[ZRB's Cyberspace - SciFi] To Mars and back in 90 days
What started as an effort to change the history settings on my IE browser took me on a short wild ride that I ended with the article on the Mag Beam, a technology when feasible will make routine interplanetary travel more comfortable.
This is not a technology involving worm-holes or subspace/hyperspace or lightspeed(+) travel. Just plain physical movement, using plasma thrusters at the starting and ending points. This seems to be a much safer technology than worm-holes, where you might end up in the core of a blue-giant if the calculations went wrong by a very miniscule amount.
The idea is similar to winches and cable cars in hill stations, where we have a cable between two locations and you can go from one to another by pushing and pulling the car in the right direction. Rather than having a cable the push here is from a plasma beam. There is basically no pull, but to slow down the vehicle the push is applied from both directions.
This seems very sensible for interplanetary travel, say once we colonize the Solar System, this system might be used for commuting if the right speed can be achieved. Just like a flight from Chennai to Mumbai or Chicago to New York.
I am excited to see practical applications by the end of 2020. :-)
For an intro on the Mag Beam (Magnetized Beamed Plasma Propulsion) technology, see this article.
This article is also good.
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Posted by zrb to ZRB's Cyberspace - SciFi at 5/17/2005 11:51:00 PM
This is not a technology involving worm-holes or subspace/hyperspace or lightspeed(+) travel. Just plain physical movement, using plasma thrusters at the starting and ending points. This seems to be a much safer technology than worm-holes, where you might end up in the core of a blue-giant if the calculations went wrong by a very miniscule amount.
The idea is similar to winches and cable cars in hill stations, where we have a cable between two locations and you can go from one to another by pushing and pulling the car in the right direction. Rather than having a cable the push here is from a plasma beam. There is basically no pull, but to slow down the vehicle the push is applied from both directions.
This seems very sensible for interplanetary travel, say once we colonize the Solar System, this system might be used for commuting if the right speed can be achieved. Just like a flight from Chennai to Mumbai or Chicago to New York.
I am excited to see practical applications by the end of 2020. :-)
For an intro on the Mag Beam (Magnetized Beamed Plasma Propulsion) technology, see this article.
This article is also good.
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Posted by zrb to ZRB's Cyberspace - SciFi at 5/17/2005 11:51:00 PM
posted by zrb | 1:48 AM
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