[El Sordo]

Aw, man.

I had hoped for something else...

[Brett66]

Fascinating stuff, I’m probably incorrectly visualizing this, but I could see maybe a torus with a donut-shaped mass going at a significant percentage of the speed of light moving around the torus. The donut would have a slice cut out of it so a spacecraft could be moved into the path of it without colliding. Sort of a stargate for instantaneous acceleration.

[j_guru]

I was just talking about this very issue with my hillbilly mechanic... although he thought he could test his theory with a potato launcher and a can of hair spray. very cool..

[LearnsFromMistakes]

In other words, a mass moving faster than roughly 57.7 percent of the speed of light will repel other masses that are placed within what we could call an ‘antigravity beam’ in front or in back of it.

Great. Just this morning I told my wife it was 57.4 percent the speed of light. Now I gotta order some flowers and apologize.

[dangerdoc]

bump

[allmost]

then we still have the problem of arranging our payload in relation to the driver mass. In other words, taking advantage of these effects would itself require breakthroughs in space propulsion that would render the advantage of using the effect minimal.

Creating the required force in a balanced way would require a wide area of accelerated massive particles meticulously aimed. If that can be achieved the secondary effect of propulsion itself almost becomes a moot point.

[allmost]

Ping.

[Quix]

THANKS.

Am reminded of all those chronic naysayers who claim it’s impossible to travel that fast or faster.

. . . as though THEY designed the whole multiverse . . .

and have KNOWN everything since before their conception in mummy’s womb.

[PapaBear3625]

Pure dreck.

[Captain Beyond]

When I go to http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=9758 I get a blank brown page. Is there something I need to enable to view it? Thanks

[Hank Kerchief]

“Can we calculate the gravitational field of a mass moving close to the speed of light?”

Relative to what? There is something very much missing in this whole discussion. Velocity (speed is not the same thing) must be measure relative to something. If two objects both traveling in the same direction, at half the “speed” of light (relative to another object), relative to each other, their velocity is zero.

The relativistic effects are just that, relative. Have my doubts about the “negative” gravity affect, but even it were true, the mass producing that effect would have to be moving at half the velocity of light relative to whatever was effected by it. Don’t see how it would be around long enough to produce much of a result.

Hank