On Aug 24, 2:27*am, Robert Clark wrote:

Nomen Nescio wrote:

The charge would then be turned off...

That's not exactly easy to do. You can't "turn off" a charge... and if
it was easy to bleed off then you'll have trouble maintaining it.

The guy who invented it said that with current technology we
could get up to a couple of percent of lightspeed...

Any pointer to calculations? I'd like to know at a minimum the
assumptions underlying them.

...and up to lightspeed in the future.

Yeah... pedantically, you can't make it "up to lightspeed". More
pertinently, throwing something small at high speed *anywhere* is
going to be a problem (interstellar erosion is going to be tough for
significant-sized objects... it will be far far worse for very small
objects (square-cube law bites again). 'Course, you can make them
really really cheap and numerous so there's a lot of redundancy in a
"cloud"... but you're not likely to do anything up around relativistic
speeds.

Starship on a Chip.
Big distance, tiny spacecraft.
By Tony Reichhardt
Air & Space Magazine, November 01, 2006
http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exp...-Starchip.html

Mmmm, Space Chips.
Little spacecraft could hitch a ride on Earth's magnetic field to
search for alien life.
By Gregory Mone Posted 08.06.2007 at 2:00 am
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviat...007-08/mmmm-sp...

I'll have to look at those, thanks.

--
Brian Davis