Wednesday, November 21, 2007

warp drive

Warp drive

Yesterday, I spent the whole day designing a warp drive ship. Ok – not something many people do for a living, but what the hell! I’m trying to base my animations for Going To Gliese on as much of the real physics as possible.

Warp bubble creation is really expensive in terms of energy (current calculations suggest you’d need ¼ of the mass of the sun just to create the bubble)… so I’ve made the ship spherical so as to use the bubble shape to its best advantage. The front of the ship needs to be heavily shielded because as it travels (actually it doesn't move- space is compressed and expanded around it!), there's a lot of energy build up at the front.

I’m imagining that there are four stages:

1) the ship itself

2) The actuator array: a donut shaped object around the ship which produces the warp bubble. The actuator array is outside the bubble and projects it inwards to surround the ship at its centre, then moves away to a safe distance. At the edges of the array are negative energy generators – perhaps whirlpools like mini black holes or galaxies. Or perhaps, more elegantly, there’s just a pipe around the outside acting as a cyclotron

3) The accelerator array: a ring, or more likely a series of rings arranged like the barrel of a gun. These are made up of discrete particles – small disposable objects which are projected one after another into the path of the bubble, detonating to cause a disturbance which sets the ship in motion and being destroyed in the process.

4) The decelerator seed: basically a single actuator particle placed in the path of the oncoming ship designed to detect the disturbance in spacetime and detonate to collapse the bubble.

Here’s a clip:

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