That Star Trek in-world physic stuff is indeed very different from description of Alcubierre drive where the bubble is actually the same kind of space-time curvature as caused by gravity except that it's not caused by gravity but another mechanism. Also, now the prevailing idea is focused on creating a warp ring, not a warp bubble as this enormously reduces energy requirement. The ship using warp drive is contracting the space ahead of it and "riding on the wave" in free-fall without feeling any acceleration while the edges of the field have enormous tidal forces due to the steep curvature of space. The problem is that whatever is out there in front of you - you'll run right into it. So, it's quite different from fiction in that you're literally falling through the actual space and the distance between - just without any increase in your mass and none of the relativistic effects. Literally - free fall - you won't feel a thing. Essentially, all the intuitive notions of inertia are moot with Alcubierre drive - warp drive. Course changes can be as rapid as your ability to turn the warp field generator. Imagining it to be surrounding the ship and attached to the reactor and ship's hull by a gimbal turning the ship's course at warp would only and solely depend on how fast the drive itself can be rotated. In extreme case if it can be on a gimbal mount and if you can rotate the ring drive system around the ship at 180 degrees per second then you could make 180 degree course change in a second with no effect. Similarly it could be possible to accelerate from 0 to n * c in t time with no possible solution resulting in any kind of inertial effects to the crew due to the free fall. Also, traveling near gravity wells should have almost no effect on the local field unless you were flying close to a neutron star or black hole. Even then it could work just fine assuming your own drive is cumulatively adding to the curvature so it would still keep you moving while cumulatively adding the effects of the gravity well. In this regard inertial dampening is a McGuffin that addresses a problem that is a misunderstanding in the first place but then Alcubierre drive wasn't suggested until 1994 and it has been further developed ever since. For instance the energy requirements have been brought down so much that it is starting to look feasible, many are still preoccupied with the old notion that it would require unfeasible amounts of energy. Thinking of it, if you're moving at "conventional" speeds and suddenly you start powering up a drive capable of, say, 20c, even if it would take it an hour to reach that speed you'd still be accelerating on average 1,666km/s being added to your speed every second. It could very easily look like the ship is suddenly jolted from it's place by such rapid acceleration - imagine it took 15 minutes to fully power the drive and maximum velocity was 40c, you'd be adding 13,333km/s every second and so on. The latter acceleration being equivalent to 1,359,157 g's. The free fall effect within the field comes in handy. In 40k I think Warp is essentially it's own dimension, some kind of extra dimension or even parallel dimension with the parallel being a poor term to describe it. More like they're tapping into a dimension of "hell".
interesting, hopefully we'll be able to see it in action in the future, I imagine there'll be all kinds of difficulties to surpass but until we make one work it'll all just be presumption. And yeah, the 40k warp is basically hell, populated by demons and whatever else risks the warp, including some of the Eldar I believe.
Oh yea, 40k is definitely fantasy. And this is no criticism, I've been burning through the Horus Heresy books without being able to put them down to get some work done. Love the stuff. Scientific it isn't but I don't even think it ever tried to be. Then also, even if one were to make a fully 100% authentic hard scifi story, it can be silly in 10 years when you've based the whole story around something that looks reasonably feasible now - such as warp drives - and then it is discovered that some future quantum gravity theory rebukes the whole thing. Essentially, opening warp portals by reading a sequence of words written in hiragana almost paused me for a few seconds but I hardly shrugged as I kept reading. Finally resolved with, if I'm fine with fantasy in pseudo-medieval setting, I'm fine with fantasy in pseudo-scifi setting as well and I love the characters and the plot and that's what really counts. Also I loved what Horus had to say: Spoiler: Horus Rising The creatures of the Warp are just "aliens" too, but they are not life forms as we understand the term. They are not organic. They are extra-dimensional, and they influence our reality in ways that seem sorcerous to us. Supernatural, if you will. So let's use all those lost words for them... daemons, spirits, possessors, changelings. All we need to remember is that there are no gods out there, in the darkness, no great daemons and ministers of evil. There is no fundamental, immutable evil in the cosmos. It is too large and sterile for such melodrama. There are simply inhuman things that oppose us, things we were created to battle and destroy. - on Sixty-Three Nineteen, after the Battle of the Whisperhead Mountains
They also tap to two interesting alternate propulsion systems, those of the magnetic propulsion and reactionless drive. Here's what Rocket Cat has to say on reactionless drives: Essentially, warp drive itself is a type of reactionless drive and NASA itself was testing one type of system as of recent while publishing some experiments they had been doing, I can't remember the exact method they were going after or it's name but they seemed rather optimistic about it potentially one day being possible. Which would be amazing for space travel, no need for thrusters if you can have a reactionless drive because, it doesn't rely on the only way we know of moving ships in space: Though aerodynamics still count for orbital entry and atmospheric flight etc. with all the friction and heat still being a concern. By the way - if we used warp drive to do this, it should both work within atmospheric setting and allow the field to be run at such low setting such as 2g acceleration or so which will keep friction low enough and won't be hard at all considering that the ship is built to travel at speeds potentially exceeding speed of light so this would be like parking your race car, a situation such as in TV shows where you could keep the ship stationary in the air with the warp field almost indefinitely considering it's using one millionth of it's field power when it's been designed to run that field at million times higher setting for years. Even at such low settings there would be a tidal force at the edges of the field but I don't know if it would result in some effect with the gas at the threshold. I wonder if the tidal force effect could even be itself used as a weapon- if a torpedo armed with the drive would rip apart armor or even whole ship in front of it with as it is bending space-time occupied by the enemy vessel. Edit: Found the NASA reactionless drive page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RF_resonant_cavity_thruster Radio Frequency Resonant Cavity Thruster, aka emDrive, is an electromagnetic drive. They achieved some promising results with it too: Edit. The reason for why reactionless drive is cool is because you only need reactor fuel, you don't need to carry a ton of cannonballs that also need to propel the remaining cannonballs too, you only bring the powder in this analogy and the powder alone creates the same thrust but with no cannonballs onboard the acceleration and ship mass are vastly different and you can even bring more powder now. But it also appears that many people are questioning the results of the NASA's and Chinese tests claiming that the results are anything but conclusive. Edit: cool pic:
lots of people are criticizing the EM drive claiming it violates Newtons third law, thing is, I don't think it actually does, sure, the drive doesn't expel what Newton would define as a mass, but Newton also never had access to radio waves or electrics. My personal thought is to wonder if they've bothered to model the electromagnetic field the machine generates around the engine itself, I wouldn't be terribly shocked to find out that it's electromagnetically 'pushing' in much the same way that induction and capacitors function. 'but that shouldn't work in a vacuum' far as I'm concerned nothing we currently use 'should' work in the emptiness of space, which just begs the question, how does it work, if there's nothing at all to push against? You can't argue against results, hopefully one of the people developing the technology will launch a prototype and we'll see whether it flies for real, or if it's all just human error. (supposedly one is being prepared for launch within the next few months)
Well, as soon as they had tested it in space, whatever the critics are saying, Chinese said they want it on all their satellites or so? I read one guy who was criticizing it as violating Newton's models. Well, sorry pal but while Newton was genius like no other, his models are outdated and these days they serve as cheap approximations for those that don't feel like going through the relativistic equations - like NASA, they know Newton's models aren't 'correct' but they're easier to manage and the error margin is acceptable with their car battery powered craft that slug their way in the immediate vicinity of our home planet. And of course the good old point about how if your models aren't in sync with someone's ship actually doing amazing stuff then you don't need to scrap the ship but update your models. At least the astronomers get this instead of trying to recalibrate or twist the lenses so that the findings would match the models!
it's not like they haven't made this mistake for centuries throughout history, we've just finally entered an era during which science actually holds some level of authority, instead of always having to bow down to the conventional wisdom of the era. And more scientists are willing to accept that just because it doesn't fit what they know, doesn't mean it can't be, it just means what they know needs to adapt. (yes I realize this is irony, but my personal views are not liable to significantly influence the world so I don't care )
Maybe there is "something" to the "nothing"? Everything exists in a "quantum soup", maybe we are pushing against "space" itself?
Many scientists are actually hoping for empiric evidence that wrecks the theories. It's a lot more fun to be creating new theories and models than to simply sit back in your chair and throw hoops with paper rolls with the "we already know everything" posted on the wall. There was a funny bit on the LHC test - they were seeing which of two theories would turn out to be true based on one of their big experiments. One of the theoretical physicists there had spend something equivalent to 40 years on his theory, the theory was essentially his career and life's work and he was a little bit unsettled at the prospect of his entire life's work potentially having been rubbish! Luckily for him the results favored his theory. I really want to study quantum physics one day. Lack of time to pursue everything interesting is such a drag!
I do rather wish much the same thing, nothing quite as interesting as shaking those fools who think they already know everything to the core. As Weird Al said...
The Robot Overlords are upon us! https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/29828...oples-homes-and-kill-their-pets-experts-warn/ We may need to train future Robot Fighters to protect us from The Robo-Tyrant! (This was one of my favorite comics as a kid. I was surprised to find it.)
What's especially amazing in a system like that is that interplanetary trips are short. Really short. No need to build a ship that will protect the crew for a year from radiation in the interplanetary space. I remember in the Il Etait Une Fois l'Espace they recycled the shit out of older scifi stories. Anyway, one of the episodes had one of the member worlds of the federation/alliance relying extensively on robots and the main story arcs enemies were humanoid robots led by Great Computer. The robots would replace humans a lot like in BSG and in one episode the heroes are investigating a ship where the captain is drinking heavily. Upon closer investigation they interrogate the captain and he reveals he's lost any hope and is drinking because he's crew has been replaced by robot agents that look like humans. On the other episode the robot agents sabotage the source code of the robotic servants of the member world and the robots turn against the humans and retool their factories to produce combat robots. In a way I wouldn't be surprised if we at some point started to revert back to increasing amount of analog systems like in Star Wars - forcing the sentient machines to interact through speech we can pick up on and so on. Thus if you were to hack a sentient machine the corruption would be contained to that one unit and nearby humans would pick up on how the unit is suddenly shouting "EX-TER-MIN-ATE" instead of watering the plants and filing tax reports. Having it all networked together and interfacing with every other system on the level where one unit being compromised can lead to the entire network being overrun in milliseconds is insanity. Which reminds me, our beloved FDF doesn't link it's military assets to internet. We are already thinking in BSG terms with separate systems for accessing net. At some point we may have to expand separate systems-thinking to home appliances just to make sure someone cannot hack your internet stove and override safeties so that the device causes a fire.
OH COME ON! Do these guys even remotely think this is funny? https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/29918...red-in-real-human-flesh-oxford-boffins-claim/ http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Military-Robot-EATR-Flesh-Eating,news-4249.html
I will never talk shit about sci-fi art that shows multiple planets in the sky, or them being big. Apparently reality IS unrealistic. Of course this was going to happen. Terminator nerds went into STEM just like the Trekkies did. Just wait until the Warhammer 40K people get in.
Reality isn't unrealistic but instead what I was just saying - you try hard to be realistic and 5 years later some discovery throws it all in the bin and you end up looking like a fool. With all the shit that reactionless drive and warp drive are getting in certain circles, imagine how silly a chemical rocket propelled or solar sail propelled ship might look if those things turn out to be easy on the level of millions people traveling between the stars. NASA needs the 40k types simply to balance out the gullibility of the trekkies. (imho)
reality is in fact unrealistic, fortunately it's not bound by any preconceived notion we might come up with about what should and shouldn't be, thus, Platypus.
Yes, if Cosmos didn't keep throwing a curve ball at us we didn't even need science, we could just set up a cult mechanicus who'd codify all knowledge into a religion and we would be good to go. I love those moments when the whole established knowledge is shaken to it's roots. I always felt Dark Energy is this:
