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originally posted by: stormbringer1701
What Dr White says about this that the only speed boost that anything from space dust to photons will get is when it passes through the interface between the bubble and normal space. inside the bubble nothing is moving except at the speed it had prior to entering warp. the ship is practically at rest (Actually it is moving at the speed it had when the bubble was erected.) there is no abnormal acceleration in the interior region and since stuff passes through the "skin" of the warp bubble there is no accumulation of matter or photons at the boundaries of the warp field either.
there is a collision hazard but it is no greater than that of the combined normal space velocities of the objects in collision. That's still quite dangerous. dust is like a high powered rifle bullet, grains are like an armor piercing round gravel is like artillery shells or missiles, bowling balls are like atomic bombs.
Though formidible; we do have technology that could protect against such impacts. fortunately the ones greater than dust are very very rare even given the volume of space that can be gone through at those speeds. For example; at high relativistic speed you can expect one dust bunny impact per square meter of frontal cross section per day. grain sized is rare and the larger ones are successively more rare still. dust and sand grain sized impactors can be swept aside by electrical or magnetic fields. gravel sized ones can be handled by automatic radar/laser combinations.
bigger ones are so rare you might not hit one at all in an entire interstellar voyage. but presumably you can dodge big ones because you should have time between seeing them and impact to do something.
Also there is one effect that is true because of the interface between the two spaces: optical rules apply. something entering a region of different density to the one it is traveling through will have it's path bent defracted or refracted. with a little luck or planning this means stuff aiming dead center of your line of travel will deflect away from it on it's own.