What it is about...

Warp Drive Now! is a project that was inspired during a christmas party at my university. I was asked to give a scientific explanation for why Santa Claus' reindeer sleigh can fly. I stumbled across an article about negative mass propulsion in the Journal of Propulsion and Power, a well-reputed scientific publication. During winter, one of the few kinds of vegetables you can buy at your local grocery store in Europe are Dutch tomatoes which have been grown in greenhouses. They don't just tast like nothing - they taste like less than nothing so I figured out that they must also consist of less than nothing, therefore having a negative mass. This led me to the conclusion that Santa Claus, lacking any advanced technology, had to rely on Dutch tomato propulsion to get his reindeer sleigh airborne.

My intentions with this project are just a bit more serious, my goal is to collect and publish any information that might be useful for developing advanced space propulsion technologies that meet the following definition:

An attempt to define warp drive

If we want to define what a "warp drive" is, we may start by canceling out all propulsion technologies that are obviously not warp drives:

• rocket engines (including those that emit photons or subatomic particles)
• airbreathing engines
• solar sails
• catapults
• swing-by maneuvers

What do these above-mentioned examples have in common? Yes, they rely on Newtonian or - to be more precise - on special-relativistic mechanics. So a warp drive is obviously non-Newtonian and non-special-relativistic. What is it then? May be, this helps:

Warp Drive definition, version 0.1

A warp drive is a means to move matter across a nonzero distance in flat spacetime whithout exchanging momentum through expulsion of reaction mass or electromagnetic waves.

This leaves enough opportunities for mechanisms that use the momentum of gravitational waves as "reaction mass" or that are based on momentumless movement, like the classic negative mass propulsion, the Alcubierre metric or the traversable wormhole.