The Halo Drive
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN readers point to it as a clear explanation of a theoretical fuel-free propulsion concept from a channel they respect.
What it is
Astrophysicist David Kipping presents the halo drive, a proposed way to propel a starship to a good fraction of light speed by gaining energy from a black hole. The video is based on his peer-reviewed paper and explains why energy is the main obstacle to interstellar flight.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2019 to 2023.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec mperham · 2023-01 · on “The Halo Drive: Fuel-Free Relativistic Propulsion (2019)”
Prof. Kipping is well known for his Cool Worlds youtube channel, which is fantastic. He created a video on his Halo Drive idea: [this video]
Recommends jp555 · 2019-06 · on “Ways to travel at nearly the speed of light”
The halo drive concept is interesting. It uses a beam of light to extract gravity energy from a black hole and use to to maintain acceleration of your ship. Almost no fuel needed because its really just a kind of extreme gravity assist that we’ve been doing since what, the 1970s? [this video]
Recommends chii · 2021-08 · on “A Dyson sphere around a black hole”
also, you can use light, instead of matter. Termed the "halo drive", it's a very nice theoretical concept: [this video]
Cites _Microft · 2019-03 · on “Black Hole Propulsion as Technosignature”
If you have the technology to reach the nearest binary blackhole ( "you just have to pay the one-time fee of the cost to reach the nearest binary black hole system" , at 16:12 min in this video: [this video] ), you can most likely deal with the mirror/energy harvesting problem as well.