Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jerf 5019 days ago
The coin experiences massive tidal forces and basically explodes, taking a certain amount of energy out of the warp field in order to do it.

One of the problems with this approach that has been explored in other papers is that even if you have a warp drive and even if you have actually gotten a ship into it and even if you've managed to point it in the direction you want to go, the collision of the interstellar medium with your warp field tears it apart quite violently and the warp field "collapses". And unlike when they "collapse" on Star Trek and the only manifestation is a polite electronic "whirring" noise, being in a collapsing real warp field is a death sentence, with tidal forces on par with black hole gravitational fields.