Wordlbuilding Detail with Roots in Science

[sbrothy]

What no one has seen before: gravitational waveforms from warp drive collapse

Despite originating in science fiction, warp drives have a concrete description in general relativity, with Alcubierre first proposing a spacetime metric that supported faster-than-light travel. Whilst there are numerous practical barriers to their implementation in real life, including a requirement for negative energy, computationally, one can simulate their evolution in time given an equation of state describing the matter. In this work, we study the signatures arising from a warp drive "containment failure", assuming a stiff equation of state for the fluid. We compute the emitted gravitational-wave signal and track the energy fluxes of the fluid. Apart from its rather speculative application to the search for extraterrestrial life in gravitational-wave detector data, this work is interesting as a study of the dynamical evolution and stability of spacetimes that violate the null energy condition. Our work highlights the importance of exploring strange new spacetimes, to (boldly) simulate what no one has seen before.

Didn’t dare post this anywhere but here.



EDIT: Just for the record I’m not out to ridicule here. I don’t have the prerequisite education for that. I do, on the other hand, hope you’ll agree it is a little farfetched. For the time being. Also the author obviously has a sense of humor.

 

[sbrothy]

Magnetic Shielding for Interplanetary Travel

A proposed design for radiation shielding in interplanetary travel is presented with primary shielding created by a superconducting split toroid magnetic field and unconfined magnetic fields created by two deployable superconducting loops. The split toroid's shielding effectiveness is analyzed with calculations of mass, field, particle path, and synchrotron radiation provided. The creation of plasma regions is also taken into consideration. The design has a wire mass of 8.08x10^4 kg, which creates a 0.47 T shielding field, and a field less than 2.17x10^-4 T in the crew area. Calculations show the shielding field deflects concerning particles of solar wind, solar flares, and high energy high atomic number particles found in galactic cosmic radiation. This design might also be used to generate power and thrust from the radiation to create a potentially self-sufficient mobile station.