"NASA Designs a Real Starship Enterprise" Topic

It's a concept ship, but it is indeed part of NASA's very real effort to study the possibility of a functioning Alcibierre "Warp" Drive. And it's a darn cool design.

link

I'm faster than you!

Beat you by 4 minutes:

TMP link

Does he ever mention exactly how this drive is generated without saying "This is when the warp drive kicks in."

Government-funded pixie dust.

Quite interesting!.
Thanks for share (both of you boys).

Amicalement
Armand

Any articles which refer to missions as 'badass' lose credibility right away in my book.
The thought of space travel is exciting enough without trying to sex it up.
If you think it needs dressing to make it interesting, you simply don't get it to begin with.

Liberate tute me ex inferis.

That film gives me the willies Fonthill Hoser

So have they fixed the problem of the warp bubble scooping up all the photons it comes across and releasing them as a planet killing gamma ray blast at the end of the journey yet?

Robert

Some call that a problem. Others call it a feature.

If we're launching a colonizing force, it's definitely a feature.

As I've said before, I'm not going into space unless it is in the comfort of the Enterprise … any version … or even the Voyager or Defiant !

Super feature once we find the Bugs' home planet. Much smarter than sending Marines in with nuclear handgrenades.

Fonthill has the right of it :). That's how it all started…

Did he solve the energy requirement issue? If I recall correctly Alcubierre's calcluations show that the effect requires more energy than can possibly be harnessed. (like more than the combined mass of the universe).

Still, I'm surprised to actually be alive in a time when I can say that 'warp field theory' is an actual field of scientific study.

That's just a simple engineering issue.

A presentation by Dr. Harold White, the NASA researcher behind the design (PDF file from NASA's archives): PDF link

He's the real deal, folks.

By the way, any "problems" that are mentioned are as speculative as the concept, not hard certainties. For example, the "problem" that it would require more exotic matter than is speculated to exist has turned out to be false; the predicted need is now down to the equivalent mass of a small car, and will very likely be reduced even further. I suspect the "killer photon wave" effect will also likely be shown as a flawed assumption. That doesn't mean the concept itself will prove either viable or feasible, but the negatives are more likely to come from either direct impossibility (establishing that exotic matter doesn't and can't exist, for example) or that the engineering challenges are too great, as opposed to roadblocks from the theory itself.

Aaaand, I just tried to understand that presentation, and all I can say is that I have no future in warp field theory. 8-O

But I did at least gather that, yes, he has solved the energy requirement problem by altering the nature and shape of the bubble.

Maybe we've found our Zefram Cochrane.

Now I am too old. When I was a child I watched every moon landing and wanted to be an astronaut since we were going to the planets.

Then I watched Star Trek and I knew where going to the stars and I wanted to be an engineer to see the stars.

Now I am 52 and my only dream to leave the solar system to explore other worlds around the stars is coming too late. How cruel if on my deathbed someone leaves for the stars and it is not me.

Stock your stem cells now, then get the full rejuv in thirty years. 52 Again is just fine for star travel. (Hey, if we can do warp, why not expect we can do longer, younger life, too?)

On another point, I've been thinking about the "killer photon wave," and I'm thinking that even a real phenomenon, it might not be that prohibitive. For instance, how wide a region does it actually effect? Could a simple navigational trick of not actually aiming at the target planet mean that it wouldn't be struck (more or less "pulling alongside")? What if the trip is timed to arrive while the target world is on the opposite side of its primary star from the approaching ship, with the ship returning to normal space and then meeting the planet with conventional (oh, call 'em "impulse") engines? Surely the photon wave won't do squat to a star, and the star would thus shield the planet.
Maybe the ship could just warp part of the way, and approach at sublight for a less significant time. (Holy cow! I'm proposing the old SF trope of the "safe jump distance," or even "jump points!")
In any case, just because the ship is aimed at a planet's solar system doesn't mean the ship is aimed at the planet itself. So as an obstacle, it may not be all that much of one.