Warp Drive

Warp Drive

The warp drive is a technology that allows a spaceship to travel at speeds in excess of the universe-relative speed of light without violating the laws of physics. It operates using warp field generators that encompass a spacecraft inside of a spacetime “bubble”, which isolates the bubble and everything within it from the rest of the universe. The bubble is then moved between the surrounding spacetime; occupants within the bubble experience no effects of inertia or time dilation as their reference frame remains static inside the warp field, while externally the bubble travels at superluminal speeds. A spacecraft at warp also exhibits no external geometric volume, instead traveling through what is referred to as subspace where it cannot directly impact other objects. However, it is still sensitive to external gravitational effects.

Design

The main component of a warp drive is the core. The warp core generates a warp field using negative energy particles, which are manufactured in particle accelerators. The nacelles extend the warp field out to a greater volume, permitting more room inside for a payload. These nacelles must be rigidly connected to the warp core.

There are numerous viable warp drive configurations, each with their own properties. Speed and efficiency are two of the most notable variables, but stability within more volatile gravitational fields may also be an important design aspect that requires its own balance of properties. There is a distinct upper bound on the maximum possible size of a warp bubble, dictated by current technological capabilities, and certain configurations permit this volume to be larger at the cost of lower efficiency and greater complexity.

The stable region of space that the bubble encompasses may also be left unstable at its edges in exchange for greater energy efficiency, which reduces the maximum usable volume that the diameter of the nacelles might otherwise allow for.

Logistics

Massive celestial bodies in space such as stars and planets have significant hill spheres, regions of space where the body is the main gravitational influence, and it is within these regions that warp travel becomes unstable. Passing through the open gravity well of a celestial object at warp can be dangerous, but entering or exiting warp within a strong enough gravitational field will result in the loss of the spacecraft.

The only safe places to enter and exit warp near stars are lagrange points, specifically the L1 and L2 points. Lagrange points are stable points in space where the gravitational forces of two celestial bodies combine with orbital centripetal force to effectively cancel out. For the concerns of warp travel, lagrange points are also inherently stable regions of spacetime. A warp ship traveling through a star system is effectively always within the hill sphere of the parent star(s), but each body of significant mass in the system has the potential to form stable lagrange points where the warp ship can exit warp.

Consider the model of the star system above. The green dots are L1 points, and only L1 lagrange points are depicted (each planet has a corresponding L2 point on its opposite side) . The colored grid region is the extent of the star’s hill sphere that concerns warp travel. Note that the rest of the star’s hill sphere extends far beyond all orbiting bodies - the colored region depicted is only the arbitrary region that concerns warp travel, the extent of which is different for each star system. The distance scale of the image is not relevant, though the falloff region is often relatively near a star’s habitable zone.

Regions within the colored grid cannot be traveled through at all, while spacecraft can still only enter or exit warp at the L1 (shown) and L2 points, even at locations beyond the colored grid.

In the image, the L1-A point is not reachable by any warp craft as it lies deep within the inner region where maintaining a stable warp field is impossible. L1-A is thus only reachable by torchships that travel from the outer system.

L1-B is reachable by only high-performance warp craft that can maintain their stability into that region. L1-C is reachable by most warp craft; only low-end or rare configuration warp drives will have difficulty. L1-D is easily reached by all spacecraft, as is L1-E. In addition, the volume of safe space to enter and exit warp around L1-E will be notably larger than any others, due to its distance from the star.

It is important to emphasize that spacecraft cannot enter or exit warp anywhere outside of the depicted L1 points; attempting to do so will result in the spacecraft being lost to oblivion. At points such as L1-A, it is still possible to enter and exit warp, though this must be a static ship that only remains stationary in subspace, a feature used by subspace transmitters. These warp drives must be flown in from the outer system using standard propulsion methods.

Divergent Velocities

Relative velocity of warp ships is maintained naturally by the structure of the universe. Spacetime tends to flow with massive objects in space like stars and planets, matching their physical motion, and it is for this reason that lagrange points are stable entry points between normal space and spacetime. Warp ships that travel through subspace are subject to this flow, and when exiting warp will match the relative velocity of local spacetime, which flows with nearby celestial objects. This allows warp drive craft the natural ability to exit warp at a relative velocity suited for local space.

Operation

Warp drives, and the ships that utilize them, are costly and challenging to construct and maintain. They require dedicated infrastructure and personnel to maintain all facets of their operation. Usage of warp-capable ships may appear ubiquitous throughout civilized space, but this is merely a testament to their utility.

Outside of warp, a craft’s sub-light propulsion will depend on the function of the ship. Warp ships in civilized space often do not travel beyond lagrange points, and so their sub-light accommodations are minimal as they produce the most value economically by being at warp as much as possible. Additionally the inherent configuration of a warp drive makes the implementation of standard propulsion a complex design requirement, as the rear nacelle often occupies the same location that an engine would, and the massive size of an engine is lost volume that could have been shipped goods or people.

More versatile warp drive spacecraft, particularly those that explore uncivilized space such as at the civil periphery, must often undertake all inter-system travel themselves and are accordingly equipped for the task. These spacecraft will almost always carry a complement of smaller craft on board.

Warp Bubble Boundaries

Regardless of any alternate propulsion methods a ship may have, it cannot use them while inside a warp bubble. The enclosed pocket of space behaves like a closed-off section of the universe; accelerations within the bubble have no effect beyond the bubble, though objects not fixed to the warp drive structure can move about freely as though they were in normal space. Accelerations of the warp ship itself risk collapsing the bubble, removing the ability to create artificial gravity via thrust. Any matter that breaches a warp bubble from within is lost to oblivion.

Detection

All warp drives perturb spacetime by creating subspace waves, which are easily detectable in external space, and the waves propagate at speeds far faster than warp ships themselves. This phenomenon forms the basis for all interstellar communication, as well as ensures all spacecraft at warp are detectable and trackable, even from their destination.

Causality

Before faster-than-light travel and communications were achieved, it had been theorized that such concepts could violate causality, leading to paradoxes where events would occur before they were triggered. With further research however, these fears were put to rest. Spacecraft at warp are closed off inside of their own isolated region of spacetime, where they are subject to no effects such as notable time dilation or space distortion, and it is not valid to represent their spacetime graph as skewed. Similarly the apparent faster-than-light nature of subspace wave communications is not capable of violating causality as the signal is spacetime itself, and it is also invalid to represent them as a skewed spacetime graph.