Tractor Beams! :)

[drew]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12620560

Cheers,

Drew.

[DaddyHoggy]

So as long as the target ship is constructed from tiny beads we'll be OK....

[Thargoid]

Most are - they're called atoms...

[Ganelon]

It takes some development time with any technological innovation before it really becomes practical and more before it becomes useful in ways unanticipated. Consider the first transistor. Some dismissed it as basically a parlour trick, others thought it useless because it couldn't handle anywhere near the power of the vacuum tubes/valves that were well developed already at the time. But the evolution of semiconductor tech eventually allowed for the development of our multicore processors and gigs of ram.

http://www.cedmagic.com/history/transistor-1947.html

That first TRANSfer resISTOR couldn't do much, and it didn't look like much of an improvement, but it was a breakthrough that began a whole generation in technological advances.

Now, under interesting thoughts would be that somewhere down the road this might also end up being a propulsion system. If the principle is based on the idea of a part of the "wake" and the eddies that form around a ship's hull.. What if a field could be generated that produced a wake effect around a hull in free space? It might be possible, way down the technological road, to use something like this principle to develop a propulsion system that would less resemble the standard Newtonian action/reaction based systems we currently have. If one entertains that idea, another possibility is that similar principles might also allow such a propulsion system to "brake" by applying the wave system in a different way.

That could amount to what we might call "inertial damping" in Newtonian terms. It wouldn't have to violate any laws of physics, just be using a different principle to apply a force than throwing something off the front of the ship (like firing retro rockets, for example, which also are actually a functional "inertial damper").

It's fascinating possibility, in any case. It'll be interesting to see the peer review and experiments and see how it works out.