Go *Canada!!!

Adding video to channels (Canada) - requested by blutruth.

doublepost.

surly the faster you go the more you have to decelerate so say u got to mars in 30 days as aposed to 1 year you would have to spend ages going around its gravity feailds before u lost enough speed to safely enter the atmosphere. ethor that or you are going to have to waste a tun of fuel to brake.

NEATO! Hey, I dug up some more technical information on the plasma rocket when I saw this video

http://www.videosift.com/video/Plasma-Rocket

>> ^blutruth:
doublepost.


?

>> ^westy:
surly the faster you go the more you have to decelerate so say u got to mars in 30 days as aposed to 1 year you would have to spend ages going around its gravity feailds before u lost enough speed to safely enter the atmosphere. ethor that or you are going to have to waste a tun of fuel to brake.


Yeah, too bad we don't have thousands of people and billions of dollars to figure out problems like that.

Might as well give up everyone! The naked guy with head-phones says its a dumb idea!

Wes is actually points out something implicitly hard with space travel. You can only speed up to certain levels of speed because you lack the ability to burn off speed in a way that doesn't kill the person inside. It takes 354 days to accelerate to light speed under 1g (you can't get that fast mind you, but this is just to show the problem).

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

Aerobraking works.>> ^GeeSussFreeK:
Wes is actually points out something implicitly hard with space travel. You can only speed up to certain levels of speed because you lack the ability to burn off speed in a way that doesn't kill the person inside. It takes 354 days to accelerate to light speed under 1g (you can't get that fast mind you, but this is just to show the problem).

The solution to that used here would be to place the passenger in a tub of fluid with a very high viscosity. In this case obviously... maple syrup.

>> ^Duckman33:
>> ^blutruth:
doublepost.

?


Sorry, I should've been more clear. I accidentally commented twice. Couldn't find a way to delete it, so just edited it. Next time, I shall say: [edit] doublepost.

Indeed, but only to a point...well 2 points that is. The mass and density of the atmosphere and cosmic body in relation to your speed, and the G forces it creates are still a problem for humans...for machines not as much. In other words, you can't hope to be going near light speed and use, say, mars to slow you down , and even if you could, the G force from near light speed in a straight line to an angular velocity would be deadly (as depicted in the 9g turn on the Apollo 13 movie.)

>> ^dag:
Aerobraking works.

>> ^westy:
surly the faster you go the more you have to decelerate

Yes, but instead of moving lots of mass slowly, plasma rockets move very little mass very,very fast. The effect being that you can accelerate to the half way point, pull a 180, and decel the rest of the way, and set yourself cleanly into orbit, at a small fraction of the fuel mass than it takes to get the shuttle into orbit.

That's all without taking into account that reducing the mass per newton means you have to send less mass to begin with, which makes the fuel use even more efficient.

Forget cold fusion, hot fusion will take us to the stars.

It takes at least a year to get to light speed, then light years to get outside our own little bit of space...not to mention you can't actually get to light speed...There are some real physical problems with going to other stars atm ....now the rest of the solar system....

For any rocket with constant acceleration, the fastest way to get somwhere is to accelerate for half the journey, turn around, and then decelerate for the second half.

>> ^blutruth:
>> ^Duckman33:
>> ^blutruth:
doublepost.

?

Sorry, I should've been more clear. I accidentally commented twice. Couldn't find a way to delete it, so just edited it. Next time, I shall say: [edit] doublepost.


Oh! LOL no problemo!

Sure it has a higher specific thrust, but they still haven't solved the problem of getting enough electricity to run it on a spacecraft. You can't keep a fission reactor cool with nothing but black body radiation from the surface of the craft unless it has a huge surface area. If they shoot a huge laser at the craft, converting that to electricity is still going to have low efficiency, so you still have the problem of cooling. Obviously the high weight-to-power ratio of any kind of chemical battery would defeat the purpose and probably result in an overall system no better than H2/O2 rockets. The best they've got is betavoltaics and photovoltaics. 500 square meters of solar panels to produce 50KW at mars' distance.

Aerobraking only works if you're not going vastly faster than the escape velocity of the planet that you're approaching. Or else you'll just get one pass through the upper atmosphere, not slow down enough, and keep going never to return. Mars' surface escape velocity is 5km/s, and mars is 35 million miles from earth on closest approach. Clearly you need some sort of retro rockets if you expect to get there in under a month. Mars has less than 1/100 of the atmospheric pressure of earth, and earth's atmosphere isn't enough to stop random asteroids from hitting it at 20km/sec

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

The Wikipedia article on aerobraking I linked to mentions doing multiple passes for effective braking. So the the first pass is enough to put you into an elliptical orbit, and then subsequent passess can slowly pull you closer to the planet body. I'm sure there are upper speed limitations with this though.

I just watched 2010 a couple of days ago. Those crazy Soviets used giant inflatable metallic, heat-absorbing bags when aerobreaking around Jupiter.

>> ^jwray:
Aerobraking only works if you're not going vastly faster than the escape velocity of the planet that you're approaching. Or else you'll just get one pass through the upper atmosphere, not slow down enough, and keep going never to return. Mars' surface escape velocity is 5km/s, and mars is 35 million miles from earth on closest approach. Clearly you need some sort of retro rockets if you expect to get there in under a month. Mars has less than 1/100 of the atmospheric pressure of earth, and earth's atmosphere isn't enough to stop random asteroids from hitting it at 20km/sec

Wow, 2010 really IS the future! About damn time a new decade/century/whatever means something cool for futuristic technology.

Yeah, right. Those bags would melt and deflate. Metal is the worst possible thing to use as your heat shield, because it's a conductor. You wanna prevent the whole thing from melting, but no matter what you use some of it is gonna be vaporized. Best choose an insulator so it doesn't all melt at once.

dude... turn around halfway and slow down

edit: well crap.. I guess a bunch more people already told you this stuff so Still angry.

It is SO awesome to me that this news report comes out a week after I read John Varley's Red Thunder, so I know a few of these figures....

>> ^westy:
surly the faster you go the more you have to decelerate so say u got to mars in 30 days as aposed to 1 year you would have to spend ages going around its gravity feailds before u lost enough speed to safely enter the atmosphere. ethor that or you are going to have to waste a tun of fuel to brake.

So in the novel the idea was that we don't use up all our fuel any more. He suggests that if you accelerate towards mars at 9.8m/s^2 then you will get half way there in only 4 days. If you accelerate at 1g for say four days and you end up travelling at around 3 million meters PER SECOND or 12 million km/h. That's fast enough to have relativistic effects. No wonder it only takes 4 days to get half way to Mars. At that point we will have travelled 58 million kilometres.

Now simply turn around, and fire your rocket in the other direction for the second half of the trip and decelerate at 9.8m/s^2 for four days. In 8 days you can travel 116 million kilometres. Wolfram Alpha says Mars is only 105 million kilometres away. Whut whut!

8 days to Mars! That's MAD! This video says 39 days. ALSO MAD! Very exciting stuff.

AAARAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!! LOAD MORE COMMENTS!?!??! WTF! DO NOT WANT!!!!!!!


I thought that I had read to the bottom of the thread and nobody had mentioned decelerating after the half-way point. Whose TERRIBLE idea was this "Load more comments"????? AARRRGH!


:ANGER:

>> ^djsunkid: He suggests that if you accelerate towards mars at 9.8m/s^2 then you will get half way there in only 4 days...8 days to Mars! That's MAD! This video says 39 days. ALSO MAD! Very exciting stuff.



From back of the handing your numbers I worked out that the mars trip they are talking about only requires a constant acceleration of .035m/s², and a peak speed of about 60km/s.

As jwray suggested this is interplanetary (very cool), but not inter-steller, since access to power (solar being the only real option) would diminish as you travel, you would have to accelerate at something like 1M*g to get up to .25c by the time your solar power failed.

The questions are how small, in theory, can this thing be made, and how efficiently can it use the gas it uses to generate the plasma. After running those numbers I would be surprised if this tech, even it its most refined, could get a probe to another star in a human life time.

Looks like I have to wait for warp technology. Damn you Sci-Fi for unrealistic expectations!!!

"This technological breakthrough you have created... is insignificant... next to the power of JEEEEEEEESUS."

All Jesus has to do is snap his fingers, and he'll be magically transported across the universe. Forget wormholes. Where JESUS goes, there is no need for wormholes. *puts sunglasses on* *snap* *POOF!*

Got to get the FTL drives working next. Frak.

>> ^JAPR:
Wow, 2010 really IS the future! About damn time a new decade/century/whatever means something cool for futuristic technology.


The 2000s saw more scientific/technological progress than any decade in the history of humankind. That's assured just by the continually accelerating rate of progress.

Not only (1) are scientists and innovators around the world better connected with each other than ever before, but (2) a greater proportion of humankind is contributing than ever before. It used to be just a handful of nations, led by North America and Britain, but now we're at the point where China is actually 2nd only to the US as a producer of scientific knowledge, and it's expected to pass the US in 2020.

Does anybody remember what the internet was like in 1999? I'd rather gauge my eyes out.

Totally get what you're saying, I'm just commenting that the year 2000 wasn't all that impressive in and of itself, but the combination of what we have now and what we see lying ahead as truly obtainable technology is just amazing.

>> ^westy:
surly the faster you go the more you have to decelerate so say u got to mars in 30 days as aposed to 1 year you would have to spend ages going around its gravity feailds before u lost enough speed to safely enter the atmosphere. ethor that or you are going to have to waste a tun of fuel to brake.


Its quotes like this that show who has and who hasn't played a game from the Elite series.

I would have to say *lies because of the 'science' guy at the end implying that this will replace launch tech on the shuttle. I'm fairly sure plasma rockets don't generate enough power for a launch vehicle.

Invocations (lies) cannot be called by Fade because Fade is not privileged - sorry.

that's the coolest cigarette lighter i've ever seen. but... whenever i hear about things advancing us silly monkeys i just think of two words... resonance cascade.

*dead

This video has been declared non-functional; embed code must be fixed within 2 days or it will be sent to the dead pool - declared dead by jonny.