
Originally Posted by
cannabineer
It would be spectacular and obvious if they used a reaction drive. But the energetics of reaction drives are awful. The best example, a photon drive, needs energy of mc˛ in order to produce impulse of mc, meaning that you need c times as much energy as you're actually giving the ship. A photon drive consumes 300 megawatts for every newton of thrust! Imo that is one of the best arguments that nobody's using photon drives; they'd be detectable at cosmological distances.
So we are almost forced to assume that interstellar travel will use a nonreaction drive ... or be in slowboats running at perhaps a few thousand km/sec. The energetics of a diametric (polarized gravity) drive reduce to the energy needed to shift the ship. The philosophical quirk here is that it takes 21x the energy to get from 10km/s to 11 km/s than it takes to go from standstill to 1 km/s. Against which reference frame is a diametric drive acting? cn
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