Sergey Dryga wrote:

>> If my physics logic is right, once a craft reached altitude, the amount
>> of energy required to keep it there would be minimal.  After all,
>> energy is force integrated over distance.  If the distance being
>> travelled is zero (no net motion up or down in the gravitational
>> field), the only energy that would have to be placed into the "bottle"
>> would be to replace leakage, and with a Q of several billion, that's
>> not much.
> 
> Something not right here, I just cannot put a handle to it.  You still have to 
> counter the force of gravity (I assume all this happens around earth).  

Resulting force determines resulting acceleration. If you want 0
acceleration (to not travel any distance), you need to achieve a sum of 0
of the forces -- so you need to counter the gravitation force to get to a 0
traveled distance :)

Now if you can generate a force without moving anything, you might be able
to not need any energy for that. But this might prove to be difficult.

Gerhard

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