If I ever write a science fiction story (and I am planning on it), this is how I’m going to handle the technology. Get faster than light travel out of the way in this manner, and everything else will be completely fudge-able:
Warp drive always seemed rather too ridiculous to work. That it came together at all, as a collection of tenuous and spectacularly ambitious technologies, had to have been some sort of miracle. As it was, it was a monument to the idiocy of human tenacity and willingness to take astronomical improbabilities on faith for the sake of convenience.
Once the principal of warping space was confirmed through tiny laboratory experiments, the two biggest obstacles to using warp technology for space travel both had to do with enormous quantities of energy. The first being the amount it took to create the warp bubble. The second was the release upon arrival of accumulated cosmic particles collected en route. The first was a technological hurdle. The second an extraordinary fatal flaw. Without a huge power plant and unbelievable fuel source, the trip would never get started. But without some way of preventing the explosion created when the warp field was shut down, the destination solar system would be fried as if from a gamma ray burster.
Humanity’s solution to this was to develop a system that was the astronomical equivalent of firing a bullet from a gun and then catching that bullet near the end of its trajectory using the barrel of an identical gun. And then using its specially designed blast chamber to absorb the energies involved.
The idea that someone figured out how to do this across relativistic galactic space with such pinpoint accuracy was patently absurd. Although every student was given a course explaining how this worked, no one really believed it, let alone remembered the details. All anyone really knew was that this is how people got about once they colonized the stars.
Only slightly less ridiculous were the original colony ships.
Warp Drive originally appeared on Drawing Contraption on 2013/11/01.