Starfleet Jedi

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/nasa_eagleworks_warp_drive/ wrote: However White and his NASA Eagleworks colleagues say that's not necessarily so: it's all down to the shape of the ring. An improved doughnut design, as opposed to a flat ring, would get the requirement down to something more like just annihilating the Voyager One probe craft.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2003/1105voyager_facts.html wrote: Mass at launch: 815 kg


* Current approximate mass: 733 kg

Mr. Oragahn wrote: I'm just skimming this but does it point to petajoules for something that weighs less than a tonne?
Who would call that within the capabilities of the UFP, or any other faction as a matter of fact??

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/18/nasa_eagleworks_warp_drive/ wrote: Voyager masses in the region of 800kg, so by our calculations one would still need a lump of antimatter (or other reasonably compact super power source) which - if it were mishandled - would explode with a force of some 17,000 megatons, equivalent to several global nuclear wars all in one (or 600-odd Tunguska meteor strikes etc). This would inconveniently take humanity's current atom labs billions of years to make, and there would be other practical issues (see our previous antimatter-bomb analysis here, and then there'd be the exoto-doughnut to fabricate etc).

But White's not done yet, we learn courtesy of SPACE.com, reporting from the 100 Year Starship conference last week. The NASA brainbox calculates that cunningly oscillating the warped region around the spacecraft could cut power requirements by another big margin.
"The findings I presented today change it from impractical to plausible and worth further investigation," White told SPACE.com. "The additional energy reduction realized by oscillating the bubble intensity is an interesting conjecture that we will enjoy looking at in the lab."