get solar plasma getting sprayed all over Pluto. But even then... the Sun (or even Venus) have a LOT of material to spare. You could probably leave that "plasma fountain" on for a few decades and not disrupt either hot-source too much. Still, I figure I can just make the portals require active machinery to be maintained, disable the mechanism, the portals shut down. And I find that makes a bit more sense than the perfectly self-contained micro-singularities in the game. I said I'd want the portals on this to be similar to the ones in the game, but not be identical.

And if these aren't the kind that you can just "shoot" at a surface from across interstellar space, then their use as an engine can still make sense. Another possible reason is if the portals have a minimum size and you want to transport large objects. I know, I'm making it pretty contrived, but this is silly science anyway, so why not make the rules so that the rocket makes some sense.

Glad to see I'm not the only person thinking about non-conventional uses for portals. While mine isn't really a propulsion system, it could work as a mass driver system.

What you would do is set up a vaccuum sealed room with absolutely no gasses. Keep portals as close or far as you like and put one portal on the floor and one on the ceiling. Place an object in between the two, drop it with almost no lateral velocity, and watch as it gets limitless amounts of speed, only limited by how much gas is in the room or it getting off track. Since there is no air to serve as a resistance medium, it gains velocity from purely gravitational pull of it's parent body. Now if only we could manufacture portals the size of airplanes.

That sounds like the potential for a pretty devestating weapon to me. According to the boom table: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Nukes_In_Space--Boom_Table

Just 1 kg accelerated up to 75% the speed of light will have as much energy as an 11 megaton warhead. If you should "drop" the mass somehow as it's being accelerated, you'd blow-up your launch facility. If you took a large enough payload and accelerated close enough to C, I imagine you could create a pretty respectable doomsday weapon. Probably not enough to blow up the whole planet, but enough to create one hell of a dust cloud.

Edited October 7, 2013 by PTNLemay

[qeveren]

I'm not sure your portal-torch engine is going to work in this configuration. What is the solar plasma (in the Sun version) pushing against in order to drive the ship forward?

[Nuke]

let me state the obvious, if we have portals, we dont need no rockets.

[Mekan1k]

If you have the ability to control wormholes you don't need fuel.

A perfect quote from Farscape.

[PTNLemay]

@ Nuke

I could arbitrarily place rules that would help it make more sense.

For example these portals might only transport simple molecules and subatomic particles, and if you try and send through anything complicated (like a living thing) it would get all twisted before it could reach the other side. In fact when you look at all of the quantum weirdness involved when people try and do the math for wormholes, it's not crazy to assume that these sort of portals would kill you if you tried to go through them. I remember someone once looked at the alubierre drive model and found that the "bubble" would probably be filled with very deadly x-rays. But I admit it does start to get more contrived.

@qeveren

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that. I'm guessing portals don't move when they expel a fast-moving object (of fluids in this case). Still, I'm sure you could come up with a design that has the gas/plasma exerting some thrust on the reaction chamber before it exits through the nozzle.

Edited October 9, 2013 by PTNLemay

[ZedNova]

I think you would become the second person to blow up a sun.

Don't you remember when Sg-1 did that?

They say the first one is always the hardest...

[PTNLemay]

@ Airborn

In that scenario they had a blackhole on one end of the wormhole, which created enough suction to crush mountains (and eventually worlds). In this scenario you'd just have a heat gradient, with the plasma wanting to go from the hotter environment to the cooler one. If for some reason the plasma did start flowing too quickly, you just have to shut off the red portal. Or (even better) maybe we can alter it's diameter so that we can control how much plasma is flowing in. You could just reduce the flow to a tiny trickle without actually closing it.

[qeveren]

@qeveren

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that. I'm guessing portals don't move when they expel a fast-moving object (of fluids in this case). Still, I'm sure you could come up with a design that has the gas/plasma exerting some thrust on the reaction chamber before it exits through the nozzle.

Turn the portal around so it points the ejected stream forward (as the ship sees it) instead. Then use magnetic fields to keep this plasma beam collimated - at least while it's inside your ship - and grab onto it, stealing some of its momentum. You'd have the most delightful thing: a reverse-torchship.

Or if you want to be more traditional, find some way to bottle the forward stream and bend it out the back like a traditional rocket.

Edited October 10, 2013 by qeveren