04-21-2013, 02:23 AM
Since the article explicitly says this only happens with FTL warp bubbles and OA warp bubbles can't exceed light speed I'd think not. Beyond that I find this article highly suspect since it includes neither hard numbers nor formulae to calculate any. Saying that a lot of energy is released without providing any context opis kinda bogus. Are we talking energy sufficient to kill anyone within km of where the ship slows down or hundreds or thousands of megatons of energy? They don't say.
Beyond that they say nothing about what numbers they use for the density o the interstellar medium, which is quite diffuse and isn't going to add up to a lot unless the warp bubble is a certain size. And OA warp bubbles are only picometers across from outside and never turn off so the issue doesn't seem to apply. Even a bubble hundreds of meters across isn't going to encounter many particles even across light years.
Finally, and thinking about this a bit, I'm having a hard time seeing how it would be possible for particles to be 'swept up' in the warp field and somehow supplied with massive amounts of kinetic energy such that they are basically relativistic particles when the warp field turns off. Mainly since a warp bubble doesn't actually apply velocity to anything, which is really rather the point and what lets it move reactionlessly or FTL in the first place. Any particles somehow caught up in it should appear to move as fast as the bubble but then come to a halt when the bubble does (the bubble should also be able to either stop instantly or slow down at a rate only limited by the rate at which the warp 'configuration' can be changed. Conventional braking has nothing to do with it). Anything else would seem to require the warp drive to apply energy to the particles in question which would count as inefficiency on its part and likely something you don't want and that would be separate from normal drive operation.
One of our physics gurus may weigh with more info on this, but I'm highly dubious about it at this point, both in general and even more re OA.
Todd
Beyond that they say nothing about what numbers they use for the density o the interstellar medium, which is quite diffuse and isn't going to add up to a lot unless the warp bubble is a certain size. And OA warp bubbles are only picometers across from outside and never turn off so the issue doesn't seem to apply. Even a bubble hundreds of meters across isn't going to encounter many particles even across light years.
Finally, and thinking about this a bit, I'm having a hard time seeing how it would be possible for particles to be 'swept up' in the warp field and somehow supplied with massive amounts of kinetic energy such that they are basically relativistic particles when the warp field turns off. Mainly since a warp bubble doesn't actually apply velocity to anything, which is really rather the point and what lets it move reactionlessly or FTL in the first place. Any particles somehow caught up in it should appear to move as fast as the bubble but then come to a halt when the bubble does (the bubble should also be able to either stop instantly or slow down at a rate only limited by the rate at which the warp 'configuration' can be changed. Conventional braking has nothing to do with it). Anything else would seem to require the warp drive to apply energy to the particles in question which would count as inefficiency on its part and likely something you don't want and that would be separate from normal drive operation.
One of our physics gurus may weigh with more info on this, but I'm highly dubious about it at this point, both in general and even more re OA.
Todd