AAWSAP DIRD, Cockpits in the Era of Breakthrough Flight, November 2010

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Figure 4. Warp Drive. Taken directly from the Frontiers book, this image has become the iconic representation
for a warp drive : the "York Extrinsic Time Plot."
In theory, the outer shell is presumed to create the propulsive effect of warping space­
time outside the craft without affecting the inside. In short, the Alcubierre warp drive
creates a separation of space-time environments inside and outside of the craft,
although the exact details remain uncertain.
Although there is no explicit function for the inner hull in this situation, this Alcubierre
warp drive at least illustrates the concept of separation of these outer and inner
environments. When planning future cockpits, the outer and inner inertial frames need
to be treated as two distinct zones. The physics related to such considerations is still
evolving4 and beyond the scope of this report.
Why Double Hull Needed: Example 2 {Field Space Drive)
Another class of conceptual propulsion is a "field drive"-a subset of "space drives"
where a spacecraft is propelled " ... using only the interactions between the spacecraft
and its surrounding space ... "5 Instead of using the Riemannian geometry of Einstein's
general relativity, these approaches use the physics of fields and scalar potentials. 6
While several variants exist, the "Bias Drive" concept is selected here to illustrate the
relevance of the double-hull configuration, specifically in the context of modifying the
scalar potential that defines an inertial frame. By altering the properties of the
surrounding inertial scalar, a gradient in that scalar is induced which, in turn, induces
gravitational-like forces on matter located in that gradient.
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