Are there any issues with this FTL drive concept?

I asked a question earlier on here concerning Negative and Heavy Matter - hypothetical types of matter I created to have a working FTL drive. With some extra work, I've tweaked the concept and been able to make an FTL drive I feel is pretty self-consistent. I'm asking this because I want to know if it is, or if there are any glaring flaws in its system of operation.

How the engine works

In the centre of the drive is a column of gas. This gas is an element that, when strongly heated, emits radiation that can convert ordinary matter into negative matter. This gas belongs to a class of matter called Heavy Matter, which strongly attracts Negative Matter - when Heavy and Negative Matter meet, they cancel each other out and convert back into normal matter. (I've worked all of these processes out on the subatomic level too but none of that is relevant to the workings of the engine.) The gas is heated to the point that it becomes a plasma, meaning a) it emits huge amounts of this radiation b) it can be confined by a magnetic field. Surrounding the confined column of gas is a vacuum - surrounding the vacuum is a much larger cloud of gas; it doesn't really matter what element this is, let's say it's hydrogen for sake of argument.

The radiation hurtles outwards, converting the gas into negative matter. To maintain the vacuum gap between the negative and heavy matter (because otherwise the negative gas would drift inwards and convert back into ordinary matter as it hit the heavy matter in the centre) the whole drive is spun very rapidly, causing the cloud of gas to stick to the interior wall due to centrifrugal force.

The FTL itself

Once enough negative matter builds up, spacetime is warped, causing the entire ship to travel faster than the speed of light. The negative matter will be drawn to whichever heavy matter is exerting the most force on it - because very massive heavy matter at long distances exerts more force than fairly light heavy matter at short distances, instead of warping to the centre of the engine, it warps the entire ship over to a large concentration of heavy matter, deliberately placed as a beacon. Large concentrations of heavy matter nullify the effect of the warping, thus causing the ship to drop out of FTL once it reaches this beacon. This allows the ship to travel at superluminal speeds between regularly spaced beacons in the universe.

Once the ship is stopped at the beacon, the plasma is drained, the spinning stopped, and the entire chamber flooded with water. Normal matter reacts with negative matter to form radiation - the result being that the accumulated negative matter is destroyed along with some of the water, readying the ship along with the next jump.

Attached is a cutaway view of this drive.

What do you guys think? Allowing for the mechanisms of Heavy and Negative matter, how feasible is this? Are there any issues or interesting effects I haven't anticipated?

posted almost 5 years ago

Locaq‭

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