Warp Drive

A Warp Drive is a revolutionary propulsion system that allows spaceships equipped with it to travel at speeds close to and exceeding the speed of light. Ships that use warp drives can only be flown by pilots certified to do so.

History
Research into a practical "warp drive", a machine capable of moving a ship faster than light, began in the early 21st century by NASA based off of the paper published by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre in May of 1994. In this paper he details the effects of bending spacetime in order to effectively "drag" the ship along spacetime, rather than have the ship physically move through it. It wasn't until 2029 when humans first set foot on the planet Mars that there were talks of finding a method of moving faster than light to continue to explore the Solar System further, and within a reasonable amount of time (It took just over 6 months for humans to arrive at Mars).

Other theories were brought up, but Alcubierre's method of FTL travel prevailed above the rest, gaining the funding for R&D in 2041.

Exotic Matter
The most difficult obstacle to overcome in Alcubierre's concept of travel is the requirement of a significant quantity of so-called exotic matter, or matter that exerts a negative gravitational attraction, effectively pushing other masses with a positive attraction away. As development continued elsewhere on the project, a negative mass was thought to be impossible to find in nature. This stunted the project so much that it was left on the drawing board for over 90 years.

It wasn't actually until July 2nd, 2131 that negative energy was found by complete accident. An interferometer responsible for detecting gravitational waves on Earth detected a negative mass disturbance, which shocked the scientific community. It turned out that an experiment was being done in Geneva, Switzerland with combining extremely hot plasma under intense pressure with Moscovium. Unbeknownst to lab scientists at the time, the high temperature and pressure caused the Moscovium to synthesize spontaneously into another element that decayed in nanoseconds. The particles released from this reaction excited nearby particle detectors, and generated a negative gravitational anomaly. The radiation that causes this strange effect was literally named "Strange Radiation".

Development
Further research was allowed to proceed due to Strange Radiation 's serendipitous discovery. However, this effect would have to continue for long periods of time, and no methods could be found that could prolong the effect for more than a few seconds. It wasn't until yet another serendipitous discovery that led to all of the pieces coming together to form the bare-bones warp drive configuration. Strange Radiation was found to exist for more than thirty seconds from one sample when exposed to a very powerful magnetic field. With a bigger sample size, the effect can be sustained for several minutes.

But on a spaceship, how could hot plasma be consistently generated to sustain this reaction? The collision of matter and antimatter was already a well-researched and developed topic in science, using the collision's pure energy to power large machines. But to channel the resulting light plasma to the Moscovium to synthesize the exotic matter was still a question yet to be answered. This is where the warp ring came into fruition. It would use centrifugal force to equally distribute the plasma to tiny compartments lined within the ring to generate Strange Radiation. However, the ring needed to be gargantuan in size in order to distribute energy given off by the exotic matter, as there was not that much of it. Regular matter was stored in a massive and dense part of the drive that was spun at equally insane speeds to generate a massive disturbance. This piece of the drive didn't have to be that big, as positive mass disturbances were clearly easy to find. This part gained the name of the forecylinder.

The primitive warp drive was tested vigorously throughout its final stages of development. The first successful test was from Lincoln Spaceport to the Moon, a trip that took just under two minutes. Follow up tests using unmanned vessels were done to the other seven planets, the most notable of which was to Mars, a trip that took just under 10 minutes, and the first to see a human-made object break the speed of light at a maximum velocity of 1.37c. The first human to go faster than light would be a research vessel pilot, who in 2259 completed the trip to the asteroid Ceres in less than half an hour, his highest velocity being 1.42c.

Practical Use
The first working successful 'warp drive' was completed in 2257 and was considered humanity's greatest technological achievement. The warp drive was still less common than rocket engines and thrusters as the main form of principal transportation in space, because of high cost to manufacture. By 2262, not even 5% of spaceships were equipped or could be equipped with a warp drive. Better implementation, as well as cutting manufacturing costs are goals for the near future, and to let pilots sail the solar system like never before, bringing new discoveries, as well as making asteroid mining more efficient. The ships that could be equipped with warp drives were scientific research vessels, and ships that belonged to companies rich enough to afford the upgrade.

Drive Function
The Warp Drive featured in Reverie follows the Alcubierre Metric, relying on quantum mechanics to retract spacetime in front of the ship and expanding space behind it, creating a warp "wave". Ships with warp capability can "ride" this wave by dragging spacetime around it, rather than moving within actual space. The inertial reference frame within the wave is a frozen section of spacetime where no acceleration is felt, and the speed of light remains at c, even when moving greater than it. Because of the way this phenomenon occurs, ships at warp can only travel in a straight line, parallel with the ship's Driving Beam, which generates the field.

Power
A warp drive is powered by the annihilation of Deuterium and Antideuterium, in order to create light plasma. The light plasma is then directed via conduits to the Driving Beam, which then directs the plasma to sublimate matter and exotic matter in the Forecylinder and Warp Ring respectively. Annihilation of matter and antimatter is controlled via magnetic field, which can increase or decrease the rate at which the reactions take place. Antideuterium is stored in a separate compartment completely, where each atom is suspended by itself with the use of strong magnetic fields.

Low Energy Warp State (LEWS)
A Low Energy Warp State is the umbrella term used to describe conventional Sub-FTL and FTL travel via a warp drive that does not cause the ship to enter Hyperspace. The drive has no problem operating at these speeds for long periods of time, enabling research or sightseeing at the pilot's will. The amount of light plasma required to achieve minimum warp speed is not that much at all, and a ship can travel at this speed for days. Most warp-capable ships including Reverie use a Forecylinder and a Warp Ring to warp spacetime, in a positive and negative manner respectively. The maximum achieved velocity by warp-capable ships in LEWS is 8.49 times the speed of light. This decreases as ship mass increases.

Light Effects
Even though the ship itself isn't actually moving, the bubble it resides in is. As the ship approaches the speed of light, all light sources are warped and have their wavelength blueshifted. This is called the Relativistic Doppler Effect. At the speed of light (1c), all the light waves become compressed in the direction of travel, making the field of view dominated by an intense bright light, surrounded by darkness.

As a result, while travelling at light speed and onwards in a LEWS, the crew of the ship cannot see anything outside of the ship's warp bubble. The ship's viewport polarizes itself to prevent blinding the occupants of the spacecraft, and instead uses virtual reality to simulate the space around the ship by using collected data and measuring gravitational disturbances.

Drive Inhibition
The operation of warp drives can be inhibited by nearby massive celestial objects because of their gravity well. Significant gravity distortions cause the warp drive to work harder to maintain current velocity, increasing fuel consumption and generating more heat. If the distortion is so great, a warp drive might not be able to begin spooling at all, or physically destroy the existing warp bubble.

High Energy Warp State (HEWS)
A High Energy Warp State occurs when massive amounts of matter and antimatter are annihilated, overloading the warp drive's capabilities. The consequence of this is a strange elongation of spacetime being stretched around the ship, allowing it to "jump" to its destination via Hyperspace conduit, instead of simply accelerating through normal 3-Dimensional space. While in Hyperspace, the drive is operating extremely fast, and is generating a lot of heat. Most of this heat is absorbed or dissipated through Heat Dissipation Vents lining the side of the warp ring. Other ship functions are temporarily shut off or suspended to allow proper operation.

The jumping process itself is incredibly discreet. The computer does everything for the jump; The pilots only engage the drive. To jump, the exact distance needs to be known to provide exactly enough fuel to the drive. This fuel amount becomes Dedicated Fuel. If too little is allocated to the drive, the ship winds up short. Too much, and the ship will overshoot its target, risking ending up inside of its intended target. There is no current method of mechanically stopping such rigorous and vehement motion the warp drive creates during interstellar jumps other than starving it of fuel. If the drive is interrupted during operation, the ship will drop out into the normal dimension immediately.

"Dropping out" is the term used when a ship exits a warp state into normal space. For LEWS, the computer slows the warp drive spool so much that the warp bubble dissipates, and all inertia is released out into real space at whatever velocity the drive dropped at. This results in an immense bang.

For HEWS, the drive is operating at such a fast speed that stopping it via slowing the spool would damage the drive. How a hyperspace dropping got around this problem is with the mechanic that was in its design. When the Dedicated Fuel becomes exhausted, the warp bubble can no longer be supported and deteriorates immediately. The result is a drop from hyperspace, an undamaged drive, and a safety cooldown to allow the drive to return to operating speeds.

Maximum speed is impossible to determine as the ship does not technically exist in this dimension for measurements to be taken.

Emergency Stop
If the ship's onboard computer detects a severe malfunction, or if the drive has somehow been compromised, many things happen in less than one second:


 * 1) Since the flow of Dedicated Fuel cannot be stopped while in Hyperspace, the computer can attempt to seal the conduits that lead to the annihilation chamber. There is a high risk of the seals being completely obliterated, so as a final safety precaution, #2 is performed.
 * 2) Locking arms that are normally used for slowing the warp ring down are quickly engaged, immediately stopping the spinning of the ring and dissipating the warp field. The arms are either severely damaged or are destroyed as a result.
 * 3) The ship is thrown out of Hyperspace and its warp bubble, significantly damaging warp coils and vital internal components.
 * 4) Ship systems except for life support are shut off or suspended for a time to allow for any possible repairs to be done.

Since all accumulated inertia is released upon the warp bubble dissipating, there is a possibility that the ship can be completely torn apart depending on how fast it was travelling.

Time Distortion
When the warp drive is running, the spacetime within the bubble is frozen, or bent in any distortion the spaceship was in when the bubble was created. Due to this phenomenon, the ship is still technically in the same reference frame as the area of space where it departed from, so no time dilation is experienced between those frames. When the warp bubble has dissipated, the ship will then experience spacetime distortion caused by any local massive disturbances.

Safety Measures
As long as a ship is inside a warp bubble that was created at the beginning of their journey (home system), the interior of the bubble will continue to experience the same spacetime distortion as they would in the home system. So it is extremely recommended that pilots be careful and not dissipate their warp bubbles for any reason, as when they do, their local time is at the mercy of nearby celestial objects, which could mean that days, weeks, months, years, etc. may pass in literal seconds at home if they are in a large enough spacetime distortion. (That doesn't go well for people with families)

Trivia

 * The overall workings and ideas of the warp drive are inspired by many different media in science fiction:


 * 1) The method the warp drive uses to travel faster than light in a "warp bubble" is based on the concept of the Alcubierre Drive, proposed by the Mexican Theoretical Physicist Miguel Alcubierre in his paper from May 1994.
 * 2) The idea for the warp drive forced to work harder around large spacetime distortions (celestial bodies) came from Star Wars ' Hyperspace Mass Shadow and the Frame Shift Drive from the game Elite: Dangerous. (Reverie's Hyperspace does not include 'Mass Shadows').
 * 3) The idea of "jumping" through hyperspace was an original idea, but the manner the ship did so (for the sake of a more interesting plot device) was inspired from Elite: Dangerous'  Frame Shift Drive.


 * The whine that originates from the Warp Drive's Driving Beam is actually the transmission whine of the BMW M3 GTR from the game Need For Speed: Carbon. I needed something cool and different to distinguish Reverie from all of the other spaceships in science fiction, so this was my way of doing so.