A Discussion of Space-Time Metric Engineering

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.