Actually, the effect my drive uses is analogous, on a macroscopic scale,
to the effect the Casimir effect has on electrons between the plates.
They wind up running in a similar manner. This effect was discovered by
Dr. Thomas Townsend Brown in the early 20's, and culminated in a project
for the Air Force and the Rand Corporation called Project Winterhaven in
the early 50's. WHile his devices utilizing the effect could only
generate a propulsive force in the order of 2% of the mass of the
plates, the reseach showed that utilizing dielectric materials in the
order of and above 10,000 k ( NOT Kelvin), which were not in existence
at the time (and I'm not sure if they exist currently) and with voltages
above around 75,000 volts would provide significant increases in Casimir
influence on electrons occillating in assymetrical orbits in the
dielectric, thus increasing the thrust to weight ratio of the device.
While it is not a pure Casimir device, i.e. the space bewteen the plates
is not less than a Planck length, it does through brute force utilize
the effect.
While the Brown device uses electrons in asymetrical orbits to generate
force, I simply use whole chunks of grounded mass to achieve the same
result. I expect that a Brown type device would be more efficient, but
probably won't be able to reach very high thrust to weight ratios to use
for launchers, as the device uses electrons with their extremely low
mass, while my device uses the whole atom, which has hugely larger mass.
Of course, as the performance is a result of F=(mv^2)/r, a change in
velocity would have a much greater impact on output. As electrons are
much easier to accelerate to higher velocities, with a high enough k
value in the dielectric, any thrust could be possible. This would
neccessitate development of all temperature superdielectric materials,
which would probably be a similar technological feat as high temp
superconductors ( which would probably be wanted for use in the plates.)
Additionally as the radius of the particle orbits in a Casimir Device
are subatomic, this obviously also amplifies the thrust produced.
-- TANSTAAFL!!!Michael Lorrey --------------------------------------------------------- President retroman@tpk.net Northstar Technologies Agent Lorrey@ThePentagon.com Inventor of the Lorrey Drive Silo_1013@ThePentagon.com http://www.tpk.net/~retroman/ --------------------------------------------------------- Inventor, Webmaster, Ski Guide, Entrepreneur, Artist, Outdoorsman, Libertarian, Certified Genius.