Horsecrap!

oh you meant for civilian uses

carry on

Has anybody actually created thrust by magnetic reflection?  I know we have an ion drive but that is a particle emitter.

As for theory on drives

1) ion drives work but need solar

2) plasma drives work but are materially expensive

3) nuclear power drives work but require radioactives

4) solar sails work but only away from stars

5) NASA has not admitted to an anti-matter drive but the United States has the most anti-matter

6) nuclear explosion drives require a lot of shielding and would eventually irradiate the crew if more than a few are used

7) magnetic theory holds little hope

8) Einstein's theory of special nonsense (my personal fun name for it) and wormholes will not give hope

9) space does not bend

10) laser based propulsion works but it eats up a portion of the vessel involved

11) gravity assisted 'slingshots' are effective but only to so much speed

12) hydrogen liquid fuel requires vast amounts of fuel versus the vessel

13) hydrogen fission is less effective than nuclear material fission

14) fusion in space is a joke (solar storms can change magnetic shields enough to fry it all)

15) guass lanching technologies is probably best (aka a platform that uses magnetic propulsion to launch a vessel, where as the launcher is hundreds of times larger than the object being launched) with suitable ion and fission power drives. add to this a gravity assist by planets up to the tolerance of the vessel and crew

The arks would need be 10 miles long, 5 wide and 5 tall, and would still mostly be fuel. the actual passenger count would barely suffice for genetic variance. some of the width and depth is for protection from solar radiation, cosmic radiation, and intersteller debris.

The closer to light speed you get the more hazardous debris in space gets, eventually any hits will automatically create nuclear fission at some given speed. this would be bad. unlike a theory of some silly haired guy light speed does not slow time down, it does not work that way.

I didn't see that anywhere.  I saw that contrary:

"A conceptual design of a thermonuclear explosive physics package, is one in which the primary mass of plutonium, usually necessary for the ignition in a conventional Teller-Ulam thermonuclear explosion, is replaced by one microgram of antihydrogen."

It's saying you don't need plutonium (or uranium for that matter) for the "ignition" of the fusion reaction.  Instead, you just need antihydrogen (and only one microgram of it).

Maybe you are thinking about how they are producing antihydrogen.   They use a Penning trap, and sodium radioactive, but this seems rather feasible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penning_trap

Check the section on fuel in this source (near the bottom).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

By the way, does anyone else find it funny that Einstein is making cracks at "some silly haired guy" and his "theory of special nonsense"?  Irony much?

Anyway, an actual post later. 

Zarf...

A nuclear explosion is happening all the time in the sun, actually a lot. The sun is primarily made up of Hydrogen. Aka Hydrogen Fission.

This is how it works according to my understanding of the theory of relativity, Einstein:

If you took a spacecraft leaving Earth to someplace 1000 lightyears away in 2013, flying at an average speed of 99.99999% the speed of light, when you arrived, it would be 1000 years later, so 3013; however, from your perspective, it would have seemed that only a couple moments had passed; it would have seemed as if you had teleported to your destination, and also teleported forward in time, since from your perspective it is now 1000 years in the future.     You'd have a lot of catching up to do on current events an history, etc..  By the time you'd get to your destination, your knowledge set, skills would be obsolete, not to mention the fact that all your friends and family would be long gone.   All your friends and family back on Earth would have died long ago.  Technology would have progressed by 1000 years of advancements, all in the blink of an eye.  If you had left children behind, they'd have grown and would have had children of their own, and so on and so on; your closest relatives back on Earth might be 50 generations distant.  This time-dilation is what makes space travel unfeasible.  Who would want to travel to a distance planet even if light-speed were possible?

The solution would be to develop back-in-time travel, so that when you arrive at your destination 1000 light years away and 1000 years in the future, you could then travel back in time by 1000 years (but not travel anywhere in space) and thus be at your destination at the same time that you left.  But this creates so many paradoxes that logically one has to assume that traveling backwards in time is impossible.

Also, as for getting pummeled by stuff traveling at the speed of light, it happens all the time.  Other stars and solar systems themselves are moving at significant fractions of the speed of light relative to ours.  Nevertheless, the light of a star which is traveling away from or approaching us at a significant portion of the speed of light will hit us slower or faster than the speed of light than but simply at the speed of light.

So if while traveling at the speed of light you were hit by a micrometer approaching you head on at the speed of light, the force of the impact wouldn't be 2x the speed of light, only 1x.

They've proved it, Einstein, with atomic clocks on the space shuttle running slower than atomic clocks on Earth. 

Also, in spite of the paradoxes, it may be possible to travel back in time.  They apparently sent particles around an accelerator that at one point must have reached faster than the speed of light (at the point the particles collided), because the decayed particles started manifesting themselves before their parent particles were produced.

http://news.discovery.com/space/could-h … 110316.htm

http://www.ibtimes.com/will-large-hadro … ast-275749

I theorize that if you travel 2x the speed of light, you essentially only travel through space at the speed of light but backwards in time, essentially arriving at your destination the moment you left.