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I may need to go out and sit on a rock in my back yard to ponder this.

A backyard is a good place to do the following experiment.

Take an infinitely stretchable rubber thread and tie it to two fence posts. This is your space. Then grip the thread near one post and drag that point all the way to the other post. That's how the FTL spaceship would travel within a very small time. Note that if there is an ant sitting on the thread where you gripped it, the ant is not in motion relative to the thread. If you ask the ant, he will tell you that suddenly the space in front of him compacted, the space behind him stretched, and he was propelled - without moving - all the way along the thread.

Another experiment - that requires an oceanfront property - is the wave. Water rises, forms a wave and then falls. The wave itself is moving, but the particles of water do not. If you ride the wave you can move pretty fast, even though the water itself is not moving (other than vertically.)

Alcubierre drive compresses the space in front of the bubble and stretches it back after the bubble passes. In essence, the bubble is riding the wave:

As things are, there are a few small difficulties remaining, such as the need to have considerable mass of exotic matter. Some calculations put it to be larger than the mass of this Universe; but other calculations say that a few milligrams will suffice. To make things worse, nobody on this planet have ever seen exotic matter; nor anyone knows how to make one.

"Take an infinitely stretchable rubber thread and tie it to two fence posts. This is your space. Then grip the thread near one post and drag that point all the way to the other post. That's how the FTL spaceship would travel within a very small time. Note that if there is an ant sitting on the thread where you gripped it, the ant is not in motion relative to the thread. If you ask the ant, he will tell you that suddenly the space in front of him compacted, the space behind him stretched, and he was propelled - without moving - all the way along the thread."

If the thread stretches, the ant will discover that his grips upon the thread will stretch apart as well. He may need to release his fore-grips and hind-grips to avoid becoming a stretched ant.

This situation is reminiscent of Niven's description of orbiting a "Neutron Star". His pilot was forced to position himself at the very middle of his ship, and present a minimal fore-and-aft aspect to the intensely variable tidal gravity effects.

Similarly, a black hole event horizon has been described as a place where one of the ordinary three axes of spacial coordinates is replaced by one of time.

This riding-the-wave technique for moving through space-time sounds like an application of gravitational distortion.

All I can offer at the moment, as a perplexed student of such phenomena, is the faint hope that the same kind of phenomenon which allows an electrical circuit to mimic a large quantity of atoms whose electrons are all arranged in a synchronized pattern, may be replicated in nuclear vibrational energies and modes which will similarly duplicate the effects of gravity.

If such an application of gravitational "magnetism" could be developed, either space travel itself may become easier, or faster-than-light travel may be in our grasp.