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Date: 2012-10-20 11:24 pm (UTC)Also, as others have noted, an actual reactionless drive (rather than one that's working because positive kinetic energy is balanced by negative kinetic energy) is, yes, a perpetual motion machine of the first kind: it makes energy out of nothing. Nothing at all. Its cycle goes around, comes back to the exact same point, but you have more energy than you started with. This is probably _why_ power and electricity are Too Cheap To Meter, and also, given a couple other assumptions from this series, it's likely that that's been forgotten in the depths of time and they just know how to make the Energy Boxes, and not how to open them up and rejigger the insides to get an unbalanced momentum out of it.
--Dave, cats are probably involved somehow