Warp 1, engage!

[Saxman]

wonder what would have happened today if somebody found some rocket fuel sticks at school. .

Homeland Security would be on them hard before you could say, "Hey y'all, watch this!"

[MrRiplEy[H]]

I would hate for it to be to easy though. I can see RedNecks like me trying to drag a asteroid of mostly gold back to the planet.

That would be a great idea. It would collapse all gold based trade and deflate gold value in an instant. The richest percentile would absolutely love you after that. Or perhaps the ex richest.

[Tank-Ace]

let me take a while guess you started dreaming about stuff like that last two years of high school and all thru college?  munchies must have been really bad.  I know mine where. 

when I was in high school back in early 80's our science and ecology club (dont ask me why they were together, nobody knew),  found some sticks of solid rocket fuel in an old room that had been used as storage for 20 years.  they were about 1 inch by perhaps 7 or 8 inches long.  they were kind of greasy and all we could read was something and fuel.  we showed it to our teacher, he looked at it, said "interesting, dont know what it is" and gave them back to us.  we advertise on the school newspaper a contest over to build a rocket using the fuel with a field trip to go to the Mohave desert to see which could fly higher.

we had zero entries but we decided to make the field trip anyway.  there were perhaps 7 or 8 of us, 3 girls included, no teacher wanted to go with us but we went anyway.  we went for 3 days and we mostly sat around smoking looking at the stars and wondering how high the rockets would fly if we knew how to build one.  not sure what happened to the sticks. but I will always remember that trip to the stars.

wonder what would have happened today if somebody found some rocket fuel sticks at school. .


semp

I'm still in college. And not quite.


The universe has always just been a fascinating place for me. Even the sheer scale of it is mind bending, and the nature of it, and all the things that fill it... its just a passion of mine, intoxicated or not.

[Sabre]

Heim is broken, forget about that one.   Excluded by data a couple years ago.

Citation, please?

[moot]

I don't recall, but it shouldn't be hard to find.  PhysicsForum probably has echoes about or whimpers over it.  Immediate but very vague intuitive memory is that it's from non-kook forum users stating it as fact and going completely unchallenged (unheard of in nitpick-obsessed communities like those, unless it's almost undoubtedly irrefutable) that I heard about it.  Now that I think about it, I remember reading the same assessment from multiple users on multiple independent forums.

[Sabre]

I don't recall, but it shouldn't be hard to find.  PhysicsForum probably has echoes about or whimpers over it.  Immediate but very vague intuitive memory is that it's from non-kook forum users stating it as fact and going completely unchallenged (unheard of in nitpick-obsessed communities like those, unless it's almost undoubtedly irrefutable) that I heard about it.  Now that I think about it, I remember reading the same assessment from multiple users on multiple independent forums.

Thanks.  I'll dig around. My day job is in the aerospace community, and came across some articles about Heim a back in 2005 or so.  Hadn't heard much since then.

[moot]

Yeah there was lots of talk till then, and warranted given Heim's implications.  Real shame it's probably dead. It was pretty elegant.

I'm really anxious for Woodward/White/March to come thru to something clear, positive or negative.  Their non wormhole predictions are effectively cheap anti-grav like lift engines here on Earth, and solar system access better than even Bussard's Polywell powered concepts (76 days to Titan):


It's pretty curious that March has gone (reportedly) over to White.  Last I recall he had his own labwork (Eagleworks) and was skeptical of White's line of inquiry into Mach Effects.  IIRC March is who had the most credible data recently (within 1-2 years).

[Sabre]

Yeah there was lots of talk till then, and warranted given Heim's implications.  Real shame it's probably dead. It was pretty elegant.

I'm really anxious for Woodward/White/March to come thru to something clear, positive or negative.  Their non wormhole predictions are effectively cheap anti-grav like lift engines here on Earth, and solar system access better than even Bussard's Polywell powered concepts (76 days to Titan):
(Image removed from quote.)

It's pretty curious that March has gone (reportedly) over to White.  Last I recall he had his own labwork (Eagleworks) and was skeptical of White's line of inquiry into Mach Effects.  IIRC March is who had the most credible data recently (within 1-2 years).

Yeah, the beauty of Heim's work was that it didn't rely on exotic materials/matter in any way; superconducting coils was the most exotic technology it required, IIRC.  As you say, a real shame it didn't pan out.  A small nuclear reactor to produce the large currents required is certainly easy enough to build; in fact, a pebble-bed HTGR would've been perfect for this type of vehicle, requiring less shielding than conventional, water-cooled nuke reactors, and without the need for the complicated cooling system.  It would have allowed a modest 600 ton craft to lift directly from the Earth's surface and go to the moon in only four hours (and without even needing to transition to Heim space).  Ah, well...Hopefully White and Co. are on the right track.