Talk:Alderson drive

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The text in the sections labeled "The science" and "Technical details" was plagarized from the article Building The Mote in God's Eye, which appeared in Galaxy Magazine in 1976. Given that my copy says copyright Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, it is probably a bad idea to leave the unattributed text in place.

Good catch on the articles - could you add in a reference to the publications at the bottom of the article? Honestly we should have had this already, I suppose we should reference Mote and Hand - are there any other articles explaining this? --Ignignot 14:59, 14 March 2006 (UTC)


Replaced the section that said the location of the points is due to being far enough out for gravity to be weak. This is obviously untrue as the point linking the Mote and the Eye is rather close to the Eye. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 90.9.56.163 (talk • contribs) 22:52, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] tramlines

The article does not define 'tramlines'. Dan told me that a tramline lies along a gradient of (if I remember right) a field defined by the star's luminosity raised to some exponent, and a tramline exists between two stars if it passes through a saddle point, undisturbed by other stars' fields. For one choice of exponent, this means a tramline exists if the sphere whose diameter is the line between the two stars in question contains no third star; such lines are a subset of a Delaunay triangulation (a concept that interested me at the time). I don't think he told me where the A.Point lies along the tramline. —Tamfang (talk) 17:37, 2 April 2008 (UTC)