Re: Real Life Thrust (was: hyperspace)

Absolutely Barking Stars writes:

@:) Actually, that reminds me of my favourite 'star drive'
@:) theory. This requires the idea that you can control and generate
@:) gravity. What you do is create a 'virtual mass' in front of your
@:) ship, and the body of the ship accelerates towards it down the
@:) gravity well. But of course, the point of mass is a fixed distance
@:) in front of the ship, so now that's moved. Basically, you can keep
@:) on going as far as you like with this, and it doesn't have any of
@:) the problems of buzzard ramjets or nuclear explosive pulses or
@:) riding laser beams etc...
@:) 
@:) Of course, generating gravity is a but, um, 'nontrivial' :-).

  I read a story a long time ago - I think by Fred Pohl - about a
spaceship with the most amazing engines ever.  They had developed
these engines that could provide hundreds or thousands of gs of
thrust.  Problem was, the pilots tended to get squished.  So they
built a spaceship with the engines and cockpit at one end (the back),
a looooooooooooong stick, and this enormous weight at the other end.
Boy was that stick ever long, and that weight big.  So anyway, the
pilot would turn the engines on, they would crank the weight real
close and the gravity of the weight would pull the pilot forward and
cancel out his inertia.  So the test pilot jumps in and takes off.  A
few hours later, he's moving at .9 c and doing loops around the solar
system every few hours.  Problem is, he doesn't come back.  Turns out
the winch that pulled the weight around has broken, so if he tries to
slow down, the gravity from the weight will crush him!	Very cute.
The physics worked, but the numbers were unreasonably huge.

-joachim