System for a zero-combat dungeon crawl?

[Trekkin]

I did read the space.com article. Quite apart from it being critically wrong, I see only details, not depth. The article is completely devoid of mathematics, with the closest we get being a prosaic description of the energy requirements of a flat ring of aphysical matter versus a torus of aphysical matter. The one is the "mass-energy" of Jupiter, while the other is the mass of Voyager. Those aren't numbers, though. (It also calls the above energy requirement "the only problem" with warp drive. If only.) The rest of the article is built on interviews with Drs. Harold White and Richard Obousy, again with no mathematics in sight. (There's also no discussion of the impossibility of steering/stopping the field or surviving the heat dumped into the flat region by Hawking radiation, but I can forgive that.)

That isn't an understanding of how warp drive works in any manipulable sense; there's no reasoning behind any of the figures. Had I come into that article with no knowledge of the metric Alcubierre described, I would have left with none -- and so, if I were to put "Alcubierre drives" into my game, I would be reduced to making stuff up as soon as a player, say, rammed something at FTL speeds or kicked somebody out the back of the ship or whatever.

As for antimatter, when they talk about "mass energy", they mean "mass-energy equivalence", a reflection of the fact that energy and mass interconvert at a ratio described by Einstein's most famous equation. Listed in mass, it's also how much matter and antimatter you need to annihilate in a perfectly (impossibly) efficient reactor to get a given quantity of energy -- and, given the Voyagers' current 700 kg mass, it seems more relevant to quote the required energy as 700 kg of matter-antimatter instead of, say, four petagrams of dry camel dung. ("Literal tons" was my first-order approximation of the actual amount needed given a less than perfectly efficient reactor.)