What If... Cosmic Slipstream Propulsion For Space Travel?

[jjabrams55]

Okay... outer space is not empty. It's full of cosmic rays and radiation. First an explanation though.

Cosmic rays: Are subatomic particles flying at high velocities, sometimes close to light speed. Emitted by the sun and distant cosmic events. Space has cosmic rays everywhere.

Radiation: This is more familiar. The energetic rays that give you cancer. Gamma rays and so on. Even visible light is included here.

So the question is, would this work? Would it even have a prayer of working? Or is this solely in the mind of science fiction? The following for your consideration:

Cosmic Slipstream: The idea is to somehow remove the cosmic rays ahead of you and then something should happen. You know how having lower pressure above a wing creates lift because it creates a vacuum? Same idea here. Moving the cosmic rays out from ahead of you should create a vacuum that your ship gets sucked into, propelling it forward constantly. At least I suppose, since nature seems to always try to fill a vacuum when it is created.

Or would that not work. And if not? Why not? Alternately, if that didn't work, what if the slipstream was so powerful that it moved matter, radiation, AND cosmic rays (technically matter, just really small bits) out from ahead of the ship? Would that create the desired vacuum effect slipstream.

Once again, there is no proof we can even do this. This is just wishful thinking as an alternative to our pathetic rockets. So prove me wrong, please. That is why I post here. To learn.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

In fiction you can do what ever you like, if you get the reader to accept it's reasonable in the world you've created.

The real deep problems (apart from not having a clue how to do it) are:
1) An energy source. If you have a good energy source, then there are plausibly easier ideas
2) It's still no use for Interstellar travel other than a Generation Ship. In an SF maybe you could have a fusion based generator and some sort of "slip stream" drive.

I think the less you explain it in your story the more plausible it will sound. I suspect it's Science Fantasy.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Okay... outer space is not empty. It's full of cosmic rays and radiation.

Much of which originates from the sun, and is manifest as the solar wind - a feature that spacecraft within the solar system could appreciably use to accelerate into interstellar space.

The energy distribution within interstellar space itself I would have imagined to be very variable - therefore any energy source that aims to draw power from that would need to be able to account for that - if needed at all.

 

[jjabrams55]

Alternately I thought of another drive which could work, given that most scifi have gravity generation anyway. Call it bounce drive, with gravity control.

The idea is to have the main ship look like a giant ball. Four smaller balls are behind and they are thrown away at a high rate of speed (using some form of anti-gravity contrivance).

Then gravity is used to accelerate the balls to collide HARD with the main ship, providing thrust. This process happens repeatedly, and the ship hull can take it because it's made of rubber, just like the smaller balls used for thrust.

This could definitely work with off the shelf scifi tech common in popular media today. You would only need rocket thrusters to pivot the ship where you wanted it to point. But the main engines would be the 'thruster balls'.

Simple and it works. So long your gravity generator isn't on the fritz (broken). You'll have to forgive me for this, I just HATE using rockets for the main thrust if scifi, since they are horribly outdated and inefficient for something called the FUTURE.

Beyond that, I like to show HOW a spaceship flies. That is preferable over the ship that has no visibly obvious way that just floats. Of course, I still like the alcubierre warp bubble, since it looks so weird it's cool.

http://www.vis.uni-stuttgart.de/~muelleta/Warp/

 

[Venusian Broon]

Interesting thoughts jj, but I don't see how it could work (although it does depend on what your 'thingimywotsits' and other SF tech works )

Firstly, isn't 'After the collision' just how rocket thrust works anyway, good old Newton III (won't you need a big supply of balls to accelerate/decelerate your ship, i.e. like a big tank of fuel...) and secondly, you have to accelerate the balls to hit the craft, so by Newton's third law again you'd go backwards first to fire them - then when they strike the craft it will move forward, so that it remains more or less in the same space. ???

Ah-ha. I suppose you could have a 'base station' from a fixed point that fires balls at the craft - a bit like the idea of using the sun's photons or a big laser to push a craft on a sail structure which has been proposed.

And of course you could be talking about accelerating the balls using some non-Newtonian force...but then if you have a device to develop some sort of strange non-Newtonian force then you probably don't need to recreate conventional rocket thrust right?

I may have misunderstood what you've put down!