Friends don't let friends use reactionless drives.
—Ken Burnside
Warped Stars
Prologue
The freighter's massive girders strained, their creaking providing relief from the eerily silent ascent. It carried several thousand tonnes of machinery, soil, and organisms, most of which were immersed in a jellylike g-absorbing fluid. As the freighter rose slowly into the air, leaving not even the slightest puff of dust, a grizzled bystander shook his head slowly.
"It's just not right," he remarked to his similarly wrinkled companion, "Rocket launches should be things of awesome power, and fire, and smoke. Sometimes explosions. Not this… kraken-borne sneaky thing." He shook his head again. "Just… not right."
His friend chuckled. "I don't know, Jeb. Seems like a grand way to go up to me. Nice, slow, and totally safe. No cargo's been lost for several years."
"That's just the thing, Bill. That was the whole charm of the space program! Without explosions, who wants to watch? Without the noise, who wants to fly?" He watched the giant freighter rise slowly in the dry air. Its groans quieted once it had lifted several meters into the air. The air once more became silent. Jeb shivered. "This thing's unnatural."
Reactionless drives are those which produce thrust without requiring "reaction mass." The need for reaction mass is what makes rockets so absurdly massive. For this reason, a reactionless drive would be a huge breakthrough for rocket science. So why does Burnside—and he's not the only one—advise against the use of reactionless drives in your scifi universe? Well, it's quite simple: They represent a violation of the law of conservation of momentum. This doesn't sound so bad until you do a little digging and discover how much of physics as we know it depends upon this law. One could construct a device which violates the law of conservation of energy, and Einstein has taught us that energy is equivalent to mass. And that's just the ways it breaks physics—the ways it could break _society_ may be even more widespread. These ramifications are difficult to appreciate fully, and a post-reactionless drive world might be so alien as to be incomprehensible. But that's only if you want to represent a post-reactionless drive world in some sort of equilibrium. I, however, endeavor to describe a world coping with the recent discovery of the abomination of physics that is the reactionless drive. Kerbal Space Program provided a convenient reactionless drive in the so-called "kraken drive." Back a few years (circa 2013), the physics engine allowed certain configurations of parts to act as drives. I'll be exploring its properties in great depth through this work.
Chapter 1: Garage Shenanigans
The welder’s sparks settled on the ground, cooling. The kerbal using the welder put the welding torch down, flipping the visor on his helmet up. Wiping the sweat off his face with a rag made from an old T-shirt, he grinned.
“All done, Jeb. You wanna test it out?”
The other kerbal eyed the steel box on the table. A number of wires were zip-tied to the side, creating a colorful pile. “You sure this thing’s gonna work, Bill?”
“Ye have little faith. Has anything I’ve made failed?”
“Well…” Jeb counted on his fingers, listing off the various failures. “The rocket-propelled buggy… the radio controlled plane of death…” he shuddered in remembrance “…the jet-powered boat—”
“All right, all right. That’s enough of that,” he said, chagrined. “This is just a gear bay. It doesn’t have any engines. It’s not even flammable! What could possibly go wrong?” He picked the remote off the pile of tools and materials covering the other desk.
“All the same, I’m going behind the blast shield.” Jeb smirked. “What if the batteries catch fire? Anyhow, let’s put it on the test stand.” He walked over to the box, lifted it, and put it on top of a charred, spidery contraption. The stand creaked in protest as Bill bolted it down. Jeb strode to the acrylic blast shield and sat in one of the two chairs behind it. Bill rolled his eyes (a rather startling expression in kerbals) and joined him.
“You know nickel batteries don't do that, right?” Bill said in a distinctly sarcastic tone. “Anticlimax in three, two, one.” He mashed the “ACTIVATE” button on the remote, and then immediately cursed under his breath. “Forgot to take the brackets off the hatch!” He made to run out and detach it, when the test stand started shaking.
“Erm…I think you should stay back here,” Jeb cautioned him. “Something's not right.”
The test stand continued to shake, increasing in violence until the box ripped itself free with a horrific screech. It rose slowly into the air, while the awestruck kerbals watched in equal measures fear and wonder. The gear bay rose until it hit the ceiling—and kept going. Splinters and plaster dust flew everywhere as it bored directly through. The two kerbals reflexively covered their heads behind the shield. When the falling wood and roofing tiles had ceased, the two ran out of the shed to watch the bay’s ascent.
“What could possibly go wrong, he says. Don’t you know better than to say that by now, Bill?”
Bill just stared at the nondescript steel box with its brand new weld—and the two brackets that had held the hatch shut—as it continued to rise inexorably into the blue sky.
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It'll be fine, I'm sure!
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