Well. This could be a game changer. New Warp Drive theory

[Drashner1]

Hmmm, s'pose that's fair, Todd.

I was thinking back to the legacy drives which were a part of the setting -- things like the differential sail -- which seemed (from the old articles I've found on the wayback machine) to be in the hands of ordinary sophs? I think it's fair to put the magic in the hands of the gods to some extent, it's just a shame we don't get to see more of those technologies precisely because they're largely held above modos and low transaps.

You're correct that things were much...fuzzier...back in the early days of the project. Both in terms of who produced which kinds of drives and the nature and role of at least low level transapients, who - depending on the author of a given article, or how the author happened to be thinking on the day they wrote the article - might be depicted as being independent beings or property, self-ascended, or created by human level minds on purpose.

Regarding reactionless drives being in the hands of modos - that does happen in the form of gift tech. At the level of governments, government organizations, major institutes, etc. the sephirotic archai do provide some number of drive systems, which can then be installed in various sorts of ships and may be passed on from ship to ship over the centuries. That said, reactionless drives are rare, both in absolute terms and even for the archai (who still use reaction drives most of the time for most of their ships outside of their main centers) and even rarer as gift tech.

Regarding seeing more of the tech in action - There are systems and places within the setting where godtech is very much on display. Ain Soph Aur comes to mind where halo tech allows the inhabitants to basically 'take an elevator' from one location to practically any other even if its on another planet. Most of the main capitals and centers will have proportionally more godtech around.

What is really needed - if folks want to see more descriptions of that tech - is for members to write articles and stories (or expand existing articles and stories) and create artworks that show it. Hint hint

As for mass-energy usage, I was thinking specifically about the article about warp bubble production at different S levels and the extreme requirements involved -- multiple Earth mass black holes orbiting sol-mass holes, knotted cosmic strings, exotic basement universes with gravitational gradients -- if these soliton... drives? can be produced in less extremal conditions, that would at least be interesting for the setting, and would potentially lessen some of the logistical issues of the void bubbles in setting, what with these proposed drives not relying on exotic matter.

It should be noted that most of the massive infrastructure described in the article is working to 'pre-warp' space in the region to make it easier to fully warp it over into a void bubble via whatever godtech magic that the archai use to do that. Even if RL developments led us to remove the need for exotic matter-energy (they seem to be rather interchangeable when talk of wormholes/warp drives takes place) it's not clear that that would result in a reduction in the infrastructure described.

The massive infrastructure should be thought of more as rather like the overall installation rather than entirely devoted to the creation of exotic matter/energy.

If this newer warp theory were to really and hugely reduce the amount of mass-energy required (exotic or not) that might lead us to reconsider the void factory designs. Or not - the real world often turns out to work in ways that lead to inefficiencies or hard limits on processes that can be made 'perfect' in theory. So that may be the case here. It may also be the case that even with the massive reduction in energy required, the conditions are still so extreme that something like our void factories would be needed to achieve it. If the older theories require a galaxy mass machine and the new theory only requires a 10 solar mass machine than that's still a gigantic reduction - while still being very big by RL standards.

Definitely agree on letting it percolate, though -- could be that even though it's passed peer review, this paper is totally wrong. It does strike me as... *optimistic* to say the least that the authors has talked about building FTL drives 'within a lifetime' in some press releases on his work.

It could be totally wrong - or some new theory could come out next week that says warp drives don't work but wormholes can be churned out using a tabletop rig and a car battery. Or it could be based on a physics model that isn't what OA is based on. Or it could be (I really need to find time to read the paper) that the vast reduction being talked about is already assumed in OA's designs and they are still this big.

If/when he (or someone) actually produces a warp drive - even if just in a lab - the impact on OA could be profound - but I also suspect we will all have much bigger things to worry about at that point than a group worldbuilding and fiction project. Hopefully in a good way, but still.

Hope this helps,

Todd