FTL - Hey that ship looks familiar....

Just saw this article on facebook and wanted to share!

http://www.space.com/17628-warp-drive-possible-interstellar-spaceflight.html

Nice! I'm a little iffy about the generic "exotic material" description for the ring, but I think I get the premise. If they can find a way to trap a "bubble" of realspace around the ship, and somehow manipulate a thin layer of the fabric around it, they could potentially find a loophole to work through.

The trick is...how do you aim it? It's not something like Mass Effect's relay system, where mass relays are linked to one another, like ports on a network hub. It's a crapshoot at first, I guess: See if it works, and pray you don't drop into the middle of a sun or at the core of a gas giant. The same idea is at work with the two concepts, though. ME uses a generic "element zero" description for the cold fusion "core" of their version of a warp drive, and the transfer has to be calculated based on the exact amount of mass the relays are transferring. Gotta be on point. Don't want to relay out and find that you left your legs behind because you didn't carry the 1.

Anyway, even if nothing I just wrote makes sense, it's an interesting idea, and I'd like to read more about it. Hopefully, it doesn't happen faster than we can get our story going. Ha!

Aiming is an interesting question but I imagine our first FTL craft will be a drone craft and if it goes into a sun, that sucks (an is one hell of an expensive firework) but no one will be dead. Hopefully we'll have viable data to figure out how to not point it into the sun next time.

This is completely off topic but watching the video - what the guy says at the end about everyone, despite differences, working together is more 'science fiction' than the FTL travel is a thought I've pondered often. I think it's true. I think part of the reason I like Star Trek so much is for the culture of cooperation in a post-war/violent Earth rather than for all the fancy technology and alien life.

I just thought it was a fun read and the ship they describe looks exactly like one in the colonial fleet! There are still a ton of details that would need to be figured out...and yeah I think they would initially use drones rather than risk people jumping into the Sun or something!

Was absolutely a great read! I love finding out that there's stuff out there like this. Thanks for sharing.