Rotor Animations

These animations are not to scale.

They qualitatively illustrate how the rotor bolts disassemble before rotating and passing through the deflection magnets. The gray trapezoids represent transformer laminations, which will actually be quite stacks of thousands of thin sheets of audio transformer steel, with just enough insulation between them to electrically isolate the laminations and allow field penetration.

As a wild guess, the bolt sections will be 10 meters long, and the diameter perhaps 4 centimeters. They will be spaced perhaps a centimeter apart (between the ends) longitudinally at 80km altitude (perhaps overlapping), increasing to 5 centimeters near the surface as the rotor descends and increases velocity (same mass flow rate, Bernoulli effect written in iron).

The six longitudinal gaps will be narrower than shown; just wide enough to admit a stationary winding, plus some enough tolerance to keep the winding from touching the hyper-velocity rotor.

The only way this will work is if the windings dip inwards briefly before and after sled passage, are maintained exactly in the center (somehow) by eddy currents. The 14 km/s rotor moves in a very high vacuum, of course. If windings are damaged, they won't be commanded to "dip" and there will be a sub-millisecond interruption in thrust.

Flux is circumferential. This animation does not show the longitudinal copper windings and optically-triggered SCRs wrapped around the poles, which pin the magnetic excitation field in the rotor, and subsequently provide motor thrust for the passage through the motor windings.

A magnetic field is synchronously imprinted on the rotor; the "slip" will be small, and the rise0-time of the field will be around 200 microseconds.

Animations updated to APNG animation in June 2021. Will attach povray source files Real Soon Now.