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.

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/

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

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.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

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.

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.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

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.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

It's obscenely unlikely that humans are the only technologically capable species in the universe.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

And that's exposed to mean what exactly?

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

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.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

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.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

Try vacuum fluctuations as technobabble. You have flat round plates of finely nanostructured material at the front and rear of the ship. Probably with something complicated linking them.

The plates act to "pump" vacuum fluctuations from in front of the ship to behind it. All done by means of quantum mechanics too complicated to explain at TL8.

Spaces collapses as the fluctuations and their virtual particles are sucked up in front and expands as they are pumped out behind. Call it a pump drive.

The implications of such a technology would be that ships would be cylindrical and travel in straight lines at FTL with no forward or rear pointing sensors. They would have to drop out of FTL to extend sensors and maneuvering engines on arms beyond the front and back discs to see where they are and change course.

This probably leads to a mothership/carrier paradigm with a big FTL ship and smaller STL ships that are released when the destination or likely combat are reached.

Some other sort of propulsions system would be used at STL speeds. If you can get close enough to interesting worlds it could even be hard science-y.

You could have lots of little ships or 4 to 6 ships almost as long but narrower than the carrier. These would be what Traveller calls a Tender ad Battleriders.

This could also end up with something similar to Battletech and its' Jumpships and Dropships.

The FTL ships should probably avoid combat due to its' all import quantum pump discs and the limits on sensor/weapon/reaction engine placement they create.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

Seems to depend strongly on the details. That's true of Alcubierre's original metric, but other people have modified the metric to require much less energy. A mere three solar masses -- but wait, there's also a 700 kg solution -- and a modification of the 3 solar mass one that needs only a few milligrams of negative mass. Oscillating the field can also supposedly reduce the mass requirement. The amount of energy required doesn't seem to be a settled question. It depends on the exact shape and behavior of the warped area. Any solution to GR that we know of that allows FTL requires negative energy, but we don't really understand exactly how much or how it has to behave.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

Yes I know, this is why I said could and not would.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

Interesting, so negative mass may be needed to make it work. I'm not sure where I got the idea that an artificial gravity field would work. Maybe something I read about gravitational lensing, assuming that even means what I think it means. Or does that have to do with gravity bending light, not space itself? Or do they really know which is really being bent?

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

Gravity doesn't "bend space". Gravity is bent space, distorted by the presence of mass. Light's path is altered by passage through the bent space, and under some circumstances, this is detectable.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

Okay, thanks. That helps clear things up a bit.

Re: Warp Drive Question
 

Something else you might want to read is "Warp Speed" by Travis Taylor.
He's an actual rocket scientist who decided to try his hand at writing fiction.
Avoid the second book, it's very Mary Sue.
I mean, the main character in the second book gets abducted by greys, and parleys that into a full, posthuman, upgrade package for him and his new girlfriend. (Actually, I think the upgrade might have been her idea.)