by s_plissken on Fri Jan 04, 2008 6:02 am
So, a magnet makes another magnet hover because the repellant forces are greater than its weight, but if you would want to make a spaceship out of that stuff it wouldn't do a lot unless it had an object of equal polarity that propels it, right? So if you have a large, weightless object in space you could propel it with a magnet but then it would just drift away very slowly until it got caught by the gravitational force of a planet or something, so you would have to do that outside the gravitational range of any planet, which is pretty far away. Once you got to 'pretty far away' you would already be in motion anyway since you must have used some kind of propulsion to get there in the first place since magnets aren't powerful enough to let a big spaceship leave orbit. And once you're moving with that thrust anyway, the little bit of acceleration that some kind of magnet launch system would give you would be pretty minimal. So unless someone builds a huge magnetic railway to another planet it's gonna be useless.