Warp drives, wavefronts and superluminality

Abstract

Coule's primary objection to the Alcubierre "warpdrive" is that the material producing the warp field needs to be superluminal. This difficulty is solved by placing the drive material inside its own warp field (making the drive system part of the payload), but we then have to deal with Low's related objection, that there is then a restricted rate at which this "naked" warp-field can propagate through the background metric. We argue that the propagation of this sort of gravitational wave is not a trivial problem, and that the possibility of ultrafast warpfield propagation should not be dismissed without further research.