[Moontanman]

Has any one else seen this?

http://www.dtic.mil/...oc=GetTRDoc.pdf

Lots of really unusual stuff

Quote

The IEC/IEF concept was originally pioneered by Farnsworth (1956) and became largely dormant for
over two decades, but it was later revived and revised by Bussard and coworkers (Bussard, 1989, 1990,
1991, 1992, 1993, 1997; Krall, 1992; Bussard and Jameson, 1993, 1994, 1995; Bussard et al., 1993;
Froning and Bussard, 1993, 1998; Froning, 1997; Bussard and Froning, 1998; Watrus et al., 1998;
Froning et al., 2001) and Miley and coworkers (Nadler et al., 1992; Miley et al., 1993; Barnes and Nebel,
1993; Miley et al., 1994; Satsangi et al., 1994; Miley et al., 1995; Nadler et al., 2000). It is also of
historical interest to note that P. T. Farnsworth is the inventor of television (Everson, 1949). Bussard and
Miley and their coworkers discovered a way to configure the IEC device for electric power and space
propulsion applications using modern engineering-physics and materials technology.

And the really wild stuff starts at page 58, almost sounds like techobabble from star trek....

[CraigD]

Moontanman, on 15 July 2011 - 12:19 PM, said:

Has any one else seen this?

http://www.dtic.mil/...oc=GetTRDoc.pdf

What a wonderful report! I look forward to reading it – though as something in the murky region between science fiction and non-fiction.

It’s author and cited contributors appear a who’s who list of pseudo scientists, most related to paranormal research – ESP, remote viewing, UFO-ology, and stranger stuff. Many of these folk have good physics backgrounds and have done respectable, if not standout, work in their the field, later becoming “disrespectable” through because of their acceptance of claims of psychic abilities and similar weirdness. Uri Geller and similar folk figure prominently in many of their biographies.

Being disrespectable, and even mentally deranged, doesn’t disqualify one from having interesting and intelligent ideas – though it does mean the reader needs to be careful about accepting those ideas.

Quote

And the really wild stuff starts at page 58, almost sounds like techobabble from star trek....

This section seems to be mostly base on Hal Puthoff’s ideas about getting energy from vacuum. As his wikipedia page accounts, Pufhoff is a colorful character.

Getting energy from vacuum is in principle possible, and via experiments such as Casimir’s, has been demonstrated pretty conclusively to be physically real. The energies are, however, tiny compared to the mass and energy required by the machines to get them. Still, if these demonstrations could be made many orders of magnitude more efficient, they could in principle be used to “get something from (classically) nothing”, which could be revolutionary for spacecraft engineering. I’m nearly certain, though, that people who currently claim to have had success or be near breakthrough in such engineering (as best I can tell, Puthoff makes no such claim in any publication) are either deluded, or lying to win affection and/or money from poorly educated, credulous people. It’s fair, IMHIO, to call their writing and talk technobabble.

Nonetheless, I find it’s fascinating stuff, and think if may someday be of real engineering value.

[Moontanman]

I was fascinated by the Farnsworth fusior being used as a rocket engine capable of Earth to LEO, is this just wishful thinking or is it a realistic use of the television technology

BTW, is there anyway i can get the old spell checker back? I am on Chrome now and the chrome spell checker is dumb as a stump...

[CraigD]

Moontanman, on 15 July 2011 - 05:02 PM, said:

I was fascinated by the Farnsworth fusior being used as a rocket engine capable of Earth to LEO, is this just wishful thinking or is it a realistic use of the television technology

Wishful thinking, I think.

Fusors, or more generally inertial electrostatic confinement plasma holders, are, IMHO, relics of half-century old hope that positive net power producing fusion might not be that hard to achieve. They’re simple, sturdy, and certainly fuse some 2H of 3H into 3He, but to approach the “break even” point of outputting more power than is input, would have to jiggered to have such different dynamics that they’d be a bigger, more complicated device of an altogether different kind, if such a jiggering is possible at all, which is uncertain.

Davis’s paper and others like it are sneakily deceptive, I think, in presenting old IEC power ideas, like Bussard’s QED-IEF, as if these speculations had actually resulted in successful +net power devices, then going on to praise their potential “high thrust-to-mass” ratios. A light weight devices that consumes more energy than it produces doesn’t have a higher power-to-mass ratio than a heavier one that produces more energy than it consumes, it has a negative power-to-mass ratio!

Quote

BTW, is there anyway i can get the old spell checker back? I am on Chrome now and the chrome spell checker is dumb as a stump...

Hypography’s spell checker under its old vBulletin webengine was just a button to trigger an Internet Explorer plugin. Newer version of IE have built in spell checkers, so I’m not sure still support this plugin.

Firefox’s spell checker is pretty good. If Chrome’s spell checker is aggravating you, maybe you should switch.

Personally, I always write text in a text editor with a good spell checker (MS Word, specifically, though there are many others), then paste it into my browser, so don’t depend on any browser’s spell checker.