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It feels weird. Weren't you supposed to instantaneously get all your maturity and adulting skills once you turned 18? ... Maybe it's because I was technically born at 3AM and that's in two and a half hours here.

Lord Denethor stood, hands clasped behind his back, in the shade of the White Tree. He made no attempt to welcome the man in front of him, no effort to put him at ease; merely tipped his head, the merest fraction of a nod. "So. You are the famous Craban."

The man shrugged, seemingly entirely comfortable with standing in front of the Steward of Gondor unshaven, still dressed in travelling clothes. "That's what they call me," he said, his accent strange and harsh to Denethor's ear.

Not that the Steward would ever allow his distaste to show. He looked out over the White City, and the vast fertile plain of the Pelennor beyond. "It seems rumour has made your fame greater than it truly is, Master Craban," he said, allowing himself a thin smile. "No hosts of citizens turning out to greet you, whatever we may have heard."

The scruffy man smiled back, a defiant glint in his shadowy eyes. "The rich rarely welcome anyone who stands up for those they exploit... my lord."

Denethor felt his smile crystallise. "My people do not exploit one another, Master Craban," he said, locking onto the other's gaze.

Craban did not flinch away. "There's more to Gondor than Minas Tirith."

Denethor held the stare for another moment, then let it drop and turned towards the north-west. "As I well know. But you are not from Gondor, are you? You come to us out of the north - from Eriador."

Craban nodded. "Arnor, as was," he said, "and mayhap will be again."

"And in that forsaken land, your claims of abuse may hold some truth," Denethor allowed. "But this is Gondor. We are of fairer stock."

"So I have often heard, on my travels," Craban said with a slight nod. "Usually from the tongues of noble lords who care nothing for the poor and downtrodden outside their walls."

Denethor stiffened. Did this man have no sense of decorum? It seemed not - that he was unable to comprehend the Steward's subtle message. Time, then, for the sword to slip a little from its sheath. "Yes, the downtrodden. You are a great champion of the... mistreated, are you not, Master Craban?"

Craban eyed him, but nodded firmly. "That I am. All deserve a fair chance, whether they be born rich or poor."

"Indeed." Denethor turned again, facing west along the White Mountains, and held out his hand to indicate them. "Unless, of course, they happen to be Rohirrim."

The ragged man's brow furrowed deeply. "The Riders have just the same rights as any other."

"Oh?" Denethor affected an expression of polite surprise, and loosed his attack. "Then it is not true that you claim to have friends among the Dunlendings - those same wild men who daily ravage the western skirts of the Mark?"

Craban scowled as the hit went home. "There can be no peace without discourse," he said. "If Rohan wishes to put an end to the depredations of certain folk of Dunland, they must talk to them. There is no other way."

"Indeed." Denethor took the opening and thrust again, driving words of steel under the other's guard. "And I daresay the same can be said of the Orcs who even now hold all of Ithilien in their iron grasp?"

Craban bent forward a little, as if fighting against the wind - or doubling over as the Steward's sword took him in the belly. "If the goblin-kind can be brought to a treaty, surely that is better than constant war."

Denethor let his icy smile return. "If this is the wisdom of the north," he said, "then it is small wonder the kingdoms of old are no more."

Craban flinched as if physically struck, then straightened and took a deep breath. "Lord Denethor," he said, his voice firm once more, "I did not ask this audience to debate peace and war. I came on behalf of the poor among your people - to ask that you give them aid in this time of famine."

Denethor nodded sharply, angered that the Arnorian dared question his rule or try to dictate to him. "I have heard their plight," he said, "and have already acted to alleviate it. Lady Lothron - of Pelargir, Master Craban, not of the White City - has undertaken to support the nobles and merchants who are suffering. As they recover, so the poorer folk around them will be carried along with them, and all Gondor will be fairer for it."

Craban's mouth actually dropped open. "And if the rich do not choose to share their bounty?" he demanded. "What will you do then, when the people of Gondor lie dying in the streets?"

"Master Craban," Denethor snapped, "you forget your place. I rule in Gondor, not you." He reached up and touched a dry branch of the White Tree. "And Gondor endures, Master Crow. For thousands of years it has endured. When the North foundered, Gondor remained firm. My people are strong-willed; they will break this famine, it will not break them."

"Strong-willed," Craban repeated. "There is a fine line between strong-willed and stubborn, my lord Steward. Good day to you." And with no more than the most perfunctory bow, he turned on his heel and strode down into the city, leaving Denethor alone.

---

Craban is the singular of crebain, as in crow; I figured Corbyn was close enough to Corvid. Lothron is the month of May, as in the Prime Minister. And Denethor has no truck with socialism.

hS

If it works, I'd like you to draw me a picture of Agent Miguel Correa. If it doesn't, I'll...let's see...I'll record myself reading one of your missions (you tell me what agent team you want) and post it to the Board. (Probably as an embedded Tumblr vid or something.) Sound good?

Going over your points in order:

a) Yes it is. Even low thrust, if run constantly, adds up to massive velocity. It just means you start gradually.

b) The Eagleworks test /is/ a reproduction. It hasn't been done a third time, no.

c) It works in 10^-6 torr vacuum, which is a good start. Orbit is the next big step.

d) Never said it was. But it can hit arbitrarily large speeds, which means it can go relativistic. That means that by its internal clocks, every star is essentially the same distance away.

e) No, it relies on the fact that it (seems to) work. The precise physics behind it may be wildly wrong, but if it works, then /some/ model will be found to explain it. Demonstrable effect trumps unlikely cause.

f) Yep. Which is why I said from the start that it probably won't work. But NASA think it's promising enough to push out a peer-reviewed paper...

g) Well, America managed the moon. And the biggest issue with long trips is the need to boost all that fuel into orbit, which this does away with. Yes, there's more to it - there always is - but it's certainly feasible.

h) Take the bet. Make Randall's Wager. If you're right, you get a thing. If you're wrong, you get a torchdrive. Either way, you win.

hS

Suppose human extinction takes a small step backwards, oy?

But, so, assuming the whole thing actually does work well, and we can pop up into space and knock about with the grey aliens and the mi-go and all the elastic bands that people have flicked slightly upwards, missed their targets, and are now orbiting the planet, what would we all actually do with it? I mean, for our first steps?
I mean, there's a whole lot of stuff about faffing with Mars, so I'd imagine we might do something there, and there's all that mining and probing and whatnot, but, y'know. Anything else, you reckon?

...and the general No-Fun-Allowed guy, but everyone in this thread seems to be missing the point that:

a) The Emdrive is nowhere powerful enough to carry a manned mission outside Earth orbit

b) It's not been reproduced yet

c) We're not even sure if it works in the field

d) It's not FTL, calm down

e) It relies on an obscure model of physics that, while not invalid, is not favoured by the cutting edge research institutes

f) Multiple sources of error still exist in this experiment and the validation of even one of them torpedoes the entire study

g) The logistics of a manned mission far surpass anything that one government can possibly organise


So... yeah. Do not get carried away. I want to be proven wrong-- it's the only way science moves forward after all-- but you're hopping on the hype train a little too early here. Save the champagne when we've actually made it work up there!

...the Voyager probes, Cassini, and New Horizons all carry RTGs? Besides, Pu-238's half-life is a mere 87 years compared to a nuclear weapon's 24000+. By comparison, it's clean as can be. Besides, not much else can generate heat or electricity in deep space.

And, as hS pointed it out, an Emdrive will not replace a chemical rocket to escape Earth's gravitational potential well. The spacecraft hitches a ride on, say, an Arianne or a Soyuz, deploys in space, and uses its RTG to power the Emdrive.

Yes, until something goes wrong at the launch and you scatter all that wonderful power source material across the atmosphere. Granted, as spacecraft don't carry that much radioactive material, it won't necessarily be too bad, provided we don't use it as apower source to actually leave earth's gravity behind (yes, that does sound horribly unphysic-y, but I hope you understand what I mean). Still, the bad publicity would result in cut fundings, which is bad.

*squees for hours on end*
Humanity could be just about to get off this mudball for realsies!!! Of course, getting into the shallow end's easy- there are already private space flights. We just need a shuttle going to some kind of space dock for this glorious little microwave to sail out into the vacuum. If this works, that is FANTASTIC NEWS, and I will live my life in squalor saving up to go, if it means I get to see that vast empty (suck it up, Casimir) sea filled with shining stars, barren planets, and cottony nebulae!!!

And, fanboying aside, is no one gonna mention the theory all of this is based on? This fundamentally changes the way I understand physics! Particles could all be sailing on some ethereal sea, caught adrift in an invisible wind, and I hadn't the slightest clue!!! This is beautiful.

I truly hope this works as well as we think it does. At the moment, I'm far too happy people are willing to practically consider such a ridiculous idea (space wind!:D)as the means of propelling mankind across the solar system, to make that bet.

~~Aegis, who is geeking out over the fact that his laptop is running off the same stuff that could be powering a star drive if this ends up proven 100%

Load this baby up with Pu-238 and you're all set.

Well, you can put that plotbunny in the freezer until after NaNo? Your NaNovel's been a fun read, so far.

Hosting a Nazi party would be pretty high on the scale, no? It's not a cake with stupid writing on it.

Hmm... if it did only work in a magnetic field, I can see great things for it out around Jupiter and Saturn. Imagine not having to loop through convoluted orbits, but just torchshipping from moon to moon. Though you might face power issues that far out, if you stuck to solar... even so, though.

I was really, really shocked to see the announcement. I figured this was just another cold fusion-style lie, but... seriously. Seriously. I so hope it's true.

hS

... giving me plotbunnies when it's NaNo. >:(

hS

I can totally see him standing up for the Orcs and making the War of the Ring worse than it was.

I'm in on the bet- but I'm going to take the Munroe side. I hereby bet a thousand words of short story (characters and prompt of the winner's choice) that when an em drive test device is launched, it will prove useless for space travel. (So, even if it only works inside the earth's magnetic field, I still lose. Low earth orbit reactions thrust is still huge.)

But seriously, holy carp, etc. Eagleworks is a big-name research group and you know they all walked into this one as skeptically as any physicist would be when given a perpetual motion machine. And this was peer-reviewed, too, which is another layer of skeptical physicists.

(Some restrictions apply on what I am willing to write, etc.)

Maybe we got off to a bad start. Whatever, I'm not going to judge you this early.
So, welcome to the PPC, have a cup of Earl Grey as your welcome gift. So since you haven't mentioned it, what are your pronouns?

Their horrified retraction (as well as their donation) implies that if they'd known the room was being rented to a group of Nazis, they would have refused to rent it to them. That's the case I was pointing out.

(Also, I'm both frightened and saddened by the waves of Nazis coming out of the woodworks, and heartened by the resounding waves of responses.)

The downside of this tech - even if it works precisely as advertised and can be dramatically scaled up - is that it's not a launch engine. Once you're in orbit, you can go anywhere you want with even a weak engine - it's just a matter of acceleration time. But to get to orbit, you need to make at least one gravity of thrust (ie, you need to counter the gravitational pull of the Earth). And right now, that takes a massive engine with an alarmingly high chance of exploding.

It should take a simple trip up the space elevator, but we don't have that tech yet - or the money to build it if we did.

"And I want it so much
Close my eyes, I can taste the Mars dust in the air
In the darkness the space stations shimmer in orbits that I will not share..."

hS

Fingers crossed that the results can be replicated! And fingers crossed that your average Joe will be able to go into space within my lifetime. I've always wanted to see the stars...

I live in GMT, but spent a good seven years over between Minas Tirith and Corbyn. Sounds legit.

hS

Then even if it doesn't work, you still get something out of it.

(I'll even add that if they don't launch one because someone else proves it doesn't work before they get round to it, I lose.)

hS

PS: Oh no, a whole decade? No space mission will ever be able to run that long.

Way too good. Suspiciously so.

I bet my socks that research teams worldwide are scrambling to replicate these results and verify the Eagleworks paper. There are multiple sources or error for this experiment and every single one of them can spell doom for the conclusion of this article-- but I want to be proven wrong.

This is uncharted territory. Should the EM drive be proven to work, the entire solar system is ours for the taking. The stars are still too far away-- a hypothetical trip to Proxima Centauri would take the better part of a decade-- but I'd argue that our solar system is more than enough already.

For now, cautious interest should be the name of the game. We have an anomalous situation on our hands-- we need to investigate it.


Also, inb4 all of the trash science news claims we invented a stardrive. It's not been 100% proven yet, jeez.