Plausible FTL
I've absolutely fallen in love with
This Article!
It's very difficult to follow; but I'll sum it up as much as I understood it...
I'll refer to some of the figures in the article, though.
It's sort of like space is smaller, except instead of making it smaller, you're traveling along an angled plane. Look at Figure 1. Imagine you're traveling along the hyperdimensional plane "xu" (instead of x and y, use u and x), and stay within the speed of light on that plane, but your location in regular space, plane "xy", is a projection of your position on plane "xu".
Mmm - when I say projection think of it like a shadow. I've got a flashlight above and to the right of the figure, you're on the x-u plane, and where you are in normal space, is where your shadow falls on the xy plane.
Now, as you rotate plane xu so that it's steeper and steeper, a smaller amount of movement on plane xu is a much larger amount of movement on plane xy.
Normally, there's no "steepness", and plane xu, the one you travel on, is the same as plane xy. The FTL method works by rotating the xu plane, and you traveling along it.
That's sort of the physics behind it, to be honest I might be way off, but that's what I got out of it, and probably the closest thing to intuitively understanding it.
How it's done is by using a sort of Conditioned Electro-Magnetic field to create a Vacuum Polarization. To me, that's technobabble, but apparently it's real technobabble, I just don't understand it :lol:.
But apparently Vacuum Polarization has some nifty side effects:
... They showed that favorable vacuum polarization (accomplished by a favorable
electrogravitic coupling between the fields of specially conditioned em radiation and those that underlie gravity and intertia) would: diminish vacuum permittivity and permeability; and increase c in the vicinity of accelerating starships. This also diminished inertial resistance of the quantum vacuum to accelerated motion (vehicle inertia). ...
In other words, normally, 1 Newton of force would accelerate a 1 Kg object at 1 m/s per second.
But, relative to an object outside the field of Vacuum Polarization, that 1 N could accelerate that 1 Kg object anywhere from 1 m/s^2 to near infinite, depending on how much you've rotated the "xu" plane.
Scroll down near the bottom and look at figure 9. That's my favorite
Keep in mind it doesn't actually reach c through brute acceleration. From it's own inertial instrumentation, it never reaches c. And from it's own instrumentation, 1 Newton of force pushes 1 Kg at 1 m/s^2. It's when you take your velocity readings from Earth's frame of reference that your acceleration is greater than 1 m/s^2 for every Newton on every Kg.
Oh, and transit time on-board would be slightly greater than the time it takes to travel from Earth's perspective, not significantly, so, however.
But, if you really wanted an answer, the original answer was that the ship emits the rest of the energy as tachyons.
PS, in response, the ship can't emit the rest of the energy as Tachyons. It's postulated that you CAN travel at FTL velocity in regular space, but slowing down TO the speed of light will have the same effects as speeding up TO it. It's crossing the light barrier (speeding up to it, or slowing down to it) that's impossible, not traveling faster than light. In effect, then, going FTL without any kind of space distortion would mean you'd be traveling backwards in time, i.e., you wouldn't lose energy as tachyons, you'd BE tachyons.
(Maybe that's what Merlin did in
Sword in the Stone? :lol
And if you were going THE speed of light, then that'd be an infinite release of energy...
