Antimatter

Wormholes

Metallic hydrogen phase transition engine.

Actually they will be combined with engines (btw you are forgot about nuclear and fusion engines). Currently SHW ship editor uses fusion engines.

This look like some pseudoscience thing.

Diamagnetic dumping.

The fact that there is some experimental evidence to support the idea kind of takes it out of the realm of pseudoscience. They have a long way to go before being proven but there is some compelling evidence.

Whether or not they'll be efficient when scaled up, provide enough thrust for large spacecraft, or even be practical remains to be seen and that's if they even work.

Aswell that we don't need much power for the warp engine would aswell mean, that we are talking about antimatter in very low quantities.

. In Star Trek as example, i aswell think, they are underestimating the antimatter a bit.

Aswell a way to lure player to the black holes.

Which would be better done with the fusion engines since you won't be flying at FTL velocities nonstop.

Antimatter in Star Trek is also generated in a cheat manner. Some field guides suggest they use normal deuterium and rip it apart into pure energy and use the replicator systems to manufacture all the antimatter they need. How this is done in an energy efficient manner is never explained and is most likely impossible.

How? Wormholes and black holes are completely different things.

Yust an idea because of the large gravity and space warp of a black hole.

So no reful in space.

With antimatter you could possible fly longer and faster, because of the high power amount.

So we won't need as much antimatter.

player could get into situation, when it cannot find fusion fuel, because there is no gas giant near

I think Antimatter would have to be created by some kind of advanced particle accelerators. Yes, it will be difficult to create them, large facilities, etc. But it should be like this.

Wormholes
An idea for some immediate teleportation engine, with a high risk of course. Aswell a way to lure player to the black holes.

Hmm, i know Higgs Bosons as mass particles and gravimetric fields. Diamagnetic dumping is something completly new for me. Ok, i heard about electrogravity aswell, but if they do their job, it would be fine aswell. ^^

Wormholes have a repulsive gravitational effect. They may look similar to black holes, but they would function very differently.

And how do you balance that for players who decided to fly too far for too long? Do they just get stuck?

Not really. Engines have a specific amount of thrust no matter what and the FTL system would have a specific amount of energy it can draw at once.

We still need kilos of the stuff. There just isn't enough floating around in space or around planets to power a ship. SHW came up with a figure of around 250 micrograms around Jupiter per (Earth) year. That is nowhere near enough to power a ship.

You still face the problem of finding a way to make the stuff in an efficient manner locally inside the ship. If the fuel source relies on going back to Earth to refuel and you are in some far off galaxy, you've got a game breaking problem.

I think, that we could use antimatter in game. Yes, you cannot refuel it anywhere, like fusion fuel, but it have very big specific energy and thrust. So it is not very good for completely independent space exploration ship, but it could be very useful for battleships and fast automated probes.

Also, player could get stuck even with fusion engine, it he is too stupid. Any engine need to be refueled and you must always think about nearest refueling place. So, player could get into situation, when it cannot find fusion fuel, because there is no gas giant near.

It will have no sense in economical terms. Creating antimatter is too expensive process, it would require much more energy to create 1 gram of antimatter than it would be released after its annigilation. It is like very powerful and very expensive battery. It would have sense only if you have no other adequate propulsion technology, for example for sub-luminal ship. For SE game, where we have FTL drives and needed physical velocities of only few thousand km/s, fusion engines is a better solution.

Wormhole will rip your ship apart. Its external space-time metric is equal to the metric of the Schwarzschild black hole. It must have a mass of few million solar masses to have low enough tidal forces up to its outfall in order not destroy any ship approaching to it. Small wormholes may be used only to transfer electromagnetic signals.

This have nothing to do with gravity. It is just interaction of diamagnetic materials with strong magnetic fields.

Creating antimatter is too expensive process,

, you cannot refuel it anywhere

player could get stuck even with fusion engine, it he is too stupid.

the gravity and space warp is used for getting the ship in some kind of strong enough warp for creating a wormhole.

you shouldn't be able to find antimatter fuel drifting in space

(which like all "infinite energy" claims, seems like pseudoscience to me)

You also still have the problem SpaceEngineer raised

A flat-face traversable wormhole would not distort the image of the remote space region or other universe seen through it because the negative energy density at the throat is zero as seen and felt by light and matter passing through it

I think the Alcubierre solution is our best hope for making a real "FTL" engine, as long as the necessary space-time transformations are actually possible.

This is what I have talked to SpaceEngineer about quite a bit. The field equations and effects work fairly well within conventional physics. The issue is the requirement for the hyperdrive ring, negative energy densities, and ring topology.

Not entirely true. You can get small amounts basically for free if you build collection facilities in orbit around planets that have magnetic fields. With solar and battery power you could power the containment field indefinitely. The only issue is on a yearly basis you only get a few micrograms, not really enough to power interstellar trips.

As SHW said, it could still serve some purposes for probes and shuttles.

You could still refuel if you have an intake that lets the antimatter flow along a magnetic field into a storage tank. Once again though, you would need a very large Jovian world to get any decent amount and even then that isn't enough for much of anything.

This is why I think some form of an emergency jump and forced orbit around a planet/star would be a good feature for this. Getting stuck, although realistic, is game breaking and would frustrate people. There should be an ingame system to counteract this that is at least somewhat plausible.

With antimatter propulsion we should be careful about what kind of antimatter we use. Electron/positron annihilation is not good because the products are high energy gamma rays which is difficult to convert to thrust. Proton-antiproton is better because a sizable fraction of the energy is released as charge particles which can be directed into an exhaust jet. But then your engine looks less like an antimatter drive and more like an ion drive, and raises the question of why we should be bothering with producing the antimatter in the first place.

The basic concept of an antimatter engine is at least grounded in very well understood physics. Cannot say the same for some of the others, like zero-point-energy engines (which like all "infinite energy" claims, seems like pseudoscience to me). Propulsion from quantum field effects is hard to believe too, but NASA and others are taking it very seriously.

I think the Alcubierre solution is our best hope for making a real "FTL" engine, as long as the necessary space-time transformations are actually possible.

All 3 of you also ignored the possibility of other types of wormholes, including flat 2 dimensional wormholes.

This was part of the reason for some of my previous posts. If we adopt the field structure and use the ring setup initially, say the Alcubierre-White setup, then allow players to advance to "virtual" rings this would add an entire branch of technologies to develop in the game.

Realistically speaking all ships will most likely need the rings if the Alcubierre-White drive ever comes to fruition. Since SE is a game this gives the freedom to use the field setup without the physical requirements of the ring.

Yes, as a game we may choose to take theoretical notions and implement them in believable ways. The more theoretical they are, the more freedom we have. E.g. with obtaining energy from the vacuum, we should not get an infinite quantity at a finite cost. We could actually use cosmological observations to quantify how much vacuum energy we can "harvest" -- it outweighs ordinary matter by about a factor of 14, but because it's evenly distributed, comes out to a few hydrogen atoms equivalence per cubic meter. A spherical region bounded by the Moon's orbit contains on the order of a kilogram.

Space Engineer and I were referring to the most simple case of the mathematical extension to the Kerr metric.

I don't mention them because they tend to diverge from the realm of well verified physics more severely.

or invoke a system which is essentially magic

I don't see any reason to not adopt Alcubierre-style drives in Space Engine. I rather think they're really cool.

Its the same with the UFO theory. Such an ship would be nice. A large howering disc, using a powerful zero point generator and a electrogravimetric engine, who can run with FTL and with sublight, can land, etc.
The only problem, such a ship would completly break the game behind it. You simply could land on the planet, fly into space, fly with FTL all with one engine. The challenge of the game would drop to near zero. I would endorse this engine on a theoretical way, but not on a gameplay side way. An possibility would be to include some ships like this for GMs in the online game, and/or as unlockable cheat in the single player mode, or for a specific exploration mode.

“Assuming they‘re in space, they will focus the three gravity generators on the point they want to go to. Now, to give an analogy: If you take a thin rubber sheet, say, lay it on a table and put thumbtacks in each corner, then take a big stone and set it on one end of the rubber sheet and say that’s your spacecraft, you pick out a point that you want to go to - which could be anywhere on the rubber sheet - pinch that point with your fingers and pull it all the way up to the craft. That’s how it focuses and pulls that point to it. When you then shut off the gravity generators, the stone (or spacecraft) follows that stretched rubber back to its point. There’s no linear travel through space; it actually bends space and time and follows space as it retracts. In the first mode of travel - around the surface of a planet - they essentially balance on the gravitational field that the gravity generators put out, and they can ride a “wave,” like a cork does in the ocean. In that mode they’re very unstable and are affected by the weather. In the other mode of travel - where they can travel vast distances - they can’t really do that in a strong gravitational field like Earth, because to do that, first of all, they need to tilt on their side, usually out in space, then they can focus on the point they need to with the gravity generators and move on. If you can picture space as a fabric, and the speed of light is your limit, it’ll take you so long, even at the speed of light, to get from point A to point B. You can’t exceed it - not in this universe anyway. Should there be other parallel universes, maybe the laws are different, but anyone that’s here has to abide by those rules.”

The ship generated about 12.75 billion gigawatts of power, simply while in orbit of a planet. Enterprise would have to consume nearly 142 kilograms of matter/antimatter mix (71 kilograms of each) every second. This equates to a staggering 12440 metric tonnes per day.

So there are risks. The only question is, how they be handled. Ideas would be some rescure ships from your homeworld, who would come to pick you up, and escape pods.

This is why I think some form of an emergency jump and forced orbit around a planet/star would be a good feature for this. Getting stuck, although realistic, is game breaking and would frustrate people. There should be an ingame system to counteract this that is at least somewhat plausible.

We still need kilos of the stuff. There just isn't enough floating around in space or around planets to power a ship. SHW came up with a figure of around 250 micrograms around Jupiter per (Earth) year. That is nowhere near enough to power a ship.

or perhaps there are antimatter clouds

Proton-antiproton is better because a sizable fraction of the energy is released as charge particles which can be directed into an exhaust jet. But then your engine looks less like an antimatter drive and more like an ion drive, and raises the question of why we should be bothering with producing the antimatter in the first place.