Here's an open source Idea for you.
Suppose you were to create a very
large, say 20 to 30 meters inside diameter, wire mesh tube. And
suppose further that the wire used would be carbon nano tube
conductors coiled around one of the new magnetic materials being
worked on now. Wouldn't what you ended up with be an electromagnetic
tunnel?
Let us then continue speculating what
you might do with this electromagnet tunnel.
Suppose you used however many hot air
lifting bodies it might require to lift this tunnel up to as high as
such atmospheric buoyancy might allow. And once at that altitude you
then powered it up to be the longest electromagnet tunnel ever
created. If you then put a platform in side with its own
electromagnets in it, but with an opposite polarity, wouldn't it be
possible to create your own vertical, linear accelerator?
If you could, and you could get this
thing to hang at at least 20 kilometers, or more, wouldn't you also
be able to launch some very significant payloads into orbit? Or, on
another tact, wouldn't such an electromagnet mesh pipe be the perfect
way to make a space elevator out of?
You materials and engineering gurus out
there need to start thinking about how you might go about making this
mesh. Maybe with some 3D printing on a whole new scale?
I used hot air lifting bodies here initially because people have this automatic aversion to hydrogen as a lift gas. And for craft flying over populated areas one might even agree with that aversion. I, however, am partial to platforms at sea. Most specifically platforms that might already be producing hydrogen from Yen Tornado, wind Turbines; where the platforms could then be easily placed at the equator in, lets say, the pacific ocean.
ReplyDeleteWhen you start thinking in those terms then lifting something heavy up; something that can be fixed to the ocean floor, becomes a lot more practical. Just consider:
Given a ring collar around the end of our wire mesh lift pipe, with an additional diameter of a thousand feet, holding a contiguous bladder that was, say, five hundred feet deep, you would have a lift doughnut with a total volume of 500 * 500sqrd * 3.14, or 392,500,000 cubic feet. Hydrogen, as a lift gas, has a net lift value of 71.05 pounds per 1000 cubic feet. Thus our lift doughnut would have 71.04 * 392,500; or 27,887,125 pounds (13,943.5625 tons) of lift. And of course, one might even envision having more than one lifting doughnut segment along the length of our electromagnetic pipe; perhaps going the route where you use some number of smaller lift doughnuts along the entire length.
Lets then consider an additional factor; creating a near vacuum in our pipe. Not only would it virtually eliminate the need for aerodynamic considerations on the shape of what we are lifting, it would allow for the opportunity to apply hydraulic pressure to the base of the lifting platform as if it were a piston. You need only do another set of simple calculations to determine that a 60 foot diameter pipe would create something on the order of 16 million pounds of push.