Abstract
The Alcubierre Warp Drive Metric, wherein a spacecraft can appear to vastly exceed the speed of light without locally ever doing so, derived in [1], is reconsidered. It is shown that the underlying driving physical mechanism (at least in a mathematical sense) is not the expansion/contraction of the space surrounding the spacecraft via the York Time T [2]. Rather, the driving mechanism is a boost that serves as a multiplier of the ship's initial velocity. This effect can in principle be likened to watching a movie in fast-forward. The expansion/contraction of space is merely a side effect of the warp drive's underlying mechanism - that can be viewed as sort of a Doppler effect, or stress/strain on space.
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References
Alcubierre, M. (1994). Class. Quant. Grav. 11, L73.
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Pfenning, M. J. and Ford, L. H. (1997). Class. Quant. Grav. 14, 1743.
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White, H.G. A Discussion of Space-Time Metric Engineering. General Relativity and Gravitation 35, 2025–2033 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026247026218
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026247026218