Alcubierre Drive

Completed 2018-03-05. Available releases:

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I was aiming to draw a physically realistic Alcubierre drive ship, and this is the result (the camera is somewhat behind the ship and co-moving). Major references were:

Unfortunately, these references are inadequate in various ways. Although the first shows the general shape of the warp bubble, it doesn't show Doppler shifts, and is too low-resolution to show details. The second doesn't show warp bubbles, but does give a general flavor for frequency shifts, and by examining the pictures, you can get a semblance for what a side view must look like, even though one is not ever shown. What I'm saying is I had to fill in the gaps myself, so this should be taken merely as a reference point; it's relation to actual simulation is only indirect.

My personal opinion is that Alcubierre drives, if they are possible to create in the first place (I am skeptical), will have v < c. For FTL drives, many open issues crop up, such as allowing the warp bubble to be generated ahead of the ship, becoming causally disconnected to the exterior, getting infinite radiation building up, etc.

Hence, the ship is traveling somewhere around v ≈ 0.85 c. You can see the Lorentz contraction squishing the ship horizontally, but it is not frequency shifted. Only objects visible through the bubble, (such as the moon, seen at front of and behind bubble) are shifted. The stars also get shifted, obviously. Traveling at high speeds produces a thin but intense corona of (mostly) Hydrogen plasma, explaining the pinkish glow (blueshifted fore and redshifted aft, since it is outside the warp bubble) (it's not Hawking radiation, because there's no event horizon to kill one side of a pair production).

The ship itself has two shield-like projections on the front and back, as well as two rings to shape the bubble around itself. For sublight propulsion, two antimatter-plasma hybrid rockets are on the sides (you can see tanks of fuel and propellant on the sides).

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