Interstellar flight profiles and observational signatures of positive-energy warp shells

Abstract

Accelerating warp shells built entirely from positive-energy matter were recently shown to exist: the radiative momentum warpshell of Le (arXiv:2606.22531) steers by photon-rocket recoil under a closed-form cost law and an acceleration–compactness frontier. What that construction does not contain is a flight plan. A systematic search (a citation scan, a full-text survey of the paper, and an inspection of the author's public reproduction code) found no published computation of interstellar routes under the shell's admissibility constraints. We compute that catalog. Under the full constraint stack, a rigorous ceiling, a numerically mapped frontier band, and a provisional rigorous floor, we obtain fuel–time tables for Proxima Centauri, TRAPPIST-1, Sgr A*, and M31; the crew-lifetime contour (τ = 50 yr) requires cruise rapidity η = 11.53 for an M31 flyby at mass ratio m_f/m_0 = 9.5 × 10⁻¹⁶. Time-optimal profiles ride the moving frontier, and the operative constraint switches from the thin-shell frontier to thick-wall realizability at compactness x* ≈ 0.54. The same integrals yield observational signatures: a saturated accelerating shell is exactly dark toward its destination, and announces arrival with a deceleration flash amplified by δ⁴ = e^(4η) and compressed in arrival time, following the general decay law F ∝ e^(7η − 3Δη_tot) (for the M31 arrival, e^(7η−72), with picosecond-scale structure), while remaining gravitationally silent on the Damour dipole. All numbers are machine-injected from certified catalogs (306 catalog rows and 567 signature rows, dual-path verified with zero omissions); the verification record includes six cross-validations against the author's code and one reproducibility gap, which we state as found.A Japanese translation of the manuscript (paper_ja.pdf) is included; all numbers, tables, and figures are identical generated artifacts.