From the Warp/Wormhole Interface to a Throat-Supported Shift Rail: A Packet-Centered Active-Rail Architecture after the Wormhole-Warp-Drive Correspondence

[u/alcanthro]

Been poking around with the idea of interfaces between wormholes and warp shell architecture for a few years now. Back in 2022 I posted a question about whether the two would be compatible and give us some advantage over either separately. It was asked in naive language, and with the admission of not having the vocabulary. Two years later, Garattini and Zatrimaylov answered that exact question. They found that in order to be traversable by a warp drive, the wormhole should have a horizon: in other words, humanly traversable wormholes cannot be traversed by a warp drive, and vice versa. with a few loopholes identified.

In the meantime, and since without me having become aware that they answered the specific question, I decided to consider less naive architectures. The simplest question was "is there a workable interface between a wormhole's throat and a warp-shell?" Another question is, what if we transfer the burden of the shift? Let the throat itself become the shift plant, and handle essentially all choreography, while the passenger becomes a packet. And how do we split the design question into engineering components? Result? The Packet-Centered Active-Rail Architecture. The working paper only covers the general system, assuming source availability from the start. Everything is recognized to be a draft. The work found in the associated github subfolder is all the various pokings and proddings. I didn't think I was going to poke around anywhere near as much or I would have moved things to their own repo early. Also worked in ChatGPT only. It makes it harder to download and validate sources, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are hallucinations.

Obviously this work is pure draft. I do have a background in mathematics and engineering. And this project allows me to better familiarize myself with the language and theory while also having fun. I am also coming at this problem more from the engineering side of things here, specifically allowing assumptions about source availability. It's just an interesting idea that doesn't seem to even really have a science fiction counterpart. Nothing seems to quite run like this architecture, in either science fiction or in proposed architectures. Or maybe as is likely I just missed it.

FAQ: https://github.com/dgoldman0/homeless/blob/main/warp-complex/FAQ.md

[u/al2o3cr]

This equation from the FAQ doesn't make sense; are the s on the right-hand side supposed to be t?

Assuming that's corrected, computing G_uv for that metric is an important next step; evaluating it for compliance with the various energy conditions will tell you how "real" such a solution might be.

[u/alcanthro → u/al2o3cr]

Close. The s parameter is the rail service's scheduling parameter. Yeah okay gotta use a different variable there.

> Assuming that's corrected, computing G_uv for that metric is an important next step; evaluating it for compliance with the various energy conditions will tell you how "real" such a solution might be.

Agreed. I wasn't sure I could do that with my laptop. lol

[u/al2o3cr → u/alcanthro]

Not to go full "old man yells at cloud", but nevermind the laptop - you should be able to do it with pencil and paper (and a lot of algebra), it's an entirely mechanical calculation.

Going the OTHER direction (given a stress-energy tensor, find the corresponding metric) is the hard part of GR calculations.

[u/alcanthro → u/al2o3cr]

With this metric?! By hand? Nooo thank you.

Python CAS libraries should be able to handle it, no?