Main menu


	What it is about
	Why we need it
	How to develop
	What it is not
	EPAG Classification
	News
	Links

	Home

The need for credibility rating

As already explained, the Phase 1 of warp drive development will mainly comprise the search for potentially useful technologies and the attempt to scrutinize them. If you enter the words "warp drive" into a search engine, you will probably get thousands of links, including to this site ;-) On lots of these sites, different isolated approaches for developing an advanced propulsion technology are discussed. The credibility ranges from experimentally tested and widely accepted theories to highly obscure ideas that are normally rejected as "crackpot stuff". However, as long as the authors of such articles maintain a minimum of seriousness about science, i.e. they accept the Occam's Razor and the need for falsifiability of their theories, they will be included in this project. In order to enable the visitor to quickly find his way through the abundance of information, the discussed technologies will be rated in order to quickly show how close they are to becoming part of a flying prototype. In order to get a certain rating, an article has to fulfill the following requirements:

	Peer reviewed	Experimentally demonstrated	Officially recognized
I	YES	YES	YES
II	YES	YES	NO
III	YES	NO	NO
IV	NO	NO	NO

Classification of technologies

While reading through these many ideas about space propulsion, a repeated pattern has become apparent that makes it possible to put technologies into one of the following 4 categories:

Energy: every propulsion system needs energy, of course. Any technology that stores, converts or collects energy in order to make it usable for warp drive propulsion will fall into this category.
Propeller: in order to create the desired distortion of the space-time continuum, you need a device that pumps the energy into the continuum in order to create the desired propulsive geometry.
Augmentor: in many cases, the propeller technologies achive only minor propulsive effects due to a weak coupling between controllable (e.g. electromagnetic) forces and space-time curvature. To enhance this coupling, special measures, so-called augmentors have to be taken.
Geometry: the desired propulsive effect is created by a particular space-time curvature. There are different geometries, depending on the desired propulsive effect.

These four categories constitute the EPAG (energy-propeller-augmentor-geometry) scheme. This is the technology chain of warp drive propulsion.

Synthesis

The goal of information aquisition is to get as many technologies as possible for each category with a class I rating. This makes it possible to enter Phase 2 of warp drive development: combining a selection of technologies for a prototype propulsion device. If the rating is lower, this shows the need for peer-review and experiments. The news log will be regularly updated if new technologies appear or existing ones get their credibility rating escalated. For example, a P-I rating would mean an experimentally tested propeller technology that is widely recognized and peer-reviewed.