[Flipside]

I think you're right Kazan, and it's going to bug me for hours now
We helped the Avionics shed once with something along the lines of what Chrono said, a rotor balanced in the field of a of a permanent magnet, and then spun with electromagnetic brushes. The motor was massively efficient, and phenominally unstable, so much as turning on a light would unbalance the magnetic field of the permanent magnets enough to make the damn rotor fall off 9/10 times.

If this person has managed to somehow reproduce the effect without the instability.......

JarC Yes, but the magnetic fields would realign themselves to the same shape relative to each other, regardless of what angle the magnetic objects were at, the field is a flux, all the magnets are is somewhere for the electrons to live.

[Flaser]

When dealing with a force field, most of the time you can't gain energy out of a force field - for it holds no actual energy - it is an object compared to the field that has stationary enegy, that you can harness.

For example when orbiting a planet - or a moon - you could use the gravity of the planet to accelerate you and create dynamic energy.

[Flipside]

Indeed, though gravity does not have a specific lockpoint (it does have a lockvelocity). I suppose the ground could theoretically be called a lockpoint, but then, look at the amount of energy required to escape it.

[Flaser]

I don't know what you mean to call lock point, but you can actually calculate the energy it takes to take an object from a source of gravity to infinity.

That way you can calculate the velocity which would ammount for the same energy - therefore if you accelerated the object to that velocity it would never slow down, for its movement energy exeeds the energy the gravitic field can exert on it.

[Flipside]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.... I see what you mean, one last little question then, we are talking about two objects of equivalent magnetic strength here, so it's the equivalent of slingshotting two planets around each other, I thought the difference in mass played a large part in the slingshot effect? As I say, I'm not professing to be any great genius at this

[Flaser]

The skingshot uses gravity as you would use a rope to spin a rock.

It's not the gravitic field that is the source of the extra speed the probe gains, but the rotation of the Jupiter, gravity is merly the agent of the interaction.

[an0n]

Originally posted by Kazan
it's not ALL permanant magnets

he has mostly permanant magenets - then a couple of small electromagnets that "pulse" to keep it from hitting magneto-lockup - ie it keeps the magnets off sync so they're pushing on each other at all times - the speed that the electromagnets pulse at affects the RPMs (and the smoothness of the turn)

this part atleast makes sense - this doesn't sound 100% bollocks to me

Yup. It's the equivelant of that spinning-top-and-whip thing.

As long as you input a tiny amount of energy to offset the wobbling of the spinning top, it'll keep spinning indefinitely.

[ChronoReverse]

All gravitational slingshotting is, is simply borrowing energy.

Everytime we use the gravity of Jupiter to save some fuel for a probe, we're stealing some momentum from Jupiter.


However, since Jupiter is something like 100000000000000000000000000 times more massive than any probe we send, the change in Jupiter's rotation and orbit is undetectable by us (and frankly is probably less than the diameter of a proton, which is also a tiny fraction of the the diameter of a hydrogen atom, which is the smallest atom).