Uhhh...I'd say it was a fantasty!
In 1988, I built some prototypes of "voice coil" based suspended-magnet tubes. I still have two of them and I'll see if I can dig them out and show pictures here. Each had a teflon or kraft paper tube. A heavy stack of cylindrical magnets was placed in the tube with pushing-polarity single magnets at each end which forced the main stack to the center of the tube. A magnetically-suspended mass, in other words. The project was for a thrusting electric dildo.
A voice coil was wrapped around the center of the tube. When pulsed, the whole affair would lurch (very quietly in my units because I wasn't banging the magnets against the ends) across the bedspread.
In 1994, I lived and worked on Maui and as a hobby, I built one with a pair of D-cells in the middle of the center magnet slug, so it could be self-contained. It was built in a glass tube and the coils (now two) were part of the moving battery/magnet assembly. You could see the inner workings, in other words. It was quite strange to watch it travel along in jumps with very little sound and no external wire connections.
Then, one night, I got involved in a bar room brawl trying to protect a young lady from being bullied by a couple of locals. I won the fight but landed in the hospital with 11 fractures in my facial bones and had two lengthy and very expensive surgeries at Maui General hospital to rebuild my face.
I had tucked my prototype into my bag when I went in for the second surgery because I was quite attached to it and was afraid it might get stolen if I left it at my home. While I was in surgery, an orderly decided to take a look in my bag and found the long tube with coils of wire and batteries inside. She called security. After the hospital was partially evacuated the US Army bomb squad was called and they took my little "inertial dildo motor" prototype out into a field and blew it up!
True story, I swear! Okay...I lied when I said I won the fight...but the damsel did escape!
But as far as making UFOs with it, I'm afraid that's not in the cards. It relies on friction between its low-mass outer body and whatever it's travelling across to get any net travel. In space, it would wiggle but not travel. Just like in the first videos; when it's laid down for "horizontal travel" you get net travel. When it tries to go vertical, it has no friction against anything so it shows no net travel.
« Last Edit: 2011-01-19, 12:25:12 by humbugger »
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