Here's a slightly refined version of the mechanism, again running without weights yet attached to the poles:
..beautiful little movement isn't it? The weight poles rounding the corners are subjected to boosted CF, while their linearly-moving partners are inducing negligible CF.
And as you can see, it's perfectly conservative. Slight oscillation - we're only monitoring the rotor bodies here, not that of the poles, but net system momentum is evidently held constant.
It's simply the previous rig, but with a more-elongated track, and a second, counter-rotating disc to attach the track to (it was previously fixed to the background). It's all-plastic, and the two rotors are 1 kg each.
Is it a Roberval, or a balance lever, or a paternoster? Yes! It is.
Soo... does it actually work as intended..?
It seems to - as noted yesterday, the simplest test is to let it destroy its own momentum - for that, we just need to let the sliding masses be flung out by the rotating poles, while simultaneously using their PE to drag the other two, linearly-moving masses, back in, with minimal resistance from CF, and so ready to be flung outwards again.
Because these linearly-moving masses are subject to negligible CF, pulling them back in does not apply the usual acceleration we would expect when pulling an orbiting mass inwards.
And the really cool part is this: the deceleration applied by the flung masses using the ice-skater effect would usually only lower the angular KE, but not the system's angular momentum - on the contrary, the effect depends upon CoM itself holding true - if radius rises, so does MoI, and since angular momentum is MoI times RPM, if MoI goes up, RPM must go down, to keep the net total of momentum constant. So the deceleration works precisely because of CoM, not in spite of it. Very fundamental point, this, and its implications must be appreciated..
However, because the poles' relative 90° positions are held constant by the track, these angular decelerations at the ends are also decelerating the masses coming straight down through the micro-CF zone - and without orbital rotation for this phase of their journey, their momentum is temporarily purely a function of their rest mass times their linear velocity... and that velocity is being decelerated by CoM! How delightfully perverse? So, every time a mass is flung outwards, CoM destroys some momentum! Bwahahah!
Check it out:
...destruction of angular momentum in a closed system without gravity or fictional losses! This supposed-impossibility can be deduced from first principles, and works exactly as expected!
This was the easy test, since it's entirely passive, and needs no further parts.
The asymmetry should of course be reversible too, though (as explained previously), however this needs an additional layer of mechanism to manage the PE required to retract the masses against CF, as well as a means of gaining momentum without gaining velocity (ie. governor mechs).
On a roll so far... We can trick CoM into destroying momentum in a lossless closed system. Physics, bitch! Hoo-yeah.
