Crawlers use a propulsion system that is built into the frame of the spacecraft. Why does a propulsion system have to be located either ahead of or behind the hull of the spacecraft? The crawler accelerates itself primarily by producing a propulsive imbalance only within the volume of space that it actually occupies. This is an optimum condition as far as power consumption is concerned.

You could produce a crawler by mounting a series of nuclear accelerators along the superstructure of the spacecraft. Since these produce only fields which, depending on the charge present in the particles already present within the vacuum of space, there is no mass transfer within the engine. If you are to fire off ions, which is a form of propulsion, then the result is that the spacecraft will take on the opposing charge. As you jettison electrons, the whole spacecraft, unable to recover the lost electrons, will take on a net positive charge.

That is a bad thing because your spacecraft will then start attracting negatively charged particles within the volume of space. Some of those negatively charged particles will be the very ions that you are firing off in order to propel your spacecraft in the opposite direction. If you could find a way to recover the charges on the ions, then you would be able to use ion engines. It would also be possible to use the ion propulsion system if you could bend the ion beam at the far end of the spacecraft.

Your spacecraft could accelerate by using fields to accelerate the ions moving through the tubes in the frame of your spacecraft. At the far end of the spacecraft, you would have to gently bend the beams to diverge in opposite directions. If the beams were to stop at the far end of the spacecraft, then the force released at the back of your spacecraft would neutralize the force generated by accelerating the beams along the hull of the spacecraft. In the event that the beams can be gently bent to the sides of the spacecraft, then the force would cancel itself out in a direction that you are not trying to move in.

This is not the only crawler design. Most fieldframe warp propulsion systems fall into the crawler class. Instead of moving the spacecraft, the fieldframe moves the space containing the spacecraft. Since this moves every particle that makes up the hull instead of moving the hull itself, this design does cause the spacecraft to crawl through the fabric of time-space.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 1:35 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.