Damn it, I was going to stay out of this thread...
The thread's author appears not to have visited the site since last August, so anyone asking questions might be waiting a while for a direct reply. I hope DCello does return at some point and make further contributions, as this really is an excellent guide - amazingly easy to understand, even if I might disagree with one or two points.
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[...] I'm not quite sure why the original author has stated definitively that the in-system FSD drive is *not* an Alcubierre drive, as it behaves precisely as if it is.
Oh, my word. Hello, Mr Wagar. It's a pleasure to see you here.
I'm something of a fan of yours, Mr Wagar, I bought
Reclamation in three different formats, but - as much as it pains me to disagree with you - I have to agree with DCello on this.
I'm no physicist, but as I understand it, there are some notable characteristics of the Alcubierre drive concept which aren't expressed in the game: the nature and amount of negative energy needed (rather more than a relatively-simple hydrogen fusion reactor can easily account for); the initial acceleration (which doesn't provide an instant jump to relative-FTL); the wake of expanding space behind our ships as we travel (which would presumably affect anything directly behind us, especially when jumping from just a few metres away from other ships, stations and starports); and the hefty blast of radiation released when we drop to sublight.
Just trying to fit the name Frame-Shift Drive into the Alcubierre concept feels somewhat forced, in my opinion.
These issues are easy enough to handwave away - it's a hypothetical technology and this is SF after all - but by the time we dispense with them, I don't think what we have afterwards is really still an Alcubierre drive, any more than the International Space Station is an igloo.
Beyond that, Miguel Alcubierre designed his hypothetical drive as a real-world articulation of
Star Trek's warp drive. Essentially, it's fan fiction, as written by a physicist. For
Star Trek. Not
Elite: Dangerous. Even the drive's Wikipedia page is happy to use terms like 'warp bubble'. I don't know about you, Mr Wagar, but it feels to me like we're filing off the serial numbers and passing it off as something other than what it is, which is a warp drive. It's purely a personal view, but I'm not comfortable with the community doing that. I'd prefer us to be more forthright.
My views are my honest opinions and I hope I haven't caused too much offence.
I wish you all the best, Mr Wagar.
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Regarding DCello's comparison of the FSD with
Star Trek's warp drive: the depiction given doesn't agree with anything I can recall, either from any canonical source, or from Sternbach & Okuda's pro-canonical
ST:TNG Technical Manual, which - even after 25 years - is still the stone-cold Gold Standard for this kind of SF technology discussion.
As I understand it (and notwithstanding some of
Trek's more questionable scripts), subspace is supposed to be a kind of subdivision of Space As We Know It, rather than some proper parallel reality,
à la hyperspace. I suppose that's why it's called subspace.
Keeping it fairly simple, the warp drive works by creating an energy bubble which surrounds and effectively segregates the ship from the part of space that limits us to sublight speeds. Creating lots of incredibly short-lived bubbles, each one inside the last - and having them selectively come into contact with each other - 'squeezes' the ship in a chosen direction, unencumbered by the normal laws of physics.
There's a brief tunneling effect as a ship jumps to warp speed, but mainly because it looks cool and bridges the gap between different FX shots. After going to warp, a ship can move as freely as an ED ship in Supercruise. There's no inherent obligation for a ship at warp to move in a particular way, or indeed at all - although the Enterprise wouldn't last very long flying backwards, since the deflector that sweeps aside space-debris only covers a forward arc.
Non-moving warp fields have been shown a few times, for various different reasons - such as reducing the apparent mass of a moon so it can be moved, for example.
Interestingly, the maximum safe speed of the Enterprise-D in
The Next Generation was 2000c, almost identical to our 2001c maximum speed in ED.
Whether that's a coincidence, or a nod of acknowledgment, only the devs can tell.
