Maneuver Drives and Physics 101

[Scott Martin]

Originally posted by Ptah:
It sounds bad. How does that work, I thought if you misjumped you just never returned, or ended up far away.

If you aren't within the field, do you raelly care where that matter ends up? *you're* not misjumping, the materials that you want to get rid of are.

In the case of (for example) a "superfund" toxic waste site (or a certain mountain in Arazona) it might perhaps be best to "skew" the misjump as far to the "destroyed" end of the spectrum as possible.

This leaves you with a spectrum of options ranging from "A foomp of inrushing air" to "an earth shattering kaboom" from the secondary effects of the jump drive, but either way, the material that *was* there is no longer there.

The ability to make matter "disappear" is a fairly potent weapon in its own right: if Jump drives produce a "dimensional tear" or other such fireworks, a deliberate "misjump field" may well be more effective than a nuke (or even an antimatter bomb).

Scott Martin

 

[atpollard]

Originally posted by Scott Martin:
There's also a whole pile of nasty implications of jump / dimensional physics (a "minor" example would be to build a jump grid and deliberately misjump a 15-story deep basement-shaped chunk of bedrock: Insta-construction! Alternately if this goes "boom" insta high-energy field-expedient explosives)

A 15-story deep basement is about 50 meters deep. If the building is 50 x 50 meters square, then the basement is about 9000 dTons. The Jump Drive (J1) would be 180 dTons and cost 720 MCr. The Power Plant would be 90 dTons (TL 15) and cost 360 MCr. The fuel tank would be a cube about 11 meters (about 35 feet) on each side.

You still need to drill the holes for the jump grid. It sounds like a lot of infrastructure costs and it would all be destroyed creating the jump. TNT and a big shovel might be a lot cheaper.

 

[Icosahedron]

Originally posted by atpollard:

Hypothetical Pitch Drive: This concept entertains the possibility that somehow a localized slope in scalar potential is induced across the vehicle which causes forces on the vehicle. In contrast to the diametric drive presented earlier, it is assumed that such a slope can be created without the presence of a pair of point sources. It is not yet known if and how such an effect can be created.

I would be interested in any thoughts on Updates for these concepts based on post 1997 discoveries.

Now we are just "talking" because it is interesting stuff.

Interpreting Mach's Principle (google it); objects are held in space by the cumulative gravitational pull of the whole universe, like a model ship held stationary between two taut elastic bands. If our Pitch Drive's anti-grav properties cut, or at least weaken, one of those bands, the ship accelerates reactionlessly. Maybe 6G is the local cumulative total potential of the universal G-field? (ie the strength of one band).

Just another idea, it's all SF.