Whether warp-drive configurations necessarily violate the energy conditions is an open and actively contested question in the peer-reviewed literature, disputed continuously from 2021 through 2026; it is not settled in either direction.
What it rests on
Attacks run against it
Attacked the time index. C-0003 asserts what the peer-reviewed literature holds 'as of 2022' and rests entirely on one 2022 paper's characterisation of its own field. Two problems, neither resolvable from the corpus. First, a paper describing the consensus it argues against is an interested witness. Second, and worse for a claim written in 2026: nothing here covers 2022 to 2026, no search of the intervening literature has been run, so the claim's date is the date of its evidence rather than the date of the field. INSUFFICIENT_EVIDENCE. The queries that would resolve it: INSPIRE-HEP citations of S-0001 restricted to 2022 onward, plus an arXiv gr-qc search for warp drive AND (energy condition OR NEC) over the same window, both logged to searches.ndjson including a null result if it is null.
Independent re-run of the decisive evidence: live INSPIRE citation sweep of S-0001 (refersto recid:1862524) reproduced Q-0001 exactly at 57/57 hits. Attacked three load-bearing phrases. (1) 'disputed continuously 2021 through 2026': per-year counts 2021:5, 2022:9, 2023:11, 2024:13, 2025:9, 2026:10 — no gap year; 2023 (unnamed in Q-0001) covered by refereed warp papers incl. Eur.Phys.J.C 2305.03736, Gen.Rel.Grav. 2302.13826, Class.Quant.Grav. 2309.10072. (2) 'peer-reviewed through 2026': the four most on-topic 2026 items in Q-0001's top hits are unpublished preprints, but the sweep contains two refereed 2026 anchors — Gen.Rel.Grav. 58:1 (positive-invariant-density warp, still violating, 'more than 60x smaller' NEC peak) and Universe 12:132 — verified by fetching full INSPIRE records. (3) 'not settled': the strongest skeptical candidate, arXiv 2602.16495 (Feb 2026), proves NEW no-go theorems and corrects 'misconceptions in the literature' — active contestation, not settlement, and unpublished. All six arXiv IDs named in Q-0001's conclusion resolve to the exact titles Q-0001 attached. E-0004's quote verified EXACT at its offset with supporting context. No internal contradiction with GREEN C-0002 (Natario-class-conditional). Every attack failed. Artifact: compute/redteam_x0025/rerun_sweep.py.