Reactionless drives are even "worse" than Epstein drives, since they break conservation of momentum entirely. Epstein drives just have wildly implausible characteristics- while they might break all known laws of, say, material and nuclear science, they don't break conservation laws since they require reaction mass.
If I remember correctly the authors stated it was based off of the theoretical limits of efficiency for a reaction mass drive (e.g. if we could turn mass into acceleration with very little waste energy). Which is a really great conceit in my opinion because it stays hard sci-fi where it matters (e.g. besides the aliens) while still being close enough to our time to be interesting.
Given what appears on screen, the Epstein Drive doesn’t even have that problem. It “only” acts like an electrostatic confinement fusion reactor with a hole in the confinement, slight enough for only the fusion products to escape, where the nozzle points.
(Edit footnote: only seen s1/2, anything surprising in s3 is unknown to me).
I thought when they were "flying teakettle" they were using water as a reaction mass, and the Epstein drive was an unexplained reactionless drive? At least in the books, haven't seen the TV show.
Iirc, there's some mention of pre-Epstein fusion ships that needed even more water.
Damn it. The Epstein drive is a fusion drive. It's far more plausible than this voodoo quackery, the only thing keeping it out of reality is the fact that nothing that size could handle the wattage without becoming a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma.
Everyone that hopes for a bright future would absolutely love a reactionless drive. I'd love it. But it's not real. We've seen lots of very bad methodology and things like researchers ignoring the fact that a null setup still produces the same thrust even though the drive has been modified not to work. With forces of this tiny order of magnitude it's incredibly hard to get accurate readings, and readings within the margin of error of the instrumentation should not be reported to sensationalist media as promising.
This is just another one of those ufo antigravity quacks you see on youtube, but somehow they got their day in court. I can't explain how much I'd love to be proven wrong, but reactionless drives are physically ludicrous in every single way we understand the universe. Is it possible for us to be wrong? Sure. Is it possible that we're wrong about literally every observation we've ever made in the history of physics? I very much doubt it and it's going to take more than a badly set-up experiment featuring a microwave stuffed into a tuba to convince anyone of that.
roywiggins|7 years ago
SolarNet|7 years ago
ben_w|7 years ago
(Edit footnote: only seen s1/2, anything surprising in s3 is unknown to me).
sjburt|7 years ago
Iirc, there's some mention of pre-Epstein fusion ships that needed even more water.
djsumdog|7 years ago
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vertexFarm|7 years ago
Everyone that hopes for a bright future would absolutely love a reactionless drive. I'd love it. But it's not real. We've seen lots of very bad methodology and things like researchers ignoring the fact that a null setup still produces the same thrust even though the drive has been modified not to work. With forces of this tiny order of magnitude it's incredibly hard to get accurate readings, and readings within the margin of error of the instrumentation should not be reported to sensationalist media as promising.
This is just another one of those ufo antigravity quacks you see on youtube, but somehow they got their day in court. I can't explain how much I'd love to be proven wrong, but reactionless drives are physically ludicrous in every single way we understand the universe. Is it possible for us to be wrong? Sure. Is it possible that we're wrong about literally every observation we've ever made in the history of physics? I very much doubt it and it's going to take more than a badly set-up experiment featuring a microwave stuffed into a tuba to convince anyone of that.
dogma1138|7 years ago
ImSkeptical|7 years ago
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