A series of advances combine to enable the largest breakthrough to date, namely, the ability to manipulate space so that the

very fabric of reality becomes an integral part of your space drive. The advances in question are the continued advancement and refinement in the creation of monopoles with useful, specialized properties, the advent of truly large scale intelligences with the related mega scale engineering, and the exploitation of very, very large energy resources, so that direct space-time manipulation becomes feasible.

A warp bubble is a region of space time enclosed in a fold, or bubble, of highly curved space. By expanding the space time metric behind the bubble and contracting the metric in front, the bubble can be made to move without the use of propellant mass.

The use of warp bubbles and manipulation of the space-time metric apparently allows reaction less propulsion in spacecraft.

The vessel can apparently be coupled to the warp bubble(s) in various ways:
1. 2. 3. By containing the bubbles wholly within the ship, as in the Displacement Drive In front of the ship, coupled by gravitomagnetism, as in the Halo Drive Entirely enclosing the ship, as in the Void Drive

Note that no warp bubble has ever been observed travelling at super-luminal speeds such faster-than-light travel is impossible with void bubbles because of:
1. 2. 3. 4. It would be impossible for the ship to send signals to the front of the bubble, meaning that crew members could not control, steer or stop the ship. Dynamical instability of the warp metric at speeds greater than light High flux of hawking radiation that would turn anything inside a faster-than-light void bubble into plasma of fundamental particles and leads to instability of the bubble itself These problems do not arise if the bubble velocity is kept subluminal

The basic concept of the warp drive is, as expected, congruent with basic space-time engineering principles.
Alcubierre proposed a method for changing the geometry of space by creating a wave which would cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract, and the space behind it to expand.
A metric is engineered so as to provide continual contraction in front of the warp bubble and expansion behind it, with the result that the asymptotically flat space-time contained by the bubble is propelled at an effective velocity given by the constraints of the metric.

The ship would then ride this wave inside a region of flat space known as a warp bubble, and would not move within this bubble, but instead be carried along as the region itself moves due to the actions of the drive. The Natario version adds the crucial distinction of contracting space-time in the radial direction while expanding it in the axial direction, with the important difference that there is no perceptible warp.
The metric engineering difficulties in this technique are more pronounced than in wormholes, because they are by nature dynamical, with an inherently unstable metric, in contrast to the saddle-point nature of wormhole space-times, which are statically and dynamically stable.

Like wormholes, warp drives require negative stress energy tensor fields to maintain the warp drive. For both examples above, the amount of negative stress energy required is given by a simple semi classical General Relativistic calculation to be:

E = -1/12*v *(R/ + /12)

v = warp bubble velocity R = warp bubble radius = warp bubble thickness.

Normally, quantum inequality restrictions on warp bubble thickness alone generate unrealistically large amounts of negative stress-energy needed for construction and also in regards to the amount of exotic matter required for such propulsion. A warp bubble traveling at 10 times light-speed must have a wall thickness of no more than 10 32 meters. This is close to the limiting Planck length, 1.6 1035 meters. A bubble macroscopically large enough to enclose a ship 200 meters across would require a total amount of exotic matter equal to 10 billion times the mass of the observable universe. Straining the exotic matter to an extremely thin band of 1032 meters is considered impractical.
However, there are two classical techniques for reducing the amount of negative stress-energy to capable amounts that can be handled by modern wormhole stabilization technology. Engineer the metric to contain a lapse function; the so-called ESAA (Ex Somnium Ad Astra) metric with the effect of increasing the warp bubble thickness decreases the amount of negative stress-energy, as seen in the previous equation.

The ESAA metric gives the new warp bubble thickness as:
(less than) = 102(v/c)l A0 v = warp bubble velocity l = Planck length A is the minimal lapse function in the ESAA metric.

Modifying the geometry of exotic matter could reduce the mass energy requirements for a macroscopic space ship from the equivalent of the planet Jupiter to that of the Voyager 1 spacecraft (~700 kg). White proposed changing the shape of the warp bubble from a sphere to a doughnut shape. Furthermore, if the intensity of the space warp can be oscillated over time, the energy required is reduced even more. The second technique is to minimize the volume of the warp bubble:
1. 2. 3. A double warp metric is created: an external, microscopic metric which reduces the volume of the bubble, and an internal warp metric which increases the internal volume. Thus, picometer-sized warp bubbles are created with internal volumes on the order of 10's of meters. By contracting the 3+1-dimensional surface area of the "bubble" being transported by the drive, while at the same time expanding the three-dimensional volume contained inside, Van den Broeck was able to reduce the total energy needed to transport small atoms to less than three solar masses.

4.

Later, by slightly modifying the Van den Broeck metric, Krasnikov reduced the necessary total amount of negative energy to a few milligrams.

However, even such 'efficient' warp bubble effects still appear to require the use of massive external generation facilities and multi-solar mass instrumentalities to create them (although the associated drive node stabilization and control devices appear to be quite compact, perhaps only a few meters across at most). Deduced implementations of warp drive nodes are as follows:
1. Drive nodes consisting of extremely dense matter (magmatter grade or higher) are enclosed inside a double ESAA metric. 2. Due to metric engineering constraints, each node must contain its entire fuel supply; when the node runs out of energy, it will be unable to maintain the metric. Nor can a node activate a metric by itself or reactivate one once it has been turned off. 3. Detailed analysis indicates probable fine-scale magmatter construction with monopolecatalyzed fusion and a compressed baryonic fuel source. 4. No node defueling/de-warping signature events have ever been observed -- it is possible that a further inter-converting monopoles with baryons may exist, allowing the drive node to be completely expended. There is also evidence that in some cases a low mass singularity may be enclosed within the bubble and used to power the drive node via hawking decay. There are also some indications that some form of wormhole based refueling process may be employed in sufficiently energetic environments.

Drive nodes are constructed in either the Alcubierre or Natario configuration:

In either case, the nanoscopic nodes are linked back to the main vessel via electromagnetic fields. Due to warp metric configuration, Alcubierre nodes must always be perpendicular to the vessel and the direction of motion to achieve full thrust capability. Natario nodes must be parallel.

To delineate the actual warp systems observed in reality from the theoretical constructs of past researchers we wish to coin the term "Void Bubble" to designate the warp bubble based technologies

Three observed classes of reaction less craft Displacement Drive

Moderate sized pockets, or bubbles, of space-time, which are larger on the "inside" than the "outside." these are the so-called Void Bubbles. These devices can be used as engines by coupling them magnetically to the vessel. These ships are then called "Displacement Ships", as their engines are displaced out of normal space.
Externally, such void bubbles are essentially invisible, as their apparent size is very small indeed. By manipulating the folded space they are made of, such void bubbles can be made to move in relation to the larger space we live in. This action is completely reaction less, and even better for space travel, the mechanisms and matter inside the void bubble is not really in our space-time. As a result, all of the mass in the void bubbles is not subject to relativistic mass increase. Although the warp motion itself is inertia less, the electromagnetic coupling between the nodes and ship is not, so the warp drive can best be described as reaction less, rather than inertia less. The void bubbles created are relatively small, and worse, the bubbles cannot be undone nondestructively. This means that the bubbles are one-use only: Once the fuel within them is expended, they cannot be salvaged. Once void bubble collapses, everything within is destroyed catastrophically.

The bubble or bubbles are coupled magnetically to a cargo/crew pod, which is then equipped with a power source and active defenses similar to those of a high powered Conversion ship. In the Displacement drive configuration
1. 2. Void bubble based drive nodes, operating in either the Alcubierre or Natario configuration, are enclosed within one or more magnetic containment vessels aboard the ship. The drive nodes are magnetically linked to the vessel within the containment volumes and react against it as they move, effectively pushing or pulling the ship across space with no ejection of reaction mass. The use of void bubbles this way is commonly referred to as Displacement Drive.

Such ships can accelerate much harder than even Conversion ships, and do not have the deadly drive ray to worry about either, making them extremely handy and safe compared to earlier technologies. Void bubbles are a tremendous advance, as they are far more energy economical than Conversion drives. The range limitations Void bubble are determined by the total mass that can be placed within the bubble and used as fuel, which is fixed when the bubble is made. Although Displacement drives allow continuous accelerations without the use of reaction mass, they provide no protection against acceleration forces and are limited in their performance by the robustness of their cargo and passengers. In general, S:4 void bubble ships have a range of 1000 or more light-years and a top speed limited only by the amount of fuel mass the ship captain is willing to convert to energy to expend on chasing light speed. In practice, few S: 4 void bubble ships exceed 0.84c on a routine basis, in order to squeeze the longest possible lifespan out of the expensive drive bubbles.

Halo Drive
Void Bubbles can be coupled to the craft using both gravity and magnetic forces, and a halo of void bubbles can be established at the front of the ship, essentially dragging the vessel along behind it in real space.
Furthermore it appears that the thrust per node requires many nodes to be used to achieve decent interplanetary velocity. Control/feedback issues of the nacelles are somewhat complicated by general relativistic effects, but the issue appears to be ontologically (and empirically) tractable.

Void Bubbles are still mostly "single use" technology, as they cannot be unmade without destroying most contents. Some extremely sturdy materials, such as high-density magmatter cases and certain high-energy magmatter vec clades may be durable enough to withstand the removal of an S: 5 Void Bubble. The bubbles become much larger internally, and far more mass can be included within them as they are created. This has two very beneficial effects. First, the additional mass serves as a much larger fuel source, increasing the longevity of the drive bubbles. Second, the combination of the large mass and small size in our universe combines to give the bubbles a small but very steep gravity gradient. Usually, S: 5 bubble drive ships have many hundreds to several million drive bubbles around a fairly conventional deep space hull. Rather than coupling the bubbles to the hull solely by magnetics, the intense gravity gradient of the bubbles is also used to move the hull around. This has the large benefit of allowing the acceleration effects of the drive to be largely negated. This means that S:5 bubble drive ships can accelerate much, much harder than any previous technology. The hulls of these ships are equipped with the most advanced passive and active defenses available, and have the added defensive ability of the intense gravity fields of the drive bubbles to call on. The use of void bubbles this way is popularly called Halo Drive, and ships using this method of locomotion are called Halo Ships. The reason for this is the blurry ring of distortion and blue glow of Cherenkov radiation the myriad of drive bubbles create around such vessels, which is a very impressive effect, to be sure.

Subtypes of observed Halo Drive Ships

Class I: A Class I Halo drive deploys a cloud of drive nodes around the actual craft being propelled and uses magnetic coupling to attach the drive nodes to the vessel itself. When the nodes move, the vessel is pulled across space. Generally a greater number of nodes are employed and higher accelerations are possible. However, as with the Displacement drive a Class I configured Halo drive does not protect against acceleration forces.

Class II: A Class II Halo drive employs an even greater number of drive nodes than a Class I drive and

utilizes more massive nodes than either a Displacement or Class I drive. Like the Class I system a Class II drive links its drive nodes to the associated craft using magnetic fields. However, it also links the nodes gravitationally, positioning them much closer to the hull of the ship than is normally done in a Class I configuration and employing more dynamic control systems. As the Halo vessel is accelerated by its associated drive nodes it is also moved into closer proximity with them, effectively balancing the inertial acceleration of the moving nodes with the gravitational acceleration created by their mass. In effect the ship 'falls' toward the drive nodes, which move away from the ship at an equal or near equal rate of acceleration. This permits the passengers and cargo aboard a Class II Halo vessel to experience only moderate accelerations, or even free-fall conditions, even if the ship is accelerating at tens or hundreds of gravities.

Halo drives decelerate their associated vessels by reconfiguring their drive nodes from the front to the rear of the ship and reversing the process used to provide acceleration.

It appears that only Fifth Singularity minds and above can create practical Halo drive systems. A spacecraft equipped with a Halo Drive can only be controlled by an entity of at least the Second Singularity (often a so-called dedicated hyperturing, which itself controls the many drive nodes, each containing a First singularity entity).

There is also some evidence that suggests that Fifth Singularity drive nodes can be deactivated in a semicontrolled manner sufficient to permit the survival and reuse of the node mechanisms, or even hardened instrument packages carried within the Void metric.

S:5 bubble drive ships have effective ranges of at least 5000 light years, and top speeds limited only by the available matter inside the bubbles for fuel. Again, in practical usage such ships rarely exceed 0.84c on routine trips, to preserve fuel mass and extend the lifetime of the drive bubbles. For fast trips, top speeds of 0.99c are not unheard of, and the extremely advanced shielding allows very long cruises at such speeds if desired.

Void Ships
Void bubbles reach their highest state of advancement, and allow the construction of craft entirely enclosed within the bubble. These craft are invisible to observers in the outside universe, except as an acute distortion of space-time.
A reasonable, engineered metric can generate apparent velocities at greater than the speed of light, while still maintaining a causally connected interaction region, at the cost of introducing Closed Time like Curves within the warp metric. As current theory precludes the existence of CTCs, practical warp bubbles are limited to velocities less than c.

Inhabitants of the bubble feel no inertial effects. This method of propulsion does not involve objects in motion at speeds faster than light with respect to the contents of the warp bubble; that is, a light beam within the warp bubble would still always move faster than the ship as objects within the bubble are not moving (locally) faster than light. Conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation would not apply as they would with conventional motion at near-light speeds. The Alcubierre metric has some apparently peculiar aspects. In particular, Alcubierre has shown that even when the ship is accelerating; it travels on a free-fall geodesic. In other words, a ship using the warp to accelerate and decelerate is always in free fall, and the crew would experience no acceleration G-forces. Enormous tidal forces would be present near the edges of the flat-space volume because of the large space curvature there, but by suitable specification of the metric, these would be kept very small within the volume occupied by the ship.

At the level of the greatest Archailects, Singularity level:6, void bubbles reach their highest state of advancement. The three key breakthroughs are that the bubbles can now, for the first time, be taken down gracefully, so matter inside the void bubble can be retrieved without harm. Second, the total mass that can be placed into the bubbles is much greater than the capacity of S:5 bubbles, increasing the life-span of the bubble. Lastly, void bubbles can now be nested one inside another, and more importantly, wormhole mouths can be placed inside, allowing far easier access to the interior of the bubble without opening and thereby destroying it. These three breakthroughs allow the spacetime ship to reach its ultimate expression, the Voidship. In essence, the external conventional hull is eliminated, as are the separate drive bubbles. Instead, the entire ship is inside a single giant bubble. Since such vessels, despite their enormous interior size and vast mass, are practically invisible, they are widely and romantically referred to as Void Ships, alluding to the fact that they occupy the Void, and not Space as modosophonts know it. Since the entire Void Ship is outside of our universe, meaning the vessel is no longer subject to relativistic effects, accelerations are astronomical, and range is extremely long. The maximum speed is high fractions of c; 0.999 at a minimum. Typical ranges are 5000+ light years. Of all the transapient created reactionless drives, the Void Drive is by far the rarest and most elusive, and perhaps the most capable. Even in this author's experience, despite extensive and exhaustive exploration and research, as well as numerous interviews with various high level transapient powers; actually observing the rumored 'Void Drive' in operation has not been possible. However, the substantial body of anecdotal evidence, including reports dating from both the Consolidation and Version Wars, interviews with known credible witnesses, and most importantly a one-time flyby visit of an associated agent to a so-called 'Valhalla Cluster' transapient manufacturing center five centuries ago lead us to

conclude that such a drive (and its associated technologies) both exists and likely operates on the principles outlined below. Void drives appear to operate on the same basic principle of the generation and manipulation of void bubble warps as is employed by the Displacement and Halo drive systems. However, the void bubbles involved are at least an order of magnitude larger in their internal volume. In the case of a Void drive, it appears that rather than being propelled by a swarm of Void bubbles external to itself, a vessel or group of vessels is instead completely enclosed in a single large Void bubble which is then manipulated to accelerate itself and everything within it up to a high percentage of the speed of light in a matter of seconds or less. When the bubble and its enclosed cargo reach its destination, the bubble is deactivated in a controlled manner and the associated vessels or devices carried inside are released into space at the destination point. Due to the flat space nature of the metric within the warp boundary, objects carried within the Void bubble experience neither acceleration forces nor time dilation and Lorentz contraction effects (which may be seen as a limitation on the technology of Void bubbles as a whole). The phenomena of Metric Ghosts and Interferometric Ghosts have certain characteristics in common with the observed characteristics of Void Ships; however, the most intriguing set of Metric Ghost sightings have occurred deep in the Perseus arm, far from the sphere of activities of any known S:6 Archailects. This may mean that the Metric Ghosts are in fact xenosophont in origin. As a final note, I wish to personally corroborate recent sightings of so-called Black Angels, which appear to exist as a direct instrument of Transapient authority. My observations of Black Angels suggest that they employ tens of thousands or millions of Void bubble nodes, which would give them reactionless, relativistic capability, and imply that the bulk of a Black Angel is invisible except to gravitational instrumentation. Their military capabilities are correspondingly +++
A note on the Conservation of Momentum
The momentum gained by the spacecraft with displacement, halo, and void drives is stored in the void bubbles, and when the void bubbles are turned off the momentum is left with the mass that was inside them. The Alcubierre warp metric used in this class of propulsion essentially sets the property v, the proper velocity between asymptotically flat space-time and the metric, to whatever value is desired. "Turning off" the warp metric means setting v = 0 again. Since the drive sets velocities between metrics rather than objects embedded in metrics, it is reaction less and inertia less.

This is possible because mass-energy and momentum are not globally conserved in GR (since it's impossible to unambiguously define their totals), although any tensorial definition will always produce local conservation.

When an Alcubierre-driven ship decelerates from superluminal speed, the particles that its bubble has gathered would be released in energetic outbursts; in the case of forward-facing particles, energetic enough to destroy anyone at the destination directly in front of the ship.

Spacecraft using reaction less drive can traverse the interstellar medium at very high fractions of the speed of light. However interstellar space is not empty; it contains dust and larger particles of solid matter, as well as thinly spread gases. These materials will interact very energetically with a ship travelling at very high speed. Fast, conventional ships such as conversion drive vessels have very effective passive and active shield systems to defend the craft against friction with the interstellar medium. A ship powered by Displacement drive is, in essence, a "rocket less rocket", so all the usual deleterious effects that happen to a rocket also happen to a displacer ship; for this reason displacement drive vessels require very effective shielding, usually an active cloud of shielding particles maintained at a suitable distance in front of the ship.

A Halo drive ship is somewhat protected by its halo, which will interact gravitationally with the debris. Given the rapid speeds, this reaction is likely to be energetic, sometimes to the point of causing one or more void bubbles to fail prematurely; in this case the remaining bubbles will be automatically rearranged to compensate for the loss. The halo is deliberately arranged to deflect particles away from the main body of the ship, acting as a so-called metric shield.

A Void ship will generally ignore most classes of debris, i.e. non-exotic matter, being able to otherwise slip between molecules. Exceptions are things like magmatter, neutronium, q-balls, event horizons, or singularities (such as the track of a Thunderbolt).

Another rumoured hazard is a burst of carefully modulated gravitational radiation designed to destructively cancel the void bubble; such a weapon could conceivably be used in warfare between the archai, although there are no reliable reports of its use to date.