Warp drive

[mike]

Can we finally break the speed of light? Nasa breakthrough suggests Star Trek's 'warp drives' may not only be possible - but practical

• NASA suggests new model which could reduce energy requirements for warp-speed travel from planet-sized to car-sized
• 'Humble experiments' in laboratory could lead to faster-than-light travel

Nasa breakthrough suggests Star Trek's 'warp drives' may not only be possible - but practical | Mail Online

 

[Gene Steinberg]

I'm glad they are "engaged" in pursuing this possibility.

So maybe there is a Zefram Cochrane after all.

 

[mike]

Now physicists say that adjustments can be made to the proposed warp drive that would enable it to run on significantly less energy, potentially bringing the idea back from the realm of science fiction into science

But recently White calculated what would happen if the shape of the ring encircling the spacecraft was adjusted into more of a rounded donut, as opposed to a flat ring. He found in that case, the warp drive could be powered by a mass about the size of a spacecraft like the Voyager 1 probe NASA launched in 1977.

Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warps can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more, White found.

With this concept, the spacecraft would be able to achieve an effective speed of about 10 times the speed of light, all without breaking the cosmic speed limit.

Warp Drive More Possible Than Thought, Scientists Say | Space.com

Icarus Interstellar

Looks like the vast distance argument against the ETH is slowly crumbling

 

[stonehart]

Warp Drive More Possible Than Thought, Scientists Say | Space.com

Icarus Interstellar

Looks like the vast distance argument against the ETH is slowly crumbling

This is about the best news I have had all week.

Just maybe ships like this Tengu here will exist one day.

EVE online This baby cost me 3 billion ISK (in game money) real world worth is a few hundred dollars.

 

[Wade]

Even if the physics were worked out would there not be a problem with any potential objects? Mapping out stars and other planetary objects is one thing. But you would probably have to take into account even fragments of objects if you weren't actually traveling faster than light bu distorting space around you ?

 

[mike]

Even if the physics were worked out would there not be a problem with any potential objects? Mapping out stars and other planetary objects is one thing. But you would probably have to take into account even fragments of objects if you weren't actually traveling faster than light bu distorting space around you ?

Thats a valid concern, and im only guessing here but some of the ideas that strike me are this

When using a "Warp Bubble" as its been described the craft itself does not move

In 1994 Alcubierre proposed a way of changing the geometry of space by creating a wave which would cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand.[1] The ship would then ride this wave inside a region of flat space known as a warp bubble, and would not move within this bubble, but instead be carried along as the region itself moves as a consequence of the actions of the drive. If this is so, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation would not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at a very great velocity through flat spacetime

Real space time gets warped around the bubble thus, any objects such as micro meteors etc get warped around the surface of the bubble as it goes.

There is also the old sci fi standard know as hyperspace, or subspace or even underspace as alan dean foster coined in his "the damned" series

The idea is that you drop "out" of real space during the journey to a sort of null space

Nothing new in this link except a short vid about extra dimensions at the bottom

Warp Drive Like That On 'Star Trek' May Be Feasible After All, Physicists Say

 

[Goggs Mackay]

Mulder - I am guessing (and it's a guess) that you can maybe warp space around the ship, meaning you take the space round the ship with you, the things you could collide with go around the ship cos they are not part of the warp? Does that make sense? I am talking off top of my large dome after all!

 

[Wade]

Mulder - I am guessing (and it's a guess) that you can maybe warp space around the ship, meaning you take the space round the ship with you, the things you could collide with go around the ship cos they are not part of the warp? Does that make sense? I am talking off top of my large dome after all!

Yeah, as soon as I had hit send on that post even my limited brain was able to come up with something like that, but your wording was even better "take the space around you, with you" I like that.

So I would take it that if a certain object was say 5,000 feet away (insert the metric distance here if it helps ) and within the field of space being warped it would retain that distance from the vessel at all times

 

[Goggs Mackay]

Now having said that, the solution in Star Trek was to have a 'deflector dish' which is like some huge cosmic broom sweeping shit away out of the path of the ship - so maybe there are reasons it can't be done like I was saying. I know the 'warp' idea is to shrink space in front of ship and stretch it behind the ship but I don't know about stuff actually going round the sides as it were.