Posted on 09/01/2005 7:08:26 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Your idea is not entirely idiotic. You can thank me later.
If you could assemble a host of gravitationally attracting bodies, which would conveniently move slightly out of range as your spacecraft passed its point of closest attraction, you would have built a gravitational slingshot that operates by a kind of peristaltic action.
No fuel would be consumed during this process, except what might be needed to move the planetoids around.
To envision it, this could have been the way the "stable wormhole" of Deep Space Nine operated.
Can you really escape the sun's gravitational pull with a slingshot maneuver? Wouldn't you just end up in a really, really big orbit around the sun? I thought you had to have some sort of propulsion to escape.
Brings to mind those electromagnetic rail guns that accellerate projectiles via conduction. Wonder if that can be adapted somehow.
Yes.
"I thought you had to have some sort of propulsion to escape."
The slingshot maneuver is your propulsion, as it was for our V'gers. They used a fortuitous alignment of the outer planets to effect gravitational maneuver after gravitational maneuver until they were well on their way to nowhere in particular.
If you could hopscotch in this manner all through the galaxy, it would be nearly as convenient as Tarzan's vines, or those ubiquitous Stargates!
It would also be very slow. The stepping stones get pretty far apart out there.
Magnetic propulsion would be easier to set up than gravitational.
Of course, you still have the pesky problem of having to build all that stuff first.
And then there is the matter of stopping...
I'm no engineer, but isn't this kind of a stupid statement?
Yeah. I think they mean a way to move the craft without throwing mass out the ass...
Yea, stopping. Not too many Midas shops out there. :-)
I would remind you that a "warp" is a heavy rope Warp drive was used 160 years ago to pull ships up the river. Its a TV joke.
Well, the other issue is we would need to develop some sort of device to cancel the g-forces on the body. The acceleration needed for most any of these ideas would leave the human body a mass of jelly-like substance.
when? when Scotty says it is safe. For now, impulse power only.
Quoth the raven, "nevermore"...
An intelligent response - too bad it had nothing to do with my post. :)
Just think of all those other civilizations just waiting to vist us, yet are similarly plagued with time and distance.
But first, let's see if we can get from NO to Houston without exercising every out of work politician on the planet.
I personally would like to see an 'Infinite Improbability Drive'.
understand completely how gravity and mass works.
Just the thought of gravity weighs heavily on my mind!
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