heretofore

Given the known constraints, you're not going to get FTL communication ability without warping spacetime. Waiting for proof-of-concept on that one. I can imagine only two other alternatives. Both rely on black box stuff. One requires that we more fully understand the underlying dimensions of the quantum world and somehow figure out how to make shortcuts. The other is is we discover that we're in a simulation, and the simulators contact us, and afford us a cheat.

I've been trying to research and wrap my mind around the matter of how things would be for a manned spacecraft employing an Albubierre drive. From my understanding, massless particles like photons would not appear any stranger than usual to the crew. They would not be overly redshifted, as is the case when we observe distant galaxies moving away at high relative speeds. That is because the spacecraft is in flat spacetime, and whatever path light managed to pass through the AD wavefront, it appears as it came in. Matter, however, will not. The "tidal" forces of the ship's FTL forward edge will rip matter to doll rags, as it were, just as if those atoms and molecules reached the event horizon of a black hole, or hypothetically were at the the end of the Big Rip in cosmology. Thus, the ship would receive the scattering of radiation from matter's dismemberment. If the AB drive is producing, say, 10c of spacetime warp, I'm guessing that all matter in front is converted to energy. Which is why one should avoid driving through anything more substantial than diffuse space. I wonder what happens at the Planck Scale of vacuum energy when your AD slams it?