Which means detaching them and keeping them around. Wouldn't that mean dragging your mass around as you go, letting it decrease as you expend fuel, similar to the current setup? And if you let yourself get too light, you'd be blown along by solar winds, never able to approach a star system.
More separately, I've been wondering: once we remove them, what happens at the destination, and we're largely massless? Do we cannibalize some of the planet's? Otherwise we'd float in the atmosphere, probably pretty high up, or get blown away by breezes...
In any case, we'd probably be far too distracted by unhigging things and floating around to actually achieve speedy space-flight for quite a while.
It won't work either way, my comment was not intented to be serious. According to the theory, the larger part of mass is originated in sea quarks which form and annihilate from the binding energy of the "real" valence quarks in very short time spans - how to approach those?
There will be other problems too.. gravity is the weakest force, but it still plays a role. If it is taken away, the chemistry of our ship (and us) could change critically.
Additionally, if there is no mass, electron and nucleons will all have the same mass (none), and all elements will have the same mass - uhoh. If you're lucky you might get an entire new set of particles, or maybe try hydrogen plasma..
I agree, we'd be far to busy figuring this out. But imagine, maybe overhigging would be possible as well and we'd have gravity generators! (Low g is one of the big health problems in space.)
I'm enjoying the mental pictures :) And know little about the details, so I'm finding this fascinating.
Now I've got a mental picture of lifting something light, cranking up its higgs-bosonity, and dropping something far heavier. As long as it uses more energy to raise the effective-mass than it can produce, we don't create a perpetual-motion device, but there could be tons of fun to be had :) Winning those hammer-and-bell challenge things at fairs, for instance - crank up the mass, thus inertia, as you swing down. Handy for destruction in general, too.
More separately, I've been wondering: once we remove them, what happens at the destination, and we're largely massless? Do we cannibalize some of the planet's? Otherwise we'd float in the atmosphere, probably pretty high up, or get blown away by breezes...
In any case, we'd probably be far too distracted by unhigging things and floating around to actually achieve speedy space-flight for quite a while.