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Old 12-05-2015, 07:29 PM   #1
davester65
 
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Default Warp Drive Question

Okay, I know warp drives are supposed to work by folding or warping space, compressing space in front of the ship and stretching it behind it. The question I have is how would one do that? The only thing I can think of that might do that is creating artificial gravity fields. Is there any other force that could be used to do that? Magnetic fields maybe? I want to run a scifi campaign using warp drives and I'd like my explanation about how warp drives work to at least be slightly plausible. Also I'm thinking how the warp field is created would effect other aspects of what the ships were like (whether they would have artificial gravity or need separate maneuver drives, etc...) Any thoughts are welcome.
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Old 12-05-2015, 07:49 PM   #2
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Default Re: Warp Drive Question

You might want to google "Alcubierre drive".
The artist interpretations I've seen of the hypothetical drive has the drive as a large ring.

This looks interesting. Don't know if it's true. Found it in the results of Google.
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/...ubierre-drive/
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Old 12-05-2015, 09:00 PM   #3
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Default Re: Warp Drive Question

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Originally Posted by davester65 View Post
Okay, I know warp drives are supposed to work by folding or warping space, compressing space in front of the ship and stretching it behind it. The question I have is how would one do that? The only thing I can think of that might do that is creating artificial gravity fields. Is there any other force that could be used to do that? Magnetic fields maybe? I want to run a scifi campaign using warp drives and I'd like my explanation about how warp drives work to at least be slightly plausible. Also I'm thinking how the warp field is created would effect other aspects of what the ships were like (whether they would have artificial gravity or need separate maneuver drives, etc...) Any thoughts are welcome.
Most means I've heard of involve weird stuff like negative mass to create the sort of wave needed to move forward. A totally not-based-in-science idea might be to isolate a bubble of spacetime with the ship in it and then cause the bubble to move. But really, any technobabble like that should suffice. There just isn't any really feasible way of doing this that we know of yet.
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Old 12-05-2015, 09:01 PM   #4
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Default Re: Warp Drive Question

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Originally Posted by davester65 View Post
Okay, I know warp drives are supposed to work by folding or warping space, compressing space in front of the ship and stretching it behind it. The question I have is how would one do that? The only thing I can think of that might do that is creating artificial gravity fields. Is there any other force that could be used to do that? Magnetic fields maybe? I want to run a scifi campaign using warp drives and I'd like my explanation about how warp drives work to at least be slightly plausible. Also I'm thinking how the warp field is created would effect other aspects of what the ships were like (whether they would have artificial gravity or need separate maneuver drives, etc...) Any thoughts are welcome.
Long story short, this is complicated and you shouldn't try to explain it if you have to ask this question, but if you insist you'd need exotic matter to make an Alcubierre drive work so that puts it at a solid TL11 to exist in any FLT capacity.
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Old 12-05-2015, 09:49 PM   #5
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Default Re: Warp Drive Question

Negative energy could be used, and due to quantum mechanical effects isn't as silly as it sounds.
But of course if we knew how to make one, we would have one, or at least one in labs proving principles.
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Old 12-05-2015, 10:12 PM   #6
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Negative energy could be used, and due to quantum mechanical effects isn't as silly as it sounds.
But of course if we knew how to make one, we would have one, or at least one in labs proving principles.
Not necessarily, the kinds of energy that could hypothetically be required are staggering even if such a thing is hard science it could very well require an amount of infrastructure we can't economically produce and see pay off within the lifetimes of the founders.
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Old 12-06-2015, 01:14 AM   #7
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Not necessarily, the kinds of energy that could hypothetically be required are staggering even if such a thing is hard science it could very well require an amount of infrastructure we can't economically produce and see pay off within the lifetimes of the founders.
It's obscenely unlikely that humans are the only technologically capable species in the universe.
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Old 12-06-2015, 01:29 AM   #8
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It's obscenely unlikely that humans are the only technologically capable species in the universe.
And that's exposed to mean what exactly?
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Old 12-06-2015, 01:45 AM   #9
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And that's exposed to mean what exactly?
That's supposed to mean that no one else once mentioned humanity or "we" as you put it. There are far too many mundane reasons why we will never have a colony on mars let alone develop FTL even if they're all possible according to physics.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that this thread was about warp drive alone, not anything specifically involving us, our psychology or what have you.
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Old 12-06-2015, 02:28 AM   #10
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That's supposed to mean that no one else once mentioned humanity or "we" as you put it. There are far too many mundane reasons why we will never have a colony on mars let alone develop FTL even if they're all possible according to physics.
I assumed, perhaps wrongly, that this thread was about warp drive alone, not anything specifically involving us, our psychology or what have you.
Well I'm 98% sure you'd be able to play a human in this hypothetical game and even if not the actual players are human so this alien species will basically have the same psychology and deal with many similar problems as us. Also when it comes down to it OP asked how to make warp drives plausible and I was just trying to inform him that the universe around a technology has just as much to do with how plausible it is as the science does. Just becouse an Iphone is possible doesn't mean it's plausible for it to exist in the middle ages.
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