Re: starship-design: This and that.

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@efn.org>]

"Kevin \"Tex\" Houston" writes:
 > Steve VanDevender wrote:
 > > Already read it, after it was mentioned by Ken Wharton.  Besides not
 > > being a cut-and-dried experiment, it also indicates that _if_ it can be
 > > scaled up to produce FTL communication, it will need a physical "pipe"
 > > of waveguides and amplifiers to work at all.  Perhaps useful for doing
 > > land-based FTL communication (again, _if_ it works when scaled up!) but
 > > by no means a starship drive.  It will be interesting to see what comes
 > > of it.
 > 
 > Seems you are out of phase I  "That's impossible!", and are now into
 > phase II, "It may be possible, but it's not practical".  }8-)

Given your comment, I'm afraid you're in phase 0, "It's possible because
I don't know enough to understand why it wouldn't work."  In any case, I
seem to have to keep repeating my point for the people who aren't paying
attention:  I am saying that we don't know how to achieve FTL motion of
mass now, and we don't have a proven theoretical framework that allows
for it.  That is much different from saying "FTL will never be
possible", although I think that's a possibility we may eventually have
to accept.

 > Yes, it's nowhere near a FTL drive, but it seems to me that if you could
 > expel FTL photons, you'd have a nice FTL drive.

First, the FTL photons postulated in these experiments are only FTL for
so long as they're in the waveguide.  Second, expelling FTL particles
doesn't make an FTL reaction drive.  It may make an extremely efficient
reaction drive, because you can get a better energy/momentum ratio than
you could get with photons.  It's easy enough to extend relativistic
kinematics to cover FTL particles (if you're willing to allow those);
FTL particles are merely those that have more momentum than energy, and
imaginary mass.  However, the extension still does not allow normal
subluminal matter to reach or exceed c.