Recent content by wolfkeeper

The launch loop cable's rotor moves at 14km/s (i.e. well above escape velocity!) When you launch stuff you need to feed in power equal to the energy needed for the vehicle, allowing for losses. This is a few hundred megawatts of power.

Potentially. And that's true of cars and aeroplanes, rockets. Basically anything with enough energy to get you around fast can sometimes release it very quickly and kill you. There are design details that can minimise the chances of a loop failing. It's probably a lot less likely to fail...

Well, it's tied down to the ground, so it can go significantly faster than the minimum speed. If you go slower than the minimum speed then it falls down. And you certainly can't stop it; there's enormous kinetic energy there, even if you stopped putting energy in, it would stay up for perhaps...

No, you do it on the ground, you lay the cable straight along the ground, stationary, and then you go to the mid-point and put deflection sections either side, and put some supports under it so it forms an arc. Just a small one a few tens of feet long or whatever. Then run the rotor up to...

You start in the middle with a small loop and move outwards, growing it as you go. B52s don't go fast enough or high enough to make the rockets significantly smaller. With a launch loop, you don't need rockets at all- it can throw to escape velocity.

Nope. In this case it's the reactive centrifugal force- it's a REAL force. It's NOT a pseudoforce. It's pushed up by the curvature of the cable forcing the rotor downward more than it would naturally fall under gravity, and that pushes the sheath upwards. If you mean a small gyroscope, no it...

Hopefully. Still, nobody has even built a launch loop a few feet across yet, never mind thousands of miles.

Don't believe the hype; space elevators won't realistically reach those numbers for a long, long time, if ever. Most of the costs are infrastructure. The space elevator is only cheap at really *enormous* launch rates, after operating at maximum capacity for years. Launch loops can handle...

Launch loops scale much better than rockets. If you want to build a bigger rocket, you pretty much need a clean sheet of paper; rockets scale badly, you have to redesign *everything*. If you want a bigger launch loop, you just build more cable; the same design of cable. And launch loops...

You don't particularly, but you don't have *that* much choice. Yes, there's no way to get directly to LEO from a space elevator of course, you have to go to GEO first. Well, you can, you can go up an elevator with a rocket ~1000km and then go from there, single stage. It's quite a small rocket...

Space elevators currently are impossible to build; the carbon nanotube *cable* doesn't exist to do this right now; not even 6 inches of it. The strongest engineering materials available can't build the space elevator. So far as anyone has been able to show, launch loops are actually possible...

Not exactly. UVA messes up collagen, and that will make you look older, but UVB damages DNA which induces cancer (as well as inducing a tan and creating vitamin D).

The Halbach array gives (essentially) a sinusoidal component to the field strength along the length. From the point of view of the coil, it's the *change* of the field causes an EMF in the closed loop (by Faraday's law). But the change of the field *leads* the field by 90 degrees. So the EMF is...

Yes, just to agree with this, it's about limits. For example the equation: y = 1/x when x is 0 is undefined however as x tends to zero from the positive side it tends to +infinity (try plugging in a small x if you don't believe me!) from the negative x side it tends to -infinity (again plug...

Yup, you need Halbach arrays; it about doubles the field, and the lift is proportional to the square of the field, so you get 3-4x more lift; and takeoff happens at much lower speeds. The number of people that have been able to make a working inductrack design is very, very short. The biggest...