Locaq

JBH again - there is a story reason why I want this to be the case. Basically, I’ve plotted out a scene where a planet is being ensieged from space, and its inhabitants are unable to flee because any ship that leaves the atmosphere is instantly destroyed. I need a reason for why they just can’t warp away on the surface, especially since this sequence is critical to the plot.

Heavy and negative matter violently react when in close proximity, converting each other back into ordinary matter. The result is that the negative mass in the tungsten ring turns back into tungsten as it’s immersed in the Salirium pool - the tank is then drained, allowing for the passengers to disembark. Now, the beacon system essentially acts like a train line. If the engine is fired up enough, its warping will be strong enough to pass through a Salirium tank without being neutralised - so a ship can pass through all the beacons on the straight line path between them, then stop at the last.

Constructed around near-Earth space are a series of ‘beacons’. A beacon is basically an enormous cube subdivided into huge tanks of liquid Salirium. A warp ship will propagate to the nearest beacon, and drop out of warp as soon as it passes through the space occupied by one of the tanks. The resulting explosion - a violent burst of near-c particles produced by the ship as it lands - is absorbed by the enormous tank of liquid metal. (continued)

So to fire up the drive, you heat up the Argosium plasma, tungsten starts to be converted, once you go over a specific negative mass value, a warp bubble is created around the ship. Now, there’s another Heavy Matter element which is key here - Salirium. Salirium is an element that a) attracts Argosium very strongly b) neutralises warp bubbles when they pass through it. When the warp bubble activates, all outside forces disappear - except for the attractive force of the most attractive source of Argosium (which could be several light years away), starting to pull the ship in that direction.

(continued) That’s not impossible because it doesn’t break any physical laws, but I don’t want it in my conception. So I cheat a bit, and say our current understanding of mass doesn’t really apply to negative mass (plausible considering it’s based entirely on the positive kind) and so it repels ordinary matter. Tungsten is used because it’s incredibly strong and can withstand high temperatures without melting, indicating its intermolecular bonds are strong - even as negative matter builds up inside, repelling all the ordinary matter around it, the ring will retain its structural integrity.

(continued) as it does so, its nuclei convert back into ordinary matter, causing them to almost instantly be destroyed by fission. So the Argosium is turned into a superheated plasma so a) it’s very rarefied b) it will emit high levels of this radiation. Negative Matter, in my conception, repels ordinary matter and attracts Negative Matter. This isn’t what would actually happen if General Relativity is 100% correct in that area - in fact, the Negative Matter would repel ordinary matter while being attracted to it at the same time, resulting in them chasing each other forever. (continued)

JBH. Ok let me be even more clear about how the Drive works. It’s built around the concept of Heavy Matter - basically an exotic form of matter made of significantly (like about 18 orders of magnitude greater mass) heavier nucleon counterparts; so heavy that gravity actually becomes significant at the subatomic level, allowing for the construction of elements with absurdly high atomic numbers. Argosium is a very specific Heavy Matter element that, when its density decreases, begins to emit radiation which can convert ordinary matter into Negative Matter. (continued)