Warp Drive Question

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by davester65

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? .

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.