they dont however operate in a separate space outside of normal reality

Well, that would be difficult to prove one way or the other.

But since we’ve already got the fictional construct of subspace, the notion of a mycelial species that can extend through it seems…within the realm of truthiness, all things considered.

The part I’ve never fully grasped is how one travels along the network, but then, I’ve never fully grasped how the warp coils are supposed to work, either.

The original question for this post was whether or not there was any actual science behind the spore drive. You said yes and no. Please enlighten me as to what scientific theory you are getting the yes part of your answer from. Because I read through your linked Wikipedia article and couldnt find anything about how a spore drive could even be theoretically possible. The spore drive is purely techno babble. The warp drive on the other hand, while being mostly techno babble, has some grounding in actual reality and scientific theory.

I said nothing of the sort.

Star Trek’s warp drive isn’t really an Alcubierre drive at all.

I and the physicists I know will go to the mat on the principal that the Alcubierre Drive is the first real life physics closed form proof of a warp drive.

For the purposes of this discussion though, the more fundamental point is that Alcubierre’s theoretical proof of concept for warp drives was created in the mid 1990s nearly 30 years after TOS first broadcast and TNG had completed its run.

As I have said here before, following the norm in mathematics-based theory development, Alcubierre started with a tractable corner case. This means he set a number of obviously necessary parameters to zero to make it possible to get to a closed-form solution that didn’t rely on crunching numbers.

His objective in his PhD thesis was prove there was an exception General Relativity that makes warp drives possible theoretically.

He did that, and as is usual with corner solutions, came up with something fairly absurd that would involve massive amounts of exotic matter and couldn’t steer a course due — simply because he intentionally set those parameters to zero for the purposes of the proof.

It’s a misunderstanding of the way theoretical reasoning and research gets done to say that Alcubierre’s warp drive isn’t the one in Star Trek, simply because he chose the simplest case for his proof. The Star Trek warp drive would involve setting these parameters to positive values - but that doesn’t mean it’s a different theory at the fundamental level.

As usual, more realistic applications of the theory, with nonzero values for those parameters that would:

• actually allow a ship to enter warp from a sublight velocity
• permit the ship to control its direction while at warp, and
• would not require massive amounts of exotic matter,

are very likely to involve massive amounts of numerical approximations calculated by a computer and advances in materials science.

Unless someone finds a mathematical trick to get around the numerical approximations with a better closed form solution — and comes up with a materially different basic warp drive equation — whatever we get eventually from this line of research will still be viewed as Alcubierre’s drive. Or, also likely an Alcubierre-OtherPerson drive.

Alcubierre’s theoretical proof of concept for warp drives was created in the mid 1990s nearly 30 years after TOS first broadcast and TNG had completed its run.

Probably the most salient point - one cannot credibly claim that the warp drive was “based on science” that hadn’t yet been published, and wouldn’t be for three decades.

Yup.

And that Alcubierre’s effort, as a theoretical physics PhD student, to prove mathematically that there was a an exception to General Relativity that would make warp possible, was inspired by Star Trek’s fictional drive and not vice versa.

Although it might go both ways these days, since it wouldn’t be at all surprising if newer writers heard of Alcubierre’s warp drive, and incorporated that into Star Trek as a mechanism for how it works.