Trouble with Casimir Pumps

As you know from having read Rome's Revolution, the Vuduri use a thing called the Casimir Pump to power their star drives. They also use it to create their PPT resonance which underlies their mind-to-mind connection as well as leading to the rise of the Overmind. However, there are some severe, fundamental, flaws with using this as a real device.

First of all, how do you collect negative energy when, by its very nature, it does not exist? How would you bottle it? How would you project it? I thought about waving my hands and invoking dark matter or dark energy. In the end, I just decided to ignore it because it was easier and, after all, it is science fiction.

Well, Bruce just stumbled across an article in Yahoo! News that kind of vindicates everything I've been speculating about for 40 years. The article is entitled "Engage! Warp Drive Could Become Reality with Quantum-Thruster Physics" and describes a "real-life" warp drive. Except it isn't a warp drive and doesn't require dilithium crystals.

According to the article, this is from Harold "Sonny" White:

The physics models that tell us how to construct a q-thruster are the same models we'll use to generate, design and build a negative vacuum generator. The quantum thrusters might be a propulsion manifestation of the physics, like the big ring around the spacecraft. If you looked in there, there might be 10,000 of these little cans that are the negative vacuum generators.

In summary, the article describes tiny negative energy generators to draw negative vacuum energy out of neutral space in order to create a star-drive that goes faster than light. Sounds a lot like Casimir Pumps, doesn't it? MINIMCOM would be proud.