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New EAS Inconsistencies
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Identity Crisis: [QB] [QUOTE]Originally posted by Guardian 2000: [qb]Any system which causes the exhaust to reverse direction (even a forcefield) will be doing nothing more than "bouncing" the exhaust toward the front of the ship, canceling out the forward thrust and bringing the thrust total down to zero. Just because the exhaust products are now headed forward does not mean that the ship must now move backward. [/qb] [/QUOTE]Nope. When the exhaust is redirected the change of momentum is 2p not just p. A particle heading aft with momentum p hits a forcefield (we'll assume that the collision is perfectly elastic) and bounces off with momentum -p. The total change of momentum (from p to -p) is thus 2p. So the ship gains forwards momentum of p when it first generates the particle and backwards momentum of 2p when it bounces the particle. p-2p = -p. The ship now has a total backwards momentum of p. Of course, no collision is 100% elastic and the redirected particle can't be heading directly back the way it came (otherwise it would go straight back into the impulse drive) so the ship's backwards momentum would be less p but, giving Starfleet engineers some credit, that's only a change of magnitude not of direction. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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