Harold White's warp drive and OA

[Drashner1]

http://io9.com/5963263/how-nasa-will-bui...warp-drive

This is sort of old news at this point, but on the pages regarding void bubble related tech (displacement drives, halo drives, void ships) it's stated that the energy requirements for producing a void bubble are very high. The paper linked above suggests that a toroidal configuration would reduce the energy requirement down to a few tons. If valid, doesn't this mean that some of the information regarding void bubbles should be updated?

Not really Reviewing the relevant EG article here:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/493f29cc472f0

it actually says:

"However, even such 'efficient' warp bubble effects still appear to require the use of massive external generation facilities and multi-solar mass instrumentalities to create them (although the associated drive node stabilization and control devices appear to be quite compact, perhaps only a few meters across at most)."

Which basically says that it takes a lot of mass-energy to both 'pre-warp' space to help you make a bubble and to generate whatever amount of negative energy is required (it's not clear exactly what sort of machine would be required to do that but it could be pretty large, especially for industrial production levels). It doesn't explicitly say how much is used although it does provide the formula used to calculate how much if we only knew the exact properties of OA warp bubbles

Putting this in more familiar terms, it could take a huge amount of infrastructure to generate even a small amount of anti-matter even with techniques vastly better than what we have now. Something similar could apply here.

On a more general note, at this particular stage White type warp drive doesn't seem to have enough experimental or other backing to indicate that it is clearly the way that a warp drive would be done or that such would require significantly less mass, energy, and infrastructure than what we describe or would be doable by humans. If some more definitive proof eventually comes along, we can then consider revising the website accordingly. However, in the interim, I think we would prefer to leave as is and presume that OA warp bubbles as described either already incorporate properties similar to White warp bubbles or that White's theory (or the machinery to implement it) was ultimately proven to be unworkable/unsolvable by human level minds and so warp bubbles remained beyond the reach of Terragen civ until the S4 archailects came along and figured it out.

Sorry about the I09 link. The actual NASA page is down, and the article linked above contains a link to the NASA page. Hopefully it will be back up soon.

No worries We don't have anything against I09 per se AFAIK. It would be nice if every interesting article and paper were readily available in its original form online, but that just isn't the case (yet).

Thanks for sharing the idea and please keep posting as new ideas or information (on this or whatever other OA relevant stuff interests you) as you find it.

Thanks!

Todd