Quote:
Originally Posted by mikey23545
They are testing the drive in a laboratory setting at very low power levels. If I'm not mistaken, the NASA test was using 17 watts of power...Your damn laptop uses 3 or 4 times that much power.
This may surprise the shit out of you, but you don't seem to be very familiar with laboratory testing...
Edit: I cnnot locate the article that gave 17 watts as the input power for the NASA TEST, so I may have to hold off on that statement, but the fact still remains that there is no reason to believe the thrust cannot be scaled up. Also, non-scientists don't grasp the idea that in space a relatively small amount of thrust applied for long periods of time can add up to fantastic velocities.
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So this got me thinking about the ability of constant thrust in space. so I started reading a little bit and found this page
http://space.stackexchange.com/quest...-get-you-there
You would reach the edge of lightspeed in just under a year and travel 1/2 a light year in just under one year. You would travel 200000 kilometers in the first 2 hours. quite interesting, at a constant acceleration of 1/2 g or 4.9 m/s we could easily travel about our solar system.