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Warp Drive, Geekbait

RecoveringYuppy said:
OK. I'll bite. How do we know that during mundane travel that "design" won't have the floors perpendicular to acceleration?
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By looking at the shape of the command-deck in the picture.

Sure, we can only see the outside of it in the image, but if the floors were perpendicular to the direction of acceleration then this would mean that it'd be a small room with a ridiculously cavernous curved ceiling possessing a pointless strip of skylights.

On the other hand, if we assume that the floors are parallel to the direction of travel, it becomes a large room with a reasonably low ceiling and a curved strip of windows that conveniently provide a 180 degree view of the surroundings.

Which scenario do you think the designer most likely intended?

ETA: I'm not sure how effective that 180 degree view would be in real-life, because it's mostly handy for traveling in a 2D plane, such as along the surface of the planet. In space it'd give you massive blind-spots above and bellow.

A better design would be to fly-by-camera from a command-deck in the middle of the ship so that the occupants can be better shielded from radiation and micrometeors.
 
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bob_kark said:
Regarding a theoretical warp drive, would passengers actually experience time dilation? I understand that it works by warping time-space versus traveling through it. So would that actually negate the time dilation that would be expected from moving a similar distance through space-time in the same time frame?
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No, they wouldn't. If I understand this all correctly (and I might not), that is because the local spacetime within the warp bubble is flat; so clocks inside the flat spacetime of the bubble and those outside the bubble (also in flat spacetime) would tick at the same rate. Time dilation would only be experienced if, say, a shuttle-craft were to leave the ship's warp bubble or enter it, thus having to cross the strong spacetime curvature.
 
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arthwollipot said:
The Alcubierre Drive is perfectly practical - if a source of matter with negative mass can be found.

I think I have some behind the couch. Hang on.
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Farsight said:
There is no such thing as matter with negative mass. Just as there are no rulers with a negative length.
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Lol :)

But seriously, some think that negative energy density (i.e. "negative mass" if you think in terms of E=mc^2) has been discovered in laboratory settings: Casimir effect
 
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Since we are debating currently impossible things, I believe the crucial question is: how many angels can dance on the bridge of the ship?
 
Belz... said:
The shape of the ship seems to indicate it, except for the "bridge".
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But most of the articles (and White himself) say the shape is determined by the equations of FTL travel. (Which is all hooey, and maybe we shouldn't try to make excuses for it)

Wolrab said:
Since we are debating currently impossible things, I believe the crucial question is: how many angels can dance on the bridge of the ship?
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Yeah.
 
arthwollipot said:
The Alcubierre Drive is perfectly practical - if a source of matter with negative mass can be found.
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Not exactly.

A bubble macroscopically large enough to enclose a ship of 200 meters would require a total amount of exotic matter equal to 10 billion times the mass of the observable universe, and straining the exotic matter to an extremely thin band of 10−32 meters is considered impractical.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive#Wall_thickness
 
Wolrab said:
Since we are debating currently impossible things, I believe the crucial question is: how many angels can dance on the bridge of the ship?
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This many...


Oh, wait. You were talking about the Galaxy Angels, weren't you?

(I've got four seasons of that Japanese silliness on DVD. Been a while since I watched any. May as well watch some now.)
 
Puppycow said:
Does this ship necessarily have to be that large?

I'm wondering about a miniature robotic version.

I mean, yeah, this one looks cool and all, but a robot probe one could be almost as good for going out to gather information and then returning.

Even if we want it to carry people, why does it have to be 200 meters long?
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Because that would prevent it from looking like the Starship Enterprise. And, seriously, that really is the most important idea driving those drawings.

There is a very, very slight reason for including rings in these drawings, but even that is based on the flimsiest of claims.
 
In the video, the guy explained that, by making the rings thicker, you can reduce the mass-energy equivalent needed from about Jupiter's mass down to the mass of the Voyager spacecraft, say 800 kg, or a little under a ton.

That is still one hell of an engineering project. Two, actually, one to produce that much and another to safely contain it ("Eject the warp core!"). Then there are minor things like converting it to electricity or whatever the rings need.

Still, unlike a Jupiter mass, it's at least realizable.

Also, apparently you have to be moving towards your destination in real space for it to work. But some ion drive and all that antimater would be a trivial energy fraction of the warp itself.
 
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Beerina said:
In the video, the guy explained that, by making the rings thicker, you can reduce the mass-energy equivalent needed from about Jupiter's mass down to the mass of the Voyager spacecraft, say 800 kg, or a little under a ton.
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Don't know which video you are referring to but there is a lot of misleading lying by ommission surrounding this "project". Did he explain that it's impossible to make the rings thicker or thinner because the form of matter required to make them is not known to exist?
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Don't know which video you are referring to but there is a lot of misleading lying by ommission surrounding this "project". Did he explain that it's impossible to make the rings thicker or thinner because the form of matter required to make them is not known to exist?
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All the articles I've seen on this mention that the exotic matter needed for the drive doesn't exist. All formulations have that objection applied to them. This in no way means that the 'Jupiter mass' objection is more valid as that one also assumes that the exotic matter is produced. If the math holds up, then the Jupiter mass objection isn't valid, the need for exotic matter criticism is.

You don't need to make one valid criticism sound like two (or more).
 
The way I see it, an Alcubierre drive is probably never going to happen, because a) the resource requirements are literally prohibitive, and b) the theory does not provide for any mechanism to 'start' or 'stop' the drive.

Thus the only part of any Alcubierre-drive space ship concept that has any merit at all is the part that realistically addresses the challenges, goals, and constraints of a spacecraft designed for long-term interplanetary exploration.

Such a craft, whether with extant or forseeable technology, will look largely the same, regardless of whether it's intended to explore the outer planets of our solar system, or the planets of the Alpha Centauri system. The only real difference in appearance will be whether it has an Alcubierre device strapped to its butt (or thorax, or wherever the fantasists imagine an Alcubierre device is best situated on an interplanetary exploration vessel).

Dr. White's concept looks nothing like a purpose-built interplanetary exploration craft should look, given our current technology and resources. It's dumb, and NASA should disavow it. If he's doing it on NASA's time, they should fire him.
 
theprestige said:
The way I see it, an Alcubierre drive is probably never going to happen, because a) the resource requirements are literally prohibitive, and b) the theory does not provide for any mechanism to 'start' or 'stop' the drive.

Thus the only part of any Alcubierre-drive space ship concept that has any merit at all is the part that realistically addresses the challenges, goals, and constraints of a spacecraft designed for long-term interplanetary exploration.

Such a craft, whether with extant or forseeable technology, will look largely the same, regardless of whether it's intended to explore the outer planets of our solar system, or the planets of the Alpha Centauri system. The only real difference in appearance will be whether it has an Alcubierre device strapped to its butt (or thorax, or wherever the fantasists imagine an Alcubierre device is best situated on an interplanetary exploration vessel).

Dr. White's concept looks nothing like a purpose-built interplanetary exploration craft should look, given our current technology and resources. It's dumb, and NASA should disavow it. If he's doing it on NASA's time, they should fire him.
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Wait, what? The primary propulsion system often radically changes the craft's shape and layout. While they share some elements, a plasma drive, a plasma sail, an Orion drive, an ion drive, and a chemical craft will all have major differences in layout and appearance (well, besides the ion and chemical ones which look basically the same apart from the drives themselves).
 
tyr_13 said:
All the articles I've seen on this mention that the exotic matter needed for the drive doesn't exist.
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No they don't. In fact I don't see it in the article cited by the OP (it's big article though, cold be buried somewhere). But I see this statement early in the main article:

Dr. White—whose daily life is working in future propulsion solutions for interplanetary travel in the near future, like ion and plasma thrusters—developed new theoretical work that solved the problems of the Alcubierre Drive concept, a theory that allowed faster-than-light travel based on Einstein's field equations in general relativity, developed by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre.
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Solved the problems, huh?

tyr_13 said:
You don't need to make one valid criticism sound like two (or more).
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There are more than two valid "problems" (more like impossibilities) with those rings. And he (and others) frequently leave them out or even state (as the OP article does) that he's solved them.
 
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