“Yes, and you and about a thousand other people have been working on those questions for the past 15 years with absolutely nothing to show for it.”
She nodded. “Okay, I’ll give you that, but, truth be told, most of those guys just took your money, shunted it to other research, and then fobbed off some old Breakthrough Propulsion Physics ideas on you.”
Nathan’s face colored slightly. “Yeah, there were some folks with a bit less integrity than others.”
“Because you gotta admit, there are some pretty loopy rumors about what you guys are trying to do!”
“I thought you said you were going to explain why your lab blew up,” he said, waving her suite around.
“Oh, I am, I am. It’s important to know where I’m coming from is all. You see, I don’t think you guys are nuts. I believe in the Deltans!”
“You believe we’re being invaded by aliens?”
Kristene’s grin faltered. “You mean you don’t?”
“Honestly? It depends on the day of the week. I’m putting off making up my mind until I can see some less ambiguous evidence, like maybe from the SSBA, if they ever allow us tasking on it.”
“It’s not ambiguous. That rogue stellar fragment theory that NASA keeps sticking by is a bunch of hooey, and it looks worse every year they refuse to change their minds. The only reason nobody will publicly challenge it is ‘cause they don’t want to admit to believing in aliens.”
He nodded and then looked down at the suite’s screen again. “So you’re a true believer. How does that apply to this?”
“Well, everybody else has been focused on the usual suspects for your interstellar engine: warps, bias drives, gravity waves, wormholes, reactionless motors, and stuff like that. But all that stuff is either impossible, improbable, or is gonna take some sort of miraculously magical power source to run. And the only realistic alternatives to the pie-in-the-sky dreamers have been your advanced plasma and ion engines. They can do the job, and we’re building them now, stuff like VASIMR, and FEEP, and Hall Thrusters, but none of them have the endurance to really go interstellar, not like the Deltans anyways.”
“Okay, so what did you do?”
She beamed. “I killed two birds with one stone. I figured if the aliens were doing it one way already, it probably indicated all those other ideas were full of crap. So why waste my time figuring out how to open a wormhole when some advanced extraterrestrials couldn’t even do it? I focused my efforts on answering the first question in order to answer the second one!”
Nathan smiled. “We actually hoped most would do that, but we didn’t want to shoot down potentially useful tangents, so we phrased it as two different questions. You aren’t the first person to link them, but you are the first to claim to have figured it out.”
She wagged her right index finger at him. “Figured it out and have the busted-ass lab to show for it.”
“Maybe. That’s what Hastings is trying to do by piecing your lab back together. He said the wreckage was very interesting.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what he’ll find. It’s what I found and what the Deltans are likely using: a photon drive, but better. Inconceivably better.”
“Go on.”
“Photon drives have been on the drawing boards for years, but the negatives have always outweighed the positives. Basically, it’s a cross between an ion drive and a flashlight. Photons are particles, at least for the purposes of this theory anyway. We won’t worry about the wave properties of light at the moment, so just think of them as particles. Specifically they’re massless particles, but they still have momentum and energy because they move at the speed of light. There’s a whole bunch of different examples of photon momentum in nature, and we’ve even tried to make space propulsion systems using solar photons for free: solar sails for instance.
“Now a flashlight or a laser is already a photon drive, shooting photons out one end and accelerating in the other, but they’re so damn weak you never feel the push. The best they can do efficiency-wise is a Newton of thrust for every 150 to 300 megawatts expended. To make a useable engine you need to produce a LOT of photons at some really big energies, which takes gazillions of gigawatts of power.
“Now, you look at the spectrum from the Deltans’ ship, and it’s this high energy curve, but it’s not a blackbody spectrum like photon drives are traditionally figured for either. Nor is it a coherent monochromatic source.”
Nathan shook his head. “You’re losing me. My basic physics was a long time ago and … .”
She nodded. “It’s okay. It doesn’t look like a star’s emissions, or any thermal source like a rocket, but it doesn’t look like a laser either. It’s different, weird, but what it does resemble is an antenna emission, only with the central, main frequency a lot higher than we’re used to, somewhere in the high ultraviolet. The blue light we see from the Deltans is just the tail end of their emission spectrum.
“I guessed that maybe there was some sort of benefit to having the photon drive’s exhaust in a narrow frequency band rather than a broad blackbody spectrum. So, I tried to duplicate what they had already done. It took a lot of freakin’ brilliant work on my part, but eventually I came up with the cone. I call it K-Mart.”
He screwed up his face, but then said, “K-Mart? Blue-light special?”
Kristene suddenly felt a lot warmer than the room seemed to be. She gave him a coy half-grin. “Oh, I knew I liked you.”
Nathan grinned back, but shook his head. “Anyways … .”
“Anyways, it’s essentially an antenna, keyed around the same central frequency as the Deltans’, but no material I know of could handle the power output needed to give this thing any sort of thrust, so I used a pair of coupled field effect antennas. They emit from the fluctuations of an EM field, with one field receiving and the other transmitting. So you put power in one side, and the other side emits your photons for thrust. It’s not reactionless, which is impossible, but you don’t need reaction mass either. You just need power.”
Nathan stood, excited by the possibilities, but still apprehensive. He began to pace. “Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say it worked. Why did your lab explode?”
She shrugged with her right side. “I don’t know. It shouldn’t have. The cone should have these huge losses from one side of the antenna to the other. It was only supposed to produce a couple of millinewtons of force, about what you’d get out of a standard ion drive. Not the sexiest interstellar engine, but it’d work. Thing is, not only did it not show any loss from the electron beam to the photon emission, that explosion seems to show that it released more energy than was even present in the beam!”
Nathan turned to her. “That’s impossible. You can’t create energy from nothing.”
“I don’t think I did. It’ll have to be proven out, but I think the cone took all the available energy from one side and converted it to photon thrust. That’s the energy in the beam, the energy in the LINAC’s fields, the radiant heat and light in the target chamber, hell maybe even vacuum energy, but I doubt it. It took everything available and turned it into thrust. The beam started the ball rolling and it just took off from there on its own. If I could do it over again, I bet I could show that whatever type of energy you shove in to the receptor field, it can use it to make thrust. It’s the ultimate rocket: the highest possible specific impulse, at a high thrust, high efficiency, and zero need to cart around reaction mass.”
Nathan approached the bed and gripped the handrail with both hands. “So, this … enhanced photon drive—could you do it again? And without blowing yourself up this time?”