It sounds to me like you mean the theoretical Buzzard Ramjet starship. This design involves
a gigantic (hundreds of miles in diameter) force field scoop at the front, sucking in hydrogen
and then accelerating it out the back to produce thrust. This ship could reach 0.99999999c
but there are several problems:
1. At relativistic speeds flying through space hydrogen would be like flying through
liquid metal, remember hydrogen is an alkali metal in the periodic table
2. There is no known radiaition shielding capable of protecting the astronauts from the
amount of energy released by splitting the protons from the electrons
3. There is nothing that says we can't go faster than light, we just can't go at the
speed of light, only a ship made of light could do that
4. The scoop would have to be very large but not made of any physical material
My own theory for exceeding light speed involves creating/capturing several black holes of
equal mass and arranging them in a ring orbiting a common center of gravity. Feeding the black
holes electrical energy would give them electrical fields and hence a method of controlling
their movement via magnetic beams. Position a spacecraft far away at right angles to the plane
of rotation and then fire up the engines. As the ship accelerates towards the ring of black holes
you cause the ring's radius to begin to decrease. Timing is critical so that the event horizons
of all the black holes would overlap slightly at the same instant that the ship passes through
the center of gravity. Since not even light can escape a black hole, then the escape velocity
inside a black hole must be greater than c. By doing this the ship would briefly exceed c and
then shot out the other side to, who knows where? Of course, this requires magic box technology.
> >
> > Peace!
> >
> > \AaronWarp drive technology Scottie?
>
> > Andy Robert Steinberg wrote:
> ><SNIP>
> > a theoretical starship design called Orion, which could reach 0.3c by
> > >jettisoning
> > >nuclear bombs a distance behind itself and riding the shock waves.
>
> Freeman Dyson proposed this method in a race w/ the liquid fuels group @ NASA
> many moons ago.
> > This would
> > >leave
> > >long trails of highly radioactive material everywhere Orion goes, in essence
> > >causing
> > >massive pollution of outer space. The Orion Project long ago was scrapped,
> > >and rightly
> > >so.<SNIP>
> Far-off energy sources may be derived from small
> > >black
> > >holes, or from converting matter directly into energy.
>
> How about converting ice (frozen H2O) into H2 fuel
> (which got the spaceship there in the first place) Basically creating a distant
> refueling station for th enext legs of the trip.
>
> Nah.. How about we do this on a massive scale on Earth to eliminate greenhouse gas
> emissions and burn H2 which produces water vapor for exhaust.
Too much O2 in the air and we get forest fires. Too much H2O = excessive humidity.
Too much CO2 = greenhouse effect. I read in The Weather Conspiracy that 50 years ago
Earth's atmosphere was 30% O2 and now it's only 20%.
>
> Sound too much like Rainbow technology.
> Glenn