Quote:
Originally Posted by deanm
Bojan - yours are almost the same words used when the jet engine was first revealed to the world..!
Look at where we are today.
And it's not easy using mechanical means of propulsion in space (how would it work?)
Dean
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Your example about jet engine is not quite right - rockets (for fireworks... around for a very long time now) are jet engines in principle and are pretty efficient (1~10%?) and the trust is quite useful.
However, I am not saying this story with EM drive is a dead-end street.... like the story about cold fusion.
I am not questioning the theoretical explanation from Finland group... it seems to be a bit "stretched", just like dark matter..
The problem I have is, the effect is not obvious at all (tiny), otherwise it would have been noticed much earlier (for example, radar technology is using MW and sometimes GW of power.. and no one reported any sort of non-accountable stresses in such equipment so far.
So... I don't know, time will tell.
EDIT:
My question should have been something like this:
Given that resulting thrust from EM drive is a consequence of paired photons leaking out of the resonator (while the rest are waisted as losses in the walls of the resonator (heat)), could we expect at all (in theory and practice) the thrust any larger than the one obtained with transmitter pumping power into high efficiency narrow band antenna?
Or by using light sail for example (which is almost the same thing as antenna... it is reflecting photons and producing thrust coming from reflected photon's momentum)?