Sounds like a lot of will-be stuff. MHD has been around for quite a while. We actually did some pretty simplified theoretical analyses of an MHD drive when I was in school. The produce a pretty low thrust from what I remember.
There are two things that stick in my head about MHD drives. One was that a Russian sub grounded itself in international waters back in the early 80s, maybe late 70s. Of course, U.S. ships came into the area, to offer help, but the Russians wouldn't let them get anywhere near the sub. The Americans noticed a large dome on the deck of the sub and thought that it was frosted over with ice. That caused a big stir in the U.S. navy thinking that the Russians were experimenting with MHD, since you would need to supercool the magnets to get the high conductivity required. Anyway, it turns out that it was just a sonar dome, but it was painted white. the second story was from Japan. They built a prototype MHD drive and put it on a small boat. They built a huge pool where they could control the flow of the water to be able to test the efficiency of the drive at different speeds. Well, the boat kept turning to one side all the time. They did all these hydrodynamic studies of the pool, made all kinds of modifications to the pumps to smooth out the flow of the water in the pool. blah blah blah. Nothing worked, the boat kept turning to one side all the time, the same side. Eventually someone realized that the boat was acting like a huge compass needle. Since it was so heavily magnetized it kept turning to the North. -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (412) 268-9081
