[extropy-chat] unidirectional thrust

[The Avantguardian]

--- Hal Finney <hal at finney.org> wrote:
> So there you go.  Energy in is 690 MJ, energy out is
> 1.02 GJ, after 60
> days of acceleration.  Over unity.  You get out more
> energy than you
> put in.  You're only going 10.1 km/sec at the end,
> having travelled 26
> million km.  Calculation done with relativistic,
> Lorentzian formulas.


Is this the funky giant capacitor type thruster? I
thought over unity machines were thermodynamically
forbidden. Would not the power supply and wiring heat
up and radiate energy into space? I know from Ohm's
Law (current = voltage / resistance) and (power =
voltage * current). By combining the two you get
(power = voltage ^2 / resistance) so the higher the
resistance of the wires and power supply and other
components the less power would be available to
accelerate the thruster. I also seem to remember that
as a conductor heats up, the resistance rises causing,
yet more energy to be lost as heat. I would be very
surprised if the thing didn't heat up and stop
accelerating before reaching unity. Unless of course
thermodynamics doesn't apply in a vacuum or the power
supply and wires were composed of high-temp
superconductors. But hell I am just a microbiologist
so I am not a physics expert. Isn't Scerir a
physicist?  


The Avantguardian 


"The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that they haven't attempted to contact us." 
-Bill Watterson


		
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