- Location
- Somewhere
Yes and no. 30-40K Warp Drives are UNRELIABLE. Since the birth of Slaanesh, the warp is more wild than a sea in a hurricane and that means being temporally displaced or ending up in the wrong place is totally possible, and that's WITHOUT potential chaos shenanigans raising those chances. Alcubierre drives are supposedly slower, but they are reliable and lack the risk of daemonic incursion, since no Warp. We can rely on the warp for NOW, but our empire will eventually outstrip our warp calming effect, and then you have the inevitable moment the chaos gods turn their attentions to our polity and warpstorm the hell out of it. We can't handle that. Not even Big E could!
That, and ST warp drives had "ratings" of warp speed, often below maximum. At Warp 5 it takes ~3 months to travel 50 light years, but at warp 9.977 132 light years takes 1 month. Who's to say we can't just work at a different scale than ST warp? Again, we're not limited by subspace's fragility, we're just bending space to go fastah!
That's without even bringing up Transwarp, which is ~Warp 10+ on the warp-speed scale ST uses. The Borg Transwarp network was practically a non-warp webway capable of hurling Voyager from the Delta Quadrant to the Alpha Quadrant in a matter of minutes. That's from Terra to Ultramar in less than a day, AT MOST.
The Federation had fuckhuge long transit times because their Subspace was actually damaged if they went over Warp 5 too much, so they kept it below that, thus the travel times. We don't use subspace.
An Alcubierre Webway- a STARGATE NETWORK- is possible if we can stabilize the spatial manipulation fields, and conceptual crystals are a good potential solution to that problem.
Well, ST warp or "Alcubierre" Drives require subspace. That is true. That being said, the math for the Alcubierre Drive exists IN REAL LIFE right now, and the only problem they have is figuring out how to maintain the bubble of warped space at speeds faster than light, since time gets all wibbly wobbly up there. Subspace is the macguffin ST uses to make that happen, but it doesn't have to be the ONLY potential answer.
We could theoretically devise a way to make functional Alcubierre Drives that would work in 40K. The biggest issue remains the stability at FTL speeds... I'm thinking runes designed to enforce the flow of time or freeze it. We were already interested in developing runes and crystals to that end for the purposes of hyperbolic time chambers and such, but this is another very good reason to invest in that. Power requirements would be restrictive... but even if we do end up with a stupid-slow warp drive, even ST speeds would make it possible for cargo convoys to travel between argi and hive worlds at a safe pace. Sectors are a matter of weeks or months travel with ST speeds at most, and subsectors are usually self-sufficient, so the transit time is safe. That, and a backup drive if one gets barfed out of the warp in the middle of empty space would be handy.
This has too much potential to NOT look into, frankly.
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