--- On Fri, 10/30/09, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com> wrote: Hi Jed and all,
There's more than a few unanswered questions about this whatsit. 1. Previous models have produced "modest thrust." What is "modest thrust?" The best we have seen to date is an apparatus of indeterminate weight very slowly revolving around a pivot. An El Cheapo brand fan could do this if attached. That video certainly doesn't rule out spurious and strange yet conventional effects. Believe me, I've dealt with this doing my own reactionless drive work. Airflow, thermal convection forces, etc. will appear out of the woodwork. Especially with setups like this making a lot of heat. 2. Again modest thrust... they are building something with superconductors (this is getting as bad as antimatter...superconductors are god...) to increase the cavity Q factor so they can make 300lb of thrust. Then make four, strap them to a test vehicle with jet engines, and fly. Why not just make something cheap and cheerful that produces 5 lb of thrust (that is a fair amount, something easily worked with) and prove it? Why go for overkill? 3. Why jets for horizontal thrust? Why not a few more EMdrives? Does it only work for hovering, not for realistic type acceleration? Shawyer did say it works best when operating stationary relative to its own thrust. You can read many meanings into that statement. 4. This thing must get hot. He wants to raise cavity Q to keep the fields inside from dissipating their energy as heat. I wonder how hot it gets. Has our intrepid inventor unwittingly invented the worlds largest Crookes radiometer?! And self powered, no less. 5. If the thing DOES work, the first thing I would do is measure thrust under constant conditions of input power in various directions relative to the Earth's orbital and rotational motion. Look to see if there's some coupling to a preferred frame of reference. As far as I know, that's about the only way (short of efficiency being down around that of a conventional photon thruster) to conserve energy. Unless something very screwy is going on. Anybody got any ideas on this? 6. The Chinese apparently tried and failed to make one. But that was because they hired this man... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wZBmEKBfLY&feature=related ...to build it. --Kyle
