I can certainly say that I have a good eye for details, and am definitely a perfectionist, and that it's something that comes in very useful in my studies. When it comes lasers, you can get some pretty powerful stuff just online these days.
And generally they're LYING. I bought a green 5000mW (5 watts) laser on ebay, but it measured only 50mW. (Ebay refunded my money, I still have the laser!) Any posted power over about 1.5-2 watts blue (450nm), or 200mW green (doubled 532nm), or red ~600mW, they're just flat lying. My blue 1 watt laser draws a whole amp, which means (4.5 volts drop) it dissipates 4.5 watts of heat! Imagine how much heat a 10-50 watt laser would dump!!! :eek
Antigravity is a little out of my league haha, definitely less doable - at least harder to find on Amazon.
There's no way to go to other planets without an electric propulsion, both antigravitic in function and sufficient power. With current technology a trip to Mars would be ONE WAY, impossible to carry enough fuel for a rocket to get out of the Martian gravity well.
And as for the Alcubierre drive, yes actually - I did a nice big long essay a year or two ago (before I started university) on space travel and colonisation, and the Alcubierre did come up a couple of times in my research. It's another one of those 'amazing in theory, near-impossible in practice' kind of things.
Apparently not; another physicist reworked the calculations and decided "this is feasible". Nasa is studying it; but they would never ADMIT to having a working ship, it would destroy the minerals and precious metals markets!
It's an absolutely fascinating idea (for those reading this who don't know, the idea is this: You can't travel through spacetime faster than the speed of light, but spacetime can warp and stretch, and it has no speed limit. The Alcubierre drive - which is basically the closest thing yet theorised to the Star Trek warp drive - is designed to warp a 'bubble' of spacetime around the craft in such a way that the bubble moves at, or faster than, the speed of light, while the craft doesn't actually move through spacetime faster than light. It's kind of like surfing on a wave you are continuously creating from your board), definitely something I would love to see more research done into.
Take what you just said, and apply it to Mallett's "time-travel". He contends it's impossible to travel back in time further than the start of the experiment (when you first turned on your laser whirlpool); but if your ship CREATES the wave AS you travel, you should be able to go as far back as you want.
Time-travel also is one of those things no one would ever admit to; and it's very easy to screw up history.
I didn't think about that - I'm always very careful to buy a lot of my clothes, computer parts, etc. at the right time of year (I found a chart once that showed me the best times but I lost it, I'm sure I could find it again with a quick google), but I hadn't thought to do that with my Arduino, servos, etc. It makes me wish I hadn't ordered over £50 worth of stuff just the other day..
Heh heh -- I sometimes wish I hadn't discovered ebay. But then, sometimes I get props that I never thought I could afford! One of my addictions is "LTA" (zeppelins, airships) -- I have an actual plate that supposedly flew on the Graff!
Oh, and by the way, if you're interested in seeing what I'm doing, I put up a post about my Audrey II project in the Replica Props forum. Tonight I went to a 3D printing group up in the Manchester city centre, so I've found a great makerspace where I will have access to a 3D printer to do all of the parts for the internal frame. I can't believe how little it's actually going to cost - £10 a month for use of the space (with laser cutters, 3D printers, all kinds of woodworking, electronics, etc. equipment) plus buying my own filaments/materials is really a lot less than I had imagined. I'm working on the CAD designs for the head internal frame at the moment, will update the post once that's made some progress. Thanks for your interest!
You know, I think I'm gonna hafta learn the "3D printing" thing. Someone sent to me as a "free surprise", a little Minion, molded in white (don't know if it's ABS or PLA). As I said in another post I've been trying to get a Tripod (from the BBC series); I just acquired one, will look into creating an STL file from the actual model. The only model posted online is so large that Shapeways wants $37,500 to make it (and I've not learned how to "scale"). And its head is said to be mis-scaled. I'm absolutely ecstatic about the Tripod I just got, looking forward to make its "eyes" (forward windows) light up like on the series, and its head turn (ordered some timer chips and a tiny motor...)