OK, bear in mind I am not a physicist, so this theory will have some holes. ...feel free to point them out. There are a few agreed upon "rules" for FTL travel that need to be dealt with in order for it to occur: an object cannot have mass, and if said object does have mass the mass must remain constant at all times. Through the theory of Special Relativity FTL travel cannot be achieved because if a ship is able to sustain infinite thrust and increase in acceleration the closer the ship gets to light speed the slower it will travel due to the fact that Newton's second(?) law is no longer applicable at such speeds: the faster the ship is going the more mass it would seem to acquire. This goes against the need for constant mass. And since infinite thrust is impossible due to the need for a fuel to generate the thrust then even if the ship could overcome the conversion of energy to mass it would still never reach light speed due to constant changes in mass brought on by fuel consumption and interaction with Aether. ...It occurs to me that the closer to light speed the ship gets it would probably be expending increasingly less fuel and generating increasingly lessened thrust as well. Through this theory time also appears to dialate for the individuals within the ship the closer the ship gets to light speed - in an ideal scenario this would want to be avoided so that the astronauts onboard could maintain an even frame of reference for travel time, actual date and times based on Earth (most likely GMT) for the purposes of mission logs, it may also aid in navigation and course plotting. To overcome the time differential we could look to the use of a Alcubierre metric to generate the necessary spatial wave form to "carry" the ship from point A to point B. The flat space at the core of the wave would allow time to remain constant with the time in the flat space outside of the wave. This would also eliminate the mass issues noted above. However leaving the Alcubierre metric could be problematic once it has started - much like stopping a tidal wave once it as begun to form. In theory the ship would need to cross through the wave to exit the metric... Which could potentially cause temporal shifts onboard the ship between the flat space within the wave and the flat space outside. In a previous thread WebFeet suggested the use of an Aether bubble. The bubble would deflect Aether while maintaining a constant environment inside. As the ship travels all excess Aether that the bubble comes into contact with is deflected thereby eliminating any potential changes in mass in the ship brought on by increasing interaction with Aether as well as the expentature of fuel. Now here's where my own theory comes in: What if we combine WebFeet's idea with the Alcubierre drive? Instead of creating a spatial wave for the ship to ride on what if the ship was sustained inside a wave bubble? Instead of a static Aether bubble we would have a dynamic Aether bubble whose surface was covered by a controlled directional ripple. The ripples would originate at the exact front of the craft and move backward - eventually terminating at the posterior end of the bubble. The intensity of the ripples would dictate the speed at which the bubble, and the ship inside travel through space. For example a mild ripple may be equal to light speed, an increase to a specific rate would equal LS+1 and so on, thereby allowing travel times to vary according to predetermined factors such as cargo: If medical supplies were desperately needed at an outpost at Epsilon Reticuli they could conceivably be sent at an increased speed... Such as LS+3. Such a means of FTL propulsion would also allow for navigation without the need of chemical or air burst rockets. A gradual change in the ripple origination point would alter the direction the ship was traveling in. If the Ripples originated a 0*x0* the ship would travel straight, if this origination point was shifted to 5* x -5* the ship would move the starboard with a downward angle. This change in origination would have to occur very slowly - otherwise the ripples could intersect as they move back over the bubble causing a disturbance in the bubble surface which could ultimately break the Aether bubble's "surface tension." The result would be the ship dropping out of light speed. The same principle could be applied to increased ripple size for accelerated travel: just as on water the more intense the ripples the more likely there is to be a disturbance in the surface tension which could ultimately cause the bubble to collapse. What I haven't been able to theorize is what would generate the Aether bubble and how the ripples could be generated.
