What effect does size or mass have on the albecurrie drive?

[Chirality]

I has wondering if the size or the mass of an albecurrie drive would effect its operation or efficiency.

[KvickFlygarn87]

Probably not. I don't know. Stop asking questions!

[K^2]

Larger bubble needs more energy. But unless you plan to haul neutron matter, actual mass of the ship or the drive doesn't matter.

[Deathsoul097]

Larger bubble needs more energy. But unless you plan to haul neutron matter, actual mass of the ship or the drive doesn't matter.

Wait really? I thought it was the other way around; that size matters not, but +mass = +energy.

[K^2]

Wait really? I thought it was the other way around; that size matters not, but +mass = +energy.

All that matters is getting the right space-time curvature. Until you have enough matter being transported to cause curvature of its own, it makes zero difference.

But size is important. Larger bubble means larger volume of space that has to be filled with the right amount of energy to form the bubble. I don't know if scaling is actually going to be as bad as surface area. But you'll definitely have harder time forming and maintaining a larger bubble.

[YNM]

I has wondering if the size or the mass of an albecurrie drive would effect its operation or efficiency.

The hard thing with them isn't their enormous mass, or energy requirements; Instead, their mass (and so, energy) have to be negative, so you can put things in it ! That's why every attempt of creating some version of it doesn't succeed. At all.

[Nibb31]

I love the idea of an albecurry drive. Sounds spicy.

Spelling folks. Learn it.

[K^2]

The hard thing with them isn't their enormous mass, or energy requirements; Instead, their mass (and so, energy) have to be negative, so you can put things in it ! That's why every attempt of creating some version of it doesn't succeed. At all.

IIRC, sub-light warp can be done with positive energy. But I'm not 100% sure that it follows Alcubierre's scheme. I really should sit down and run through the math on the sub-light warp. But even with FTL warp, there is no proof that negative energy is required. It is a requirement of every known scheme, however, so it might actually be a fundamental requirement, but we don't know for sure yet. (Same deal with traversable wormholes, by the way.)

Fortunately, even if negative energy is a requirement, you really just have to have energy lower than vacuum energy. And you can achieve that by excluding field harmonics. Casimir Effect, etc. Think of it like a bubble in a liquid. It has positive mass, but lower than that of surrounding fluid, so it rises up, against gravity, as if it had negative mass. There are a whole lot of open questions there, but in principle, this should give us a loophole for building FTL warp drives and making wormholes traversable. There are a whole lot of new challenges with this approach, but at least we aren't dealing with total fiction here. We do have physics that describes "negative" energy we need, and we do have physics that tells us how to arrange that energy to form a warp bubble. So, to some degree, it is an engineering problem.

Granted, it's the sort of engineering problem that dwarfs pretty much every other technological challenge we are facing, but it's nice to know that FTL is at least not impossible. Kind of lets you hope for a better future than being stuck in this star system until extinction.

All of that said, FTL Warp is way, way out of our league right now. Hydrogen fusion (the slow, controlled kind), sub-light warp, and even some limited gravity manipulation are a short list of techs we'd have to hit long before we even seriously consider it. But limited experiments with sub-light could be done in our life-time. Not as a self-sustaining ship, but as tiny probes launched by enormous machines that will generate a warp bubble externally. I don't know about you, but for me, even a quantum dot moving along a particle accelerator beam at a turtle's pace, but under warp, without ever having to have undergone acceleration, would be an absolutely phenomenal achievement.

Technically, we're further along with Quantum Teleportation than warp, but because of how the former scales, my money would still be on practical sub-light warp coming about first.

[K^2]

Sorry about the double-post, but in case anyone is still interested, I did run the numbers for sub-light Alcubierre drive. You end up with regions of negative energy density either way. However, the total amount of energy required scales with speed. So a "slow" moving warp bubble is going to be much easier to organize than an FTL one.

I have seen a lot of literature mentioning that negative energy is only strictly required for FTL, though. I'll try to see if I can find a scheme that doesn't rely on negative energy for sub-light. There are a lot of parameters to play with. Perhaps, something as simple as a different shape for the bubble boundary could do it. And even if energy limits the top speed, the fact that ship experiences no acceleration as bubble accelerates still makes it worth investing research into.