Questionable physics, well, I like to watch people play.
I'll drink to that. It could at least be amusing.
I'm going to go read upon ion drives and a tad more on proplusion schemes. I remember enough to know that NASA has worked with this concept.
I'm still searching for something to explain the microwaves with regards to making this thing an open system, etc. I'm not grabbing the image entirely.
The description for this putative "drive" also makes my head spin. Do microwaves leave one end? That could produce trust, I suppose, but not much and there would be more efficient ways of doing the same thing.
The cliff notes version of rocket propulsion is that you have to fling stuff to go. The faster you fling the reaction mass, the more efficient it is. For a conventional reaction-mass based system the efficiency is referred to as specific impulse (Isp). For some reason known only to people who are better at math than I am, specific impulse is measured in seconds; the higher the better.
Solid fuel rockets are 350 seconds, tops. Liquid fuel rockets the the SSME can get into the 400's, but at a significant hit in thrust to weight ratio and complexity. With advanced nozzle designs and exotic (and extremely toxic) propellants it should be possible to push Isp into the low 500 second range, and such designs have been demonstrated but are of questionable utility. Who wants a rocket that runs on flourine?
By running hydrogen or methane through a nuclear reactor Isp well into the 600's is possible, and with more exotic reactor designs it's possible to push the number far into the 1000's and 2000's. Simple demonstrators were built in the 50's IIRC. Adding a nuclear reactor to a rocket adds a whole new layer of complexity and nail biting, of course. Thrust to weight ratio is also inferior to chemical rockets.
Ion engines use electrical fields powered by solar arrays to spit out chemically inert propellant, usually a noble gas. They have specific impulse well into the 3000's, but thrust measured in fractions of a gram. For long term missions though, the technology is well demonstrated and effective. See Deep Space One.
And then you have the more exotic, theoretical designs that rely on fusion or antimatter or something crazy like that.
But there is another approach; why bother using a rocket at all when there's plenty of momentum being supplied by the sun? Using either a very thing sheet of mylar to bounce sunlight, or a magnetic field propogated by some means to reflect solar wind, it is possible to get delta-v with no expendature of reaction mass whatsoever.
So why muck about with pseudoscience?
