Warp Drives Make Better Guns Than Engines

[Wicky_42]

Even putting aside particles for the moment, the simple ability to project a mass at even approaching the speed of light makes for an incredibly powerful weapon. Nuclear weapons would be relics compared to the amount of force you could hit a planet with accelerating any decently sized object to the upper % of the speed of light.

I always wondered why no-one in the Star Trek universe strapped a shuttle-sized warpcore to an engine and used it as a guided one-shot-kill anti-ship/planet missile. Just fling yourself at any amount of warp speeds and you'll completely destroy anything you impact from the absurd amount of energy you'll be carrying.

Spoiler: graph of just how absurdly fast Trek's warp speeds are

Throw those numbers at E=mc^2...

snip.

This must be the most useless FTL drive I ever heard of. When approaching the speed of light, the mass of your ship (the actual inert mass) approaches infinite values, which require linearly scaled (thus, in the end, infinite) energy for acceleration. The Laws of relativistic physics don't care about friction.

I think you meant exponentially... *science fail*

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Actually since this negative energy bubble is being generated behind your ship, wouldn't the first thing all those accumulated particles slam into when you stopped be your ship?

No, the debris is built up at the front of the ship

Well the article made it sound as if all that debris was being collected by the bubble since they used the analogy of an ocean wave, so naturally I thought all that built up stuff would hit the ship when you tried to stop.

 

[Fenris Frost]

Anyone else reminded of the 'Vanguard' class from Mass Effect?

 

[Saulkar]

Goddamn son! Now if only Shepard could get his hands on this. Reapers, you jelly?

 

[ctuncks]

Well in regards to fictional works the Warhammer 40K setting has had it's "Warp" travel weaponised for some time now such as Vortex Grenades or the dreaded Ork Shokk Attack Gun.

 

[Landis963]

If only eezo-induced FTL didn't phase through objects enroute.
EDIT: Double post ARRRRGGGGGHHHH!

 

[Landis963]

If only eezo-induced FTL didn't phase through objects enroute.

 

[Ukomba]

Always preferred the Star Wars Hyperdrive anyways.

But I thought the whole point of a Warp Drive was that you weren't actually moving, or you were just moving at normal speeds. It's that the bending of space allowed the appearance of FTL travel. If you really were building momentum like that then you'd still hit the lightspeed barrier.

 

[isometry]

As you approach the speed of light, the rest of the universe contracts to zero size. Even though the andromeda galaxy is 2 million light years away, you could get there arbitrarily quickly by traveling at large, sublight speeds.

For example, if you were traveling at 99.99999999999% the speed of light, the distance from earth to the andromeda galaxy would contract to 1 kilometer, so you'd arrive in a fraction of a second.

At realistic levels of human acceleration (e.g. 1g) the trip to andromeda could still take only less than 30 years.

Edit: The point of all this is that faster than light travel is not necessary. In Star Trek, they say that Warp 10 corresponds to theoretically infinite speed where the entire universe looks like a single point. The funny thing is that's what happens in reality as the speed of light is approached, the entire universe contracts to a single point so every destination becomes near. The whole warp system is superfluous, since the speed of light already corresponds to warp 10.

 

[Da Orky Man]

Negative energy has always bothered me. The concept arises from a symmetric mathematical equation. However, no one has ever been able to adequately explain (to me, perhaps what goes on down the hall in the theoretical physics office is much more concrete) what negative energy is, or how to generate it.

"Wormholes are totally possible! All you need to do is pump in enough negative energy..."

Negative energy is more accurately descibed as negative mass-energy, because mass and energy are one and the same in different forms. Now, negative mass has a reverse-gravitational effect; that is, it pushes matter away. Should you use suficient quantities of both normal matter-energy and negative matter-energy, then you could theoretically warp an existing black hole in such a way as to make it possible to fly through without being crushed. And lo, the wormhole is born.
However, we aren't sure it even exists, let alone how to make it. And anyway, we'd need jupiter-masses of it to do anything useful.

 

[Daaaah Whoosh]

Actually since this negative energy bubble is being generated behind your ship, wouldn't the first thing all those accumulated particles slam into when you stopped be your ship?

No, the debris is built up at the front of the ship

Well the article made it sound as if all that debris was being collected by the bubble since they used the analogy of an ocean wave, so naturally I thought all that built up stuff would hit the ship when you tried to stop.

No, the wave is in front of you. When you stop, it keeps going. Imagine if you hit someone with your car and then stopped. He wouldn't come through the windshield, he'd go flying forward.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Anything capable of producing that much dark energy is likely capable of obliterating all life on a planet even before you reach light-speed anyway.

 

[NeutralDrow]

The Kzinti Lesson, as applied to Star Trek? Awesome.

I think some physicist said that any engine technology which could be used for interstellar travel outputs enough energy to be made into a weapon of mass destruction.

The first person I thought of was Larry Niven, who applied it to fusion drives.

"A reaction drive's efficiency related to propulsion is directly proportional to its usefulness as a weapon."

 

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Even putting aside particles for the moment, the simple ability to project a mass at even approaching the speed of light makes for an incredibly powerful weapon. Nuclear weapons would be relics compared to the amount of force you could hit a planet with accelerating any decently sized object to the upper % of the speed of light.

Beat me to it. Both physicists and science fiction writers have already explored in great detail the military side effects of propulsion systems that allow for either travel at significant fractions of the speed of light or FTL. All you really have to do is strap one of those things to a decent-sized rock and point it at a planet you don't like, and it might as well not exist anymore after the amount of damage done to it.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

Ahhh, superluminal particles. What better way to start the day?

It reminds me of why the LHC would only use individual atoms, over atom clusters. Imagine an entire ship accelerated to that velocity and rammed into something. Honestly, I'm surprised scifi hasn't made this happen yet.

Spoiler: It's funny how often this

Spoiler: turns into this:

But that's just the standard course of things! Hell, if we hadn't made beer by accident, we'd still be trying to make water explode.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Actually since this negative energy bubble is being generated behind your ship, wouldn't the first thing all those accumulated particles slam into when you stopped be your ship?

No, the debris is built up at the front of the ship

Well the article made it sound as if all that debris was being collected by the bubble since they used the analogy of an ocean wave, so naturally I thought all that built up stuff would hit the ship when you tried to stop.

No, the wave is in front of you. When you stop, it keeps going. Imagine if you hit someone with your car and then stopped. He wouldn't come through the windshield, he'd go flying forward.

I'm pretty sure the article said that the bubble would be generated behind the ship, but whatever. It's all just theory anyway.

 

[Strazdas]

I vote we try to use EvE Online's method. New Eden's warp drives simply create a vacuum bubble around a ship, which enables the normal sublight engines to propel you at FTL speeds effortlessly due to not having to fight the resistance of those very particles.

that is not very efective. asi t only travels within solar system. the rest of travel id done via gates, which work on pretty much teleportation priciples. it took hundreds of years to mvoe gates to the next solar system in eve universe. it wont be working any time soon.

Also just to point an obviuos: venus is closer to earth than mars.

 

[Thaliur]

snip.

This must be the most useless FTL drive I ever heard of. When approaching the speed of light, the mass of your ship (the actual inert mass) approaches infinite values, which require linearly scaled (thus, in the end, infinite) energy for acceleration. The Laws of relativistic physics don't care about friction.

I think you meant exponentially... *science fail*

Indeed... I confused energy and force during writing, sorry about that.

About those Warp-drive missiles you mentioned, wouldn't that be mostly how photon torpedoes work? At least that's how I always imagined them, besides being antimetter bombs, of course. Acording to the Memory alpha wiki, they are warp-capable.

 

[Wicky_42]

About those Warp-drive missiles you mentioned, wouldn't that be mostly how photon torpedoes work? At least that's how I always imagined them, besides being antimetter bombs, of course. Acording to the Memory alpha wiki, they are warp-capable.

I had a look at the entry, but no, they're driven by "sustainer engines", which use reactants and leave plasma exhaust. They are capable of being fired during warp and are shielded (which can alloy them to match frequencies and penetrate shields), but they come no-where near light speed. Then again, when you're an anti-matter bomb there's some that might say light speed is over-rated.