Warp drive not science fiction after all?

Hi, DA.As in avid science fiction fan, I have read a great deal on the Alcubierre drive concept (most of which, due to my lack of a physics background, I still do not understand).But, my basic understanding is that the Alcubierre drive works by warping space before and behind the ship using a bubble of exotic matter. The new discovery is that you can achieve the same effect with just a torus (doughnut) of exotic matter, which purportedly solves the energy-requirement problem (the original Alcubierre drive was supposed to require a mass of fuel equal to the mass of jupiter to move a small spaceship, while the new version requires a much smaller mass, apparently comparable to the Voyager deep-space probes).My understanding is also that the Alcubierre drive suffers from what they call "time dilation" in sci-fi stories. That is, it only seems to go faster than the speed of light from the perspective of a passenger inside the ship. From the perspective of someone outside the ship, the ship does not actually go faster than light.That means, for those of us watching, a Voyager probe with an Alcubierre drive still wouldn't reach Alpha Centauri for hundreds of thousands of years.