[Spaceships] Reactionless Drives, Pseudovelocity, and NOT breaking a setting (much)

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by malloyd

It's the only way of avoiding violating conservation - you change velocity without changing energy or momentum, you must have zero mass. It's not necessary if you don't care about the infinite energy issue.

Or, as I thought was pretty obvious considering the title of the thread we're in, you have a thing called pseudovelocity which acts like real velocity in some ways (such that you can use it to go places) but not in others.

Originally Posted by malloyd

If it is sufficiently low and the minimum size of the drive is sufficiently small, then it prevents you from *creating* energy with this scheme. You can still destroy it, but that's much less a problem.

Presumably you mean 'sufficiently large', since minimum size being small is a lack of constraint?

I'm not seeing why a low input RPM to your generator would preclude energy creation.

Originally Posted by malloyd

Well slightly, because energy from nothing is theoretically worse than energy from mass conversion, but as a practical issue, yeah not really. The problem with kinetic kill projectiles is an unavoidable consequence of any space drive that is any good. If you are travelling between planets is periods substantially shorter than a year, your body has more energy relative to those planets than a small nuclear weapon. *Any* good SF drive system is a weapon of mass destruction.

Any space drive that allows you to run up kinetic energy at an uncomfortably high rate, certainly. Even if, like the perpetual-motion-spinner-plus-photon-drive-array system it is probably useless for anything other than kinetic-kill applications.

But your conversion from reactionless travel to powerful free-energy source is very incomplete. A stutterwarp or pseudovelocity-bubble doesn't work with your generator. You can't even drive an RKV with a basic reactionless drive that has a sub-relativistic etheric speed limit...because the generator won't generate when it's moving at the drive's speed limit already.

Originally Posted by malloyd

Which is sort of my point, if you want to ignore that, just do it. Trying to alter the way the drive works so it isn't true without breaking the rest of physics in exploitable ways is doomed to fail.

I'm aware that's your point. I'm not seeing a compelling case for it.