/sci/ - Science & Math

A while ago I was running efficiency numbers for potential QI thrusters and I came up with a concept I call the Star Wars threshold, a point at which the overall electricity-to-thrust conversion enables flagrant scifi bullshit like fanless hovercars or direct SSTO with good payload fractions, and so on. As a rough order of magnitude estimate for working with current power supply technologies (diesel generators, batteries, fuel cells, solid core fission, etc.), that's on the order of 100mN/W, a figure which has been seen at least once on a tiny lab bench setup. The test thrusters on orbit now are about 1mN/W.

The future is closer than you think.

>>15696288
>>15696302
The anime schizo is a notorious samefag. He will gaslight you then spam anime or zubrin for the rest of the thread. He was doing it long before his recent fight with the Krystal posters.

There is no one "anti-anime schizo", that is a term he uses in all of the frequent arguments he gets into here. He will keep trying to make it about anime and not his near constant disruptive shitposting and attention whoring. Sometimes he manages to stay away for a few days and /sfg/ suddenly improves.

t. missed all but the tail end of this thread

>>15482466
Thrust from a planetary magnetosphere would make them a perfect complement to plasma magnet sails, which don't function in planetary magnetospheres due to lack of solar wind. So either we get almost-propellantless high thrust electric propulsion good for all the outer planets, or we get ACTUAL propellantless electric propulsion that can take us to the stars.

>>15478662
It's the only propulsion memetech I've seen follow a vaguely normal development process.
>"hey that's weird"
>hypothesis
>initial experiments
>theory
>more lab work
>grant funded research (DARPA)
>replication and refinement by third parties
>commercialization (IVO) and parallel continued lab work
>ground testing in vacuum chambers
>now a test flight
Even if it does work the fact that it needs super high voltage and only gets ~0.05N/W specific thrust means you still need fancy low-alpha power supplies or a rocket tug to get out of LEO in any reasonable timeframe, so it's not magic.

>>15428549
fuck off Earther

A space company is asking me for a writing sample to go with a job application. Wat do?

>>15409548
Nuclear is only expensive for government reasons. Ban intervention once ground is broken, allow seabed storage and breeder cycles, certify reactor module series instead of whole plants, and it becomes competitive with solar.