User blog:Mr.Robbo/On 'Superluminal Inductors'

The 'Superluminal Inductors' used in the Zambarau Concord are actually based a a few real-life lines of study. The 'Torus Engine' mentioned on the page is based on work done by Harold "Sonny" White, in which he explains how making the walls of a warp bubble thicker, as well as oscillating the intensity of the warp bubble, massively reduces the energy requirements of a hypothetical warp drive here. The use of a particle accelereator to produce a negative energy warp bubble is discussed here by Richard Obousy. The idea that a starship using a warp drive is actually moving off the 'brane' and into the 'bulk' in terms of string theory is mentioned again by White here.

However, I couldn't stomach the fact that all of the starships in the Zambarau Concord would probably be spherical to make efficient use of the warp bubble space, so I had to turn to the work of less well accredited scientist Marshall Barnes, who claims to have produced similar results to White using 'specially synthesised electromagnetic fields' here. Despite Barnes' credentials and claims to the contrary, I am inclined to believe that his work may be classed as 'fringe science' as it relies on Albert Einstein's Unified Field Theory (which Einstein never finished). In the name of science fiction, though, I am still including this as the 'Superluminal Inductor' as it gives me more freedom as to how starships would look.

Of course, in reality the physics of the Alcubierre warp drive is littered with problems and most physicists agree that a faster-than-light warp drive is centuries or millennia away, if it is possible at all. Ans that's a very big "if."