I'll hold most future discussion of Alcubierre for the build thread (don't hold your breath, have other things to do before I get that started.)
To economize on part and vinyl acquisition costs I like to prepare at least two builds at once. And so the second one will be Plasma Dart II. Other than paint job, I have two significant construction questions on this one. Here is the current status:
Firstly, I swapped out the green plasma for a blue plasma texture I found that repeats properly, so no seam is visible. It seemed like most "warp cores" in sci-fi tend to be blue, so I went that way, and I think it looks good. Plus it'll distinguish it a bit from Gary's green plasma PD1 (if he builds it). But I am still absolutely nowhere with the rest of the paint scheme.
Construction issues:
1) In the middle BT section, the intrusion of the BT50 stuffer tube at the rear and the shoulder of the balsa transition leaves me with only about 3.5" of space to pack recovery materials. That seems tight, even for a plastic parachute. I think it'd be quite difficult to try to pack anything into the BT50 hidden down in there. One option would be to bring the stuffer tube all the way to the top, so I just have a single long BT50 to work with, which would be annoying because it's BT50, but at least it's a known, workable solution. Another option would be... well I'm not sure exactly. Any suggestions?
2) The CG will be right around the warp core, and that's also the widest portion of the rocket, so I thought I could mount the launch lug (geez, again with the launch lug problems) onto on of the spars that surrounds the core. Picture shows the LL in red just to highlight it; in the build it would be black to match the spar and I'd bevel the ends so it wouldn't stick out so much. Anyway, this type of mounting would demand a lot of strength from the mounting of the supporting spar to the centering rings on each end. This is complicated by the fact that I'd need to prepaint the spars and the rings (realistically there'd be no good way to do it after assembly.) I have some formative ideas but nothing where I've been able to work it out all the way from start to finish. I'd even consider doing the spar in metal if needed for additional strength, but that doesn't solve the mounting problem. Note: running the lug through the two transitions would be challenging, since it's taller than the transitions and so wouldn't properly fit "inside" them. Having it be partly embedded in the transitions and partly out seems like it would be very tough to pull off. Although now that I wrote that I'm wondering if I should thinking about that some more, since it would certainly solve the strength problem.