Alcubierre Drive - sswelm/KSPInterstellar GitHub Wiki

The Alcubierre drive (or warp drive) allows rapid travel across the solar system at unbelievable speeds, but cannot change your momentum. Accelerating to the speed of light is impossible according to Relativity but this drive gets around that by not producing any physical acceleration: instead it warps space-time fore and aft of your ship in order to translate an entire bubble of space-time containing your ship across space at otherwise unattainable speeds.

This approach has some drawbacks, however; whenever you drop out of warp, your velocity will revert to what it was when you entered warp (relative to the sun). That means that the delta-v required to slow down when you arrive at a planet can vary between a theoretical minimum of zero (if you can calculate a jump perfectly) and up to a maximum of more than 20km/s.

In order to minimize delta-v, warp jumps should be made when the target and destination planets are at their closest approach and their velocities relative to the sun are parallel.

Alcubierre drives are powered by Exotic Matter; the drive will automatically take in any spare electricity (MegaJoules) the vessel has available and convert it into Exotic Matter until the drive is fully charged. It requires 1000 Megajoules (1GJ) of energy to produce 1 unit of Exotic Matter. The amount of Exotic Matter required for a jump depends on the mass of your ship and the speed you want to travel at.

Advanced Warp Navigation

The fact that the warp drive affects your physical location but does not change your momentum can be used to your advantage with clever jump techniques.

If you jump toward your parent body, your orbit's periapsis will be closer to the body, and if you jump away from it your apoapsis will be higher. You can raise, lower, or circularize your orbit using zero fuel by properly timing your jumps.

Similarly, you can perform a gravity-assisted capture using multiple jumps. If you arrive at your target with too fast of a relative velocity to stabilize, you can slow yourself down by first warping to a point where your ship is close to the parent body and has a relative velocity that points directly away from it. Let your ship get slowed down by gravity, then as you are close to leaving the planetary SoI, jump back directly toward the planet. You can repeat this process indefinitely until you have a velocity slow enough to easily establish an orbit.

Alternate model

Forum user zzz created an alternative model for the warp drive with a collapsible outer ring.

This model is available for download from http://www.mediafire.com/?ewkw5zkzuss6s2h. The sample .cfg files in the archive use the same internal name as the original Alcubierre part, so some .cfg editing will be necessary to integrate them into your KSP installation without conflicts.

Known Issues

Some versions of Active Texture Management shipped a configuration for Interstellar that doesn't handle the warp-effect textures correctly. If you experience black textures on the warp-drive effect, delete the ATM config for WarpPlugin or replace it with a compatible version. The configuration included in the Green Skull ATM Configs pack is compatible.