Now that gravitational wave astronomy is a viable means of investigating the cosmos, we’re capable of studying extreme events like the merger of black holes and even neutron stars. Anything that generates ripples in spacetime large enough to spot is fair game, and that would include supernovae events and individual neutron stars with surface irregularities. If we really want to push the envelope, we could conceivably detect the proposed defects in spacetime called cosmic strings, which may or may not have been formed in the early universe.
The latter is an intriguing thought, a conceivably observable one-dimensional relic of phase transitions from the beginning of the cosmos that would be on the order of the Planck length (about 10-35 meters) in width but lengthy enough to encompass light years. Oscillations in these strings, if indeed they exist, would theoretically generate gravitational waves that could be involved in the large-scale structure of the universe. Because new physics could well lurk in any detection, cosmic strings remain a tantalizing subject for speculation in gravitational wave astronomy.
Remember the resources that are coming into play in this field. In addition to LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), we have KAGRA (Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector) in Japan and Virgo (VIRgo interferometer for Gravitational-wave Observations) in Italy. The LISA observatory (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) is currently scheduled for a launch some time in the 2030s.
For that matter, could a cosmic string be detected in other ways? One possibility is in any signature it might leave in the cosmic microwave background (CMB). Another, and this seems promising, is the potential for gravitational lensing as light from background objects travels through the distorted spacetime produced by the string. That would be an interesting signature to find, and indeed, one of the exciting aspects of gravitational wave astronomy is speculation on what new phenomena it would allow us to detect.
As witness a new paper from Katy Clough (Queen Mary University, London) and colleagues, who ask whether an artificial gravitational event could generate a signal that an observatory like LIGO could detect. Now we nudge comfortably into science fiction, for at issue is what would happen if a starship powered by a warp drive were to experience a malfunction. Given the curvature of spacetime induced by an Alcubierre-style drive, a problem in its operations could be detectable, although not, the team points out, at the frequencies currently observed by LIGO.
An Alcubierre warp drive would produce a spacetime that is truly exotic, but one that can be described within the theory of General Relativity. The speed of light is never exceeded by our starship, thus satisfying Special Relativity, but a craft that can contract spacetime in front of it and expand spacetime behind it would theoretically cross distances faster than the speed of light as witnessed by an outside observer.
Huge problems would be created by such a craft, including some that may be insurmountable. It seems to violate what is known as the Null Energy Condition, for one thing, which demands negative energy seemingly not allowed in standard theories of spacetime. But the authors note that “The requirement that warp drives violate the NEC may be considered a practical rather than fundamental barrier to their construction since NEC violation can be achieved by quantum effects and effective descriptions of modifications to gravity, albeit subject to quantum inequality bounds and other semiclassical considerations that seem likely to prove problematic.”
Image: Two-dimensional visualization of an Alcubierre drive, showing the opposing regions of expanding and contracting spacetime that displace the central region. Credit: AllenMcC., CC BY-SA 3.0
Problematic is a useful word, and it seems appropriate here. It’s also appropriate when we consider that a functioning warp drive raises paradoxical issues with regard to time travel, allowing closed time-like curves (in other words, the possibility of traveling into the past, with all the headaches that causes for causality and our view of reality). That puts us in the realm of rotating black holes and wormholes, powerful gravitational wave generators. The authors also point out that a warp drive would be a difficult thing to control and deactivate, as Miguel Alcubierre himself pointed out in a 2017 paper.
So how would we detect a starship of this variety? The authors note that at constant velocity, an Alcubierre drive spacecraft would not generate gravitational waves, but interesting phenomena would be observed if the drive bubble were to collapse, accelerate or decelerate:
There is (to our knowledge) no known equation of state that would maintain the warp drive metric in a stable configuration over time – therefore, whilst one can require that initially, the warp bubble is constant, it will quickly evolve away from that state and, in most cases, the warp fluid and spacetime deformations will disperse or collapse into a central point….This instability, whilst undesirable for the warp ship’s occupants, gives rise to the possibility of generating gravitational waves.
In other words, a working warp drive craft may well be undetectable, but a prototype that fails could throw an observable signature. The paper homes in on the collapse of a warp drive bubble, which could be created by the breakdown of the containment field that the makers of the starship use to support it. So we have a potential gravitational wave signature for a technological catastrophe as an advanced civilization experiments with the distortion of spacetime for interstellar travel.
Such events are presumably rare. I’m reminded of Greg Benford’s story “Bow Shock,” in which as astronomer studying what he thinks is a runaway neutron star – “a faint finger in maps centered on the plane of the galaxy, just a dim scratch” – is in fact a technological object. Here’s a clip:
“What you wrote,” she said wonderingly. “It’s a…star ship?”
“Was. It got into trouble of some kind these last few days. That’s why the wake behind it – ” he tapped the Fantis’ image – “got longer. Then, hours later, it got turbulent, and—it exploded.”
She sipped her coffee. “This is…was…light years away?”
“Yes, and headed somewhere else. It was sending out a regular beamed transmission, one that swept around as the ship rotated, every 47 seconds.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re sure?”
“Let’s say it’s a working hypothesis.”
Great scenario for a science fiction story, and there are a number of papers on starship detection from other angles in the scientific literature. In Benford’s case, the starship is thought to be of the Bussard ramjet variety, definitely not moving through warp drive methods. All this reminds me that a survey of starship detection papers is overdue in these pages, and I’ll plan to get to that in coming weeks. But back to warp drives.
Let’s assume things occasionally go wrong at whatever level of technology we’re looking at. We’re witnessing SpaceX actively developing Starship, a craft that gets a little better, and sometimes a lot better, each time it is launched, but development is hard and there are errors along the way. Throw an error into an Alcubierre-style starship and gravitational effects should show up involving nasty tidal outcomes.
To investigate these, Clough and colleagues develop a structured framework to simulate warp bubble collapse and analyze the gravitational wave signatures that would be produced at the point of collapse. Other types of signal may also be produced, but the paper notes: “Since we do not know the type of matter used to construct the warp ship, we do not know whether it would interact (apart from gravitationally) with normal matter as it propagates through the Universe.”
We don’t have equipment tuned to pick up such signals. We have the needed sensitivity in observatories like LIGO, but we would need to tune it to a different range of gravitational waves. The paper continues:
…for a 1km-sized ship, the frequency of the signal is much higher than the range probed by existing detectors, and so current observations cannot constrain the occurrence of such events. However, the amplitude of the strain signal would be significant for any such event within our galaxy and even beyond, and so within the reach of future detectors targeting higher frequencies… We caution that the waveforms obtained are likely to be highly specific to the model employed, which has several known theoretical problems, as discussed in the Introduction. Further work would be required to understand how generic the signatures are, and properly characterise their detectability.
A funding request to study starships undergoing catastrophic failure is going to be a tough sell. But probing the question produces the formalism developed by the Clough team and gives us further insights into warp drive prospects. Fascinating.
The paper is Clough et al, “What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse” (preprint).
I was at first surprised that they considered an Alcubierre drive, rather than the Lentz drive which, to quote its abstract, is “sourced by purely positive energy densities” and thus seemed more realistic. However, their ref. 14 ( https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.05002 ) cites Lentz’s paper as merely one of several “Natário style generic warp drives” and argues it violates the null energy condition and the weak energy condition. For what it’s worth, Lentz put out his own description of emissions from warp drives ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19381 ) *and* says that several such drives actually do satisfy the energy conditions. I think we’re in need of a debate here.
Oh yes the Lentz idea is a little bit less impossible. Agreed.
While anyone who wish to build an Alcubierre drive, need to start with the mass equivalent of a sun.
A Lenz drive only need a set of exotic matter entities with some characteristics similar of the matter in neutron stars that fly along the spaceship like a flock of birds.
This seem to require a civ that already have a masters degree in Kardashev scale development who also play tennis with white dwarf stars on their lunchbreak.
And we see no signs of any interstellar Wimbledon, which they would achieve doing long before such a drive could be made.
So: Sorry for my humorous take on the matter, but while I think the physics is at least hypothetically correct – their papers have after all gone trough peer review.
It require a level of engineering so far out of our grasp it’s mind boggling.
Having such a civ in our galaxy would have left traces on a macro scale long before they start to build a craft with any of those proposed drives.
Yes – this is the kind of engineering that require a Dyson sphere / swarm / ring.
Lentz is right about one thing, the positive energy density. Perhaps we should consider that there is no such thing as negative energy, but positive energy with negative curvature which is exactly what we find in the expansion of gravity waves which therefore must have negative curvature. My idea is to assume that the anti graviton is a reverse spin graviton with a spin of 2 and zero mass.
At any rate, I intuit that the idea of some kind of bubble of solid matter of some kind won’t work because we can’t control it or make it. Furthermore it is general relativity that makes negative matter impossible because planetesimal and asteroid sized bodies could not hold together without gravity and would want to fly apart from the expansive force of anti gravitons and we need planet sized masses to make any gravity. Since the difficulty of building a warp drive was based on thought experiments which used the material bubble hypothesis or premise in their models, this new idea or model would make those models invalid since they are not supported by general and specially relativity or quantum field theory.
Consequently, the development of a gravity control device which electronically controls and produces gravity waves is ideal since once we do that, then making anti gravity is a piece of cake. The warp drive will also be hard to make because it still would require a very large amount of energy to make it strong enough. It still is limited to the distant future, but not anti gravity and gravity control which don’t violate any of the energy conditions of space.
After thinking about what I wrote more carefully, I see I have jumped to conclusions prematurely with a little hair splitting and over criticism. I don’t think we can make obsolete the terms negative energy and negative mass which describe the geometry of space with negative curvature, expansion and the space field vectors all pointing away from a central point. These still represent positive energy and therefore based on first principles invalidate the idea of any kind of solid, negative matter or solid warp drive bubble.
Therefore we can say that negative energy describes wave particles which warp space in the opposite direction as ordinary energy mass..
Negative curvature or negatively warped space would still have some energy in it, and therefore is a measurable amount energy when contrasted with zero or nothing in space but zero point energy. It would energy we put there and not the quantum vacuum zero point energy which is already a property of empty space, so we can say positive energy with negative curvature can be described by negative energy and mass warping space in a specific way.
It is my hypothesis that the Alcubierre Warp drive is the only one or model that FTL will work since it was designed based on known first principles.
I almost thought I discovered one of these about thirty years ago!
I came across a very unusual anonymous nebula in a published photograph, and started trying to identify it using various atlases and catalogs I had access to. I came up with a list of three separate objects with slightly different coordinates; not an unusual result when working with old sources and data. But when I plotted them, they fell in a perfectly straight line with the times falling in perfect ascending sequence. I had discovered a high proper motion nebula traveling across the sky at an angular velocity of about approximately 3’/year–way too slow for a solar system object, and way too fast for a body at interstellar distances.
Fortunately, I lived near enough at the time to a major university that had a copy of the Palomar Sky Survey and I was able to find it on both the red and blue prints at precisely the location it had showed up in my original
discovery photograph, although the two exposures were taken decades apart. The object was not moving, the extreme “proper motion” was a coincidental artifact of catalog and cartographic scrivener’s errors and mistaken identification. Later, more detailed sources on the internet revealed the object to be the HII region Sharpless2 170, about 8000 light years away. The object also appears to have a small open cluster, Stock 18, imbedded within it. It is now appearing in modern atlases and observing lists, and is a frequent target for amateur astrophotographers.
But for a while there, I wondered if I had stumbled across evidence of a huge debris field around a crippled spacecraft, tumbling past the solar system just a few light hours away…
Here is something I came up with that I put online in less restrictive environments but may relate to this. So what about it?
SubAtomic Alcubierre warp drives in our local system, what would be the effect like cosmic rays or would the warp bubble being atomic size only affect a single LIGO?
SubAtomic UFOs!
NORAD WHAT YOU GONNA DO???
All this with us not even having the slightest clue…
Here is an interesting theory that includes AI! We are developing chips at a a ever increasing reduction in size. Eventually getting down to the bio level and further into the very structure of matter the quantum level. Dust size AI could be floating around in our atmosphere taking samples of our DNA and storing the information. We may do this in the future in probes to distant exoplanets. So we look out and see strange craft around earth but maybe we need to look for subatomic AI monitoring us in our gut, skin even in our eyes so it can see the world we see. All this with us not even having the slightest clue. This fits well with Plutonium fallout showing up from the Trinity site in New Mexico in 1945 reaching all the way to New England and the Japan fallout. This monitoring may have been going on for billions of years but seeing something that never existed on earth {Plutonium} would set off alarms on any alien civilizations monitoring our planet earth.
I dont know why people say this this but Plutonium has always existed on earth.
What happened after atomic testing is there are way more.
Plutonium is created naturally from uranium decay and some plutonium isotopes are quite long lived.
Also, yes we all have thousands of plutonium atoms in our bodies.
Well, maybe I should of said PU-239 which will kill you. Which is highly radioactive and makes a very good, absolutely dirty bomb. I should know because an early atomic energy advocate was also involved in cover-up to
just how deadly Plutonium 239 was;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_A._Fidler
Now what do you think advanced exterrestrial civilizations that have been in existence for at least millions years and have encountered many immature baby civilizations are going to do. They know history repeats itself…
“Improving the Neighborhood” (1999) – A C Clarke. His contribution to the Nature SciFi entries, he wrote a story that suggested a Double Nova was established as artificial and caused by the species developing infinite energy sources. (The double nova was the planet and its associated large moon.) The narrative suggests that this species could have been a problem for the civilizations in the local star cluster. Therefore their loss should not be regretted as they could have become troublesome.
It’s not technically the UFO that is subatomic, but only its wormhole-like connection to the rest of the universe. It stands to reason that if we can add pocket universes wherever we want, the universe is perhaps a much bigger place than we ever imagined! Hiding them in plutonium fallout seems a bit eccentric at first blush, but alien motives are hard to predict; besides, some of us have stood in the virtual presence of our prophet Archimedes Plutonium, who has spoken to just how much might be hidden away inside one of these innocent-looking nuclei. :)
Now there’s a more serious physics question concerning whether we might be able to detect these passing lurkers. If we have a piece of silk string, some immense toxic lead paperweights, and a spare barn like Cavendish, can we look for wiggles of the string to tell us if there are aliens in our descending colon? Looking on Stack Exchange, I stumbled across the notion that actually, having the warp drive arrive at your planet, let alone go through atmosphere, was going to “kill” it entirely. This was impeccably sourced to an article in The Register about a group of physics students, but following it through, eventually I found this preprint ( http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.5708 ) which was actually published in Phys Rev D. “… any people at the destination would be gamma ray and high energy particle blasted into oblivion due to the extreme blueshifts for P+ region particles” Seems like every time we start folding space we end up damaging something that was written on it.
Not hiding them but looking for things that are unnatural. This is just a million year advance version of the Proxima Centauri Swarm. After all the electron may be multidimensional as R. C. Jennison point out.
https://www.lenr-forum.com/attachment/1195-jennison2-pdf/
From the present analysis we now ascertain a number of very remarkable facts relevant to such a particle observer. If the reflection occurs at a surface which is rotating at or very close to the velocity of light then the scale size of the Universe will be vanishingly small.
(This effect has been discussed in Ashworth and Jennison 1976.) If this observer receives radiation, then, as the Universe has been reduced to vanishing dimensions, the remainder of the wavefront which strikes him is contained in the encounter at the rotating observer’s point in space-time. We can speculate that it may therefore disappear, or strictly, never appear, as ar as all other observers are concerned. Furthermore the apparent specular reflection encountered in the Compton effect may be a simple outcome of the curious rotating geometry at this boundary. If this is the case, the communicating properties of fundamental particles in space-time are out of this world but still amenable to physical understanding.
This would also explain inertia and get rid of the ugly MACH effect:
http://gsjournal.net/Science-Journals/JournalReprints-QuantumTheoryParticlePhysics/Download/3309
1) Alcubierre’s warp drive theory or idea has not been correctly studied and interpreted by physicists because they did not use general relativity like Miguel Alcubierre.
2) I’ve made certain assumptions or axioms applied to the Alcubierre Warp Drive that always stick to known principles and therefore are completely valid. If we don’t stick to first principles, then are result we be invalid.
3) Negative energy was incorrectly assumed to be a deficit of energy and therefore violates the null energy condition. A AC Warp drive does not violate the null energy condition. The expansion of space with negative energy wave particles takes exactly the same amount of energy as gravity waves. It simply is the reverse of gravity. In fact we can assume that the anti graviton particle has a spin of 2 and zero mass. Ford 2004. The Quantum World. Therefore anti gravity is simply a gravity wave crest instead of a trough. Increase the amplification of thetroughs and you get anti gravity, negative energy.
4) There is no such thing as negative matter which would could not even hold together according to the laws of quantum physics. The particles would want to fly apart. One would have to reverse the spin of all of the baryons.
5) There is no such thing as a warp drive bubble so there will be no gravitational collapse of it. A warp drive is simply a pocked of local space created when the space around the sides of the length of the warp drive is pulled or wrapped around the sides of the spacecraft at FTL speeds.
6) The warp drive has a gravity wave particle generator or emitter in the front and an anti gravity wave generator in the back, NOT on the sides. When you are on a treadmill at the airport, the wheels are spinning in the direction that you walking, not perpendicular to it which makes no sense.
7) Such a warp drive can be completely controlled from the inside and it will travel at both sublight and FTL and both gravity and anti gravity engines can and must have exactly the same energy as in a diametric drive. Therefore they can be turned off and on without anyone knowing about it unless you are right next to the ship due to Newton’s law of universal gravitation and inverse square law that limits the force of gravity so it attenuates inversly proportional to the distance. When the AC warp drive is going FTL it is completely invisible to the visible universe. It is still in our universe in hyperspace, but not visible, local space.
Excuse me for the error. I meant to say that there is no such thing as a warp drive bubble. It is only a pocket of normal, local space that we drag with us, and therefore is does not violate general relativity. To do this we have to make disks in front and back of the ship with the cylindrical passenger compartment between them horizontally. Consequently, the ship and passengers will always be inside of the warped pocket of space with the space contracting in front of it and expanding behind it. Recall that space is not flat, but four dimensional and all of the problems of the AC warp drive are solved if we use an example of Fourth dimensional general relativity in our picture and thought experiment.
Another mistake. Anti gravity would be like a gravity wave trough, but not a deficit of energy, just the wave at the bottom of the cycle. Crests would be attractive force and troughs expansive force like in the LIGO detection.
Geoffrey,I find your notion of what negative energy could represent; i.e., reverse gravitation / the expansion phase of a gravitational wave, interesting.
The idea of a standing gravitational wave (or trough) reminds me of articles going around a few years back about Lentz ideas related to solitons and space warps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O8ji46VBK0https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/abe692#sidr-main
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/abe692#sidr-main
Eureka, Erik W Lentz and Ryan C Felton have only weeks ago published a draft paper on the techno-signatures that may result from positive energy warp drives.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.19381
This strikes me as like looking for aircraft using seismic detectors to detect the rare airliner crashes. The signature would need to be strong and unique enough to be extracted from what is likely to be a lot of noise when the detectors’ sensitivity is that high.
If we assume that interstellar ships are as safe as airliners, then for every warp bubble catastrophic collapse sending a signal, there must be many orders of magnitude more ships traveling between the stars. I hope there are better ways to detect them – like the equivalent of contrails or the interception of transmissions.
“Warp drives” are so Star Trek, even if the Alcbierre Drive is valid and workable as a solution. However, there may be other methods of traversing space at FTL velocities. Maybe “hyperspace” is the solution, or some other dimensional approach. We are really guessing at technologies. When Loeb suggested that ‘Oumuamua might be a ship with a sail, that was almost laughable other than the fact that there is serious work on interstellar sailing ships. If c is some cosmic speed limit, that cannot be evaded, then interstellar sail ships might exist (or interplanetary ones that escaped their systems). But if c can be evaded, I wonder whether warp drives, Alcubierre, or Cochrane ones will be the technology of choice.
They detected 70,000 dancing fans at a Taylor Swift concert with seismographs, so there is always hope. :)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jun/13/taylor-swift-fans-cause-seismic-activity-in-edinburgh-but-not-as-much-as-harry-styles-did
This evidence does not allow you to just shake it off, shake it off!
I agree. A warp drive at FTL would deflect all debris with a natural deflector shield of space moving at FTL, but the warp drive would be in hyperspace, so one would simply go around space debris, planets, and stars and we might not have to worry about these and any space debris, but I think in hyperspace it still is inside our universe, just not the visible, detectable universe. we could only detect the gravity waves when it came out of warp.
I don’t think there is a bubble catastrophe without any bubble. For example, imagine two concave or parabolic, vertical disks with a cylinder horizontal connected between them at both ends of the cylinder which is the passenger compartment and power source. FTL space passes around the outside or is pulled around the sides of the length of the spacecraft faster than the speed of light, so the whole ship is inside a pocket of space. The intensity of gravity and anti gravity emission disks can be completely controlled from the inside and therefore when the thing never comes out of warped space even below the speed of light where it would be visible and detectable. There is no sudden coming out of warped space so the warp drive is at an immediate stop. It slows down slowly. I did some thought experiments on that and absolute nothing bad happens and there is not large emission of radiation EMR or gravity. Now if you immediately turned off one end of the ship, so only one end was working at at FTL, that would be a catastrophe because it would not longer be in a free fall geodesic and feel tidal forces which would rip apart the spacecraft killing everyone.
There is also no time dilation problem with a warp drive at FTL and therefore it can’t go back into time, but only forwards.
All the other models of FTL space warps in the warp drive literature won’t work. They are all sublight drives and don’t have FTL or they are not provable. The problem is the free fall geodesic, for without it there is no FTL. With the Alcubierre Warp drive, there is a gravitational mass in front of the ship which pulls the ship towards it. An anti gravitational mass behind it pushed it. The fact that spacecraft is being pulled and pushed simultaneously gives it a free fall geodesic, so the ship and passengers are weightless and therefore they don’t fell any inertial effects like increased gravity from relativistic acceleration and speeds. According to the strong equivalence principle of General relativity, in a free fall geodesic the sum of inertial and gravitational masses is zero. Harrison 1979. This changes of course at relativistic speeds according to Einstein’s special relativity because anything that approaches the speed of light will have a mass increase and length contraction like the particles in the LHC. Anything that has mass takes an infinite amount of energy to reach the speed of light so objects with mass cant reach the speed of light. They can get very close to light speed light protons accelerated in the LHC., but can’t reach the speed of light. In a AC warp drive, the conservation of momentum is violated due to the strong equivalence principle. The same is true for a diametric drive. The sum total of gravitational and inertial mass and negative gravitational and negative inertial mass is zero and we have a free fall geodesic. A diametric drive that does not have the energy of a warp drive will still be a subluminal drive.
Any propulsion that does not have negative energy or the expansion of space as well as the contraction of space is a space warp has a maximum speed of less than light velocity. It should be quite obvious that if we can electronically control gravity and anti gravity waves from inside the ship electronically with the push of a few buttons, steering the ship is easy. We also control the energy level of the gravity and anti gravity waves and therefore the speed of the ship. We can shut off the space warp immediately. I don’t think anything bad will happen even at FTL because not any energy builds up outside the ship as was previously thought. We could keep the engines on lowering the power until we were only moving at 7 miles per second or the Earth’s escape velocity. Something bad might happen if we shut off only the front or the back of the ship at FTL. The passengers would suddenly high G forces. It might not rip the ship apart because if we shut off only one end of the ships space warp, we will instantly come out of warp we would be moving completely still. This new idea just came to me. Recall that the ship and passengers are stationary, but the space was moving at FTL around it. It takes time for the ship to accelerate, but it would accelerate quickly and G forces would be felt depending on the speed of the spacecraft. We’d have to shut the other half off quickly.
Here are some more thought experiments. If we put negative masses around the entire ship or even just on two sides of it, then as we increase the energy, the structural integrity of the walls would become compromised, the entire ship would implode and everyone inside it dies.
NASA’s model or drawing of the Alcubierre Warp drive is not correct. It would only be a sublight drive because if the front of the spacecraft just has an open ring, or open hole in it’s front which is moving space, then it still is moving through normal space and must experience inertial effects and increased gravity as it approaches light speed. The entire front of the spacecraft must have a solid, vertical disk which emits gravity waves from every part of it’s entire surface and also anti gravity waves from the whole surface of the vertical disk attached to the back of the starship. The horizontal tube, cylinder or passenger compartment must be always inside the two disks and therefore inside the pocket of space made only from FTL space passing over and around the length ship which is like in a tube of fast moving space if we consider that the FTL space also is forced move move past and around the expansions of space in the front, and back like a fast moving tube.
Backing up here, I’ve made another mistake. The space in the front of the MA warp drive contracts and expands in the back pulling the space past it like a tube.
Quote by Me: ” Recall that the ship and passengers are stationary,” This might be another mistake. A more, precise wording is the pocket of local space the MA warp spacecraft is inside does not reach or exceed C relative to itself, but the pocket of space is moving at FTL through hyperspace which is still inside the universe and normal space and therefore FTL.
How do any of these considerations change (if at all) for cases where the warp drive is not being used for FTL travel? A warp drive allowing travel at 99% of light speed would still be a pretty powerful and useful technology. At a minimum, it sounds as if it might be easier to control from within the ‘bubble’ while traveling slower than light.