Quote Originally Posted by Eldest View Post
But that's too easy. This is mad science. So instead, here's one way of doing it (and a possible way of interstellar travel, which is the ship they're referring to): you make your hull and materials as light as possible. You can use ALCH 325: Preternatural Fluids to lower the density dramatically. Then you start looking into YGGD 212: Polarcane Geometry, specifically the gravity one. This makes it so that bubbles of the ship have gravity in a different direction than down: make half your ship this, and you now have a weightless ship. Put a few bubbles that can be controlled, and you can have (slow) movement, all without actually using engines: you're just falling in a given direction. This has the advantage of not needing nearly as much power, however, it is more complex and would require more cooperation between gramists.
Hmm...

...You know, you just gave me an idea. I think (and, to be clear, this is with a teenager's conceptual understanding of complex physics, so someone with a stronger background in the science should check me on this) that you could use the magnetic aspect of YGGD 212 to construct something effectively analogous to a negative-mass drive. Despite operating on ferrous materials, YGGD 212 doesn't really create magnetism- there are no poles. Really, it's more like creating a magnetic monopole (for attraction) and... something like a 'magnetic anti-monopole.' Unlike positive and negative charges, though, the opposite charges don't repel- rather, if you have two ferrous objects with one attractive and one repulsive monopole, the repulsive would be attracted to the attractive and the attractive would be simultaneously repelled by the repulsive, creating acceleration without an input of energy. My understanding of electromagnetism as a theory is pretty rudimentary, but as stated before, these forces don't actually act like magnetism so I don't think that that matters.

The problem with this, of course, is that unlike negative mass, this breaks conservation of momentum. Mass and velocity are both still positive, after all. Still, since this is a situation that cannot occur in the real world (because of said violation of conservation of momentum), I don't see a problem. Well, actually, I see lots of problems, but they don't specifically relate to this thing.

Still, if I'm correct, then the result you get is basically infinite acceleration with no input. Also, it's possible (and this is me extrapolating based on previous similarities, so here I'm really shaky) that you could build something analogous to Alcubierre drive out of this, which would be pretty awesome.