Alcubierre warp drive

[acrosome]

Can anyone here speak intelligently about the Alcubierre drive, in game terms? Assuming, that is, that we ignore the energy requirements, zero mass, and such?

What would space look like as viewed from an Alcubierre driven ship at subluminal and supraluminal pseudovelocities? If you can see out of the warp field, can you fire lasers out of it? Can it send and receive radio transmissions?

What happens if you steer one into a planet or other large mass? For that matter, what happens to all of the particles in the space in front of it? Do they decay into various forms of radiation as the space is collapsed?

Can they turn arbitrarily fast, or is the drive polarized to unidirectional travel?

Would such a ship have the same ability to acquire an enormous true velocity by warping just enough to hold steady over a planet, then destroy the planet by turning off the drive and impacting it at an arbitrarily large fraction of c?

And what's this stuff about using it as a time machine?

I'm intensely curious about this drive. A forum search for "Alcubierre" had a few hits, but not the information I'm interested in. lwcamp gave some hints once, but not a lot.