On restrictions of current warp drive spacetimes and immediate possibilities of improvement

TL;DR

This paper critiques current warp drive spacetime models, highlighting their restrictive assumptions and proposing a more general, covariant framework to incorporate essential physical ingredients like acceleration, vorticity, and curvature.

Contribution

It introduces a covariant description of spatial motions in General Relativity and discusses how existing warp drive proposals omit key physical features, suggesting avenues for more realistic models.

Findings

Current warp drive models impose strong restrictions limiting physical realism.

Many models lack covariantly non-vanishing spatial velocity, acceleration, and vorticity.

Inclusion of curvature and warp mechanisms is essential for physical plausibility.

Abstract

Looking at current proposals of so-called `warp drive spacetimes', they appear to employ General Relativity only at an elementary level. A number of strong restrictions are imposed such as flow-orthogonality of the spacetime foliation, vanishing spatial Ricci tensor, dimensionally reduced and coordinate-dependent velocity fields, to mention the main restrictions. We here provide a brief summary of our proposal of a general and covariant description of spatial motions within General Relativity, then discuss the restrictions that are employed in the majority of the current literature. That current warp drive models are discussed to be unphysical may not be surprising; they lack important ingredients such as covariantly non-vanishing spatial velocity, acceleration, vorticity, together with curved space, and a warp mechanism.