Mach Effect: Maneuver Drive For Real?

[leo knight]

I just found this over at the Next Big Future blog.

Part 1: http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/mach-effect-interview-with-paul-march.html
Part 2: http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/mach-effect-part-ii.html

Check out the illustrations in Part 1 of Solar System travel times at 1G, and the conjectural WarpStar-1 spacecapable of 2G acceleration, helpfully with dimensions. I calculate it at 13.5 tons.

My formal physics education ended my sophomore year of high school, so I can't judge the scientific merits of the article, but the kid in me says, "Maneuver drive! Woo!"

Enjoy!

 

[Spinward Scout]

Earth to Jupiter in a week. Anywhere in the solar system in three weeks.

If they could get it to work, and make it easy to build, we could colonize the solar system within a decade.

But to look at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France?

- Vincent van Gogh

 

[aramis]

The level of thrust is right at the detectable limit of the aparatii in use for measurment from what I read in 2004 or so. The data was, at best, suggestive but inconclusive. Not an outright nullification of the hypothesis, since a trend was measurable, and consistent. However, that trend was supposedly below significance in light of the miscelaneous extraneous noise in the data.

In short, the null hypothesis was not confirmed, but the null hypothesis was not cleanly refuted, either.