TL;DR: General Relativity already allows “FTL by geometry”: you don’t outrun light locally—you move the spacetime around you. Bobrick & Martire’s framework shows physically admissible warp spacetimes (subluminal with ordinary positive energy; superluminal only with exotic stress-energy). In Frequency Wave Theory (FWT), a warp drive is a moving refractive bubble in a quantum-acoustic superfluid field. The cheapest way to sculpt that bubble is a thin shell with an annular rim that does most of the work—i.e., a flat, saucer-like disc. It minimizes shell volume, concentrates the required gradients at the edge, self-stabilizes when spinning, and couples cleanly to ring currents/plasma—hence the classic “disc.” The “GR part” is rock-solid; the “saucer minimizes energy” is a strong engineering inference from the energy scaling of thin-shell warp bubbles.
Share this post