Subject:
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Re: Where's all that gravity coming from?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space
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Date:
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Tue, 6 Mar 2001 02:05:00 GMT
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Viewed:
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350 times
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In lugnet.space, William R. Ward writes:
>
> I don't believe that gravity generators will ever be a viable
> technology.
> Comments?
It's been a while scince I've read it, but a book called "The Compleat
McAndrew", by Charles Sheffield (I found it at BN.com just now) offers two
other ideas. It's a collection of short stories that are pretty Hard Science
Sci-fi.
Using future tech, the main female character flies cargo vessels powered by
'Kernel' black holes. Now I'm no astrophysicist, but the book does a good job
of describing the whole process of how they proved a theory and were able to
contain these mini-holes in electromagnetic fields (can I say again, don't ask
me, check the book) These are kept in giant spheres that are linked together
with more EM.
More interestingly, however, is the ship desinged by the main male character,
McAndrew. He's described as one of the greatest theoreticians ever.They
compare him to Einstein many times and talk about how his mind "sees around
corners". He designs a ship to take advangtage of the 'allways falling towards
the source of gravity' idea. This one is closer to the Continuous Acceleration
plan. It has a HUGE mass-plate out front with a column rising up from the
middle. The cabin is a sphere on that column that, when the ship is at rest is
at 1 Gravity in the direction of the plate. As the ship accelerates, the
sphere moves down the shaft, essentially 'falling' so that the occupants only
ever feel 1G, even when their accelleration is about 50G's, due to the
closeness of the massplate and the fact that the massplate is falling away at
49Gs. The drive to move the ship/massplate is actually glossed over, almost on
purpose at a couple points, but it does state that it's more amazing than the
acceleration/gravity idea. Something about consuming Dark Matter (another
theory they're closer to proving in the book)
Anyway, I've probably really messed up that explanation, but I do recommend
reading the book if you're into spaceship building as it discusses many
different possibilities. In fact, if I can find my copy, I may read it again.
Sean
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Where's all that gravity coming from?
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| I don't believe that gravity generators will ever be a viable technology. Even if it were possible to create such a thing, they would likely cause a lot of undesirable effects. So I try to design my MOC's (at least my more recent ones) to be viable (...) (23 years ago, 5-Mar-01, to lugnet.space)
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