Look up "Sawyer EM drive" and more importantly look up the rebuttal to it. It is utter garbage, and the results if positive are either errors or outright faking of data. The Sawyer paper made me wonder but I ignored that since he claimed to produce thrust and so I ignored the "this does not make sense" part of the explaination, then I read the rebuttal paper and it is clear that it is garbage. It is fraud, plain and simple. Does not work, can not work. It basically shows scientists are easy to fool since it is expected that one doesn't lie outright about your results. This is something that paranormal frauds have been exploiting for years.
On to Aurora, you can't have a fuel-less drive system not because of pseudo physics but simply because fuel is an inherent game limitation. The infrastructure costs of any empires fuel chain are immense. You have refineries, you have reserach invested in making the refineries more efficient, you have research invested into fuel harversters, you have reserach into fuel use efficiency, you have colonies set up solely as fuel depots, you have tankers, you have refinery ships, you have to mine the sorium and this all then feeds back into the overall strategic range of your ships. Then your ships have to carry fuel, which means space used by fuel tanks. Larger ships need more fuel as they have higher power needs to achieve a reasonable speed. Feeding the beast becomes a full time job in fact.
In no case is there any way as far as I can see that you can balance the inherent advantages of a fuel less engine in Aurora. It would give you an unlimited range ship. It would save you a teremendous amount of research and space inside your ships. It would save you the resources you otherwise have to invest into fuel infrastructure (refinery ships, refineries, and tankers). 50% reduction in output is a sad joke.
Also solar power is utterly inefficient, it only works on satalites as they have minisule power needs. Ion drives for example are strongly limited in output due to the fact you have only a few hundred watts of power from your panels. They also don't work much past the orbit of jupiter. I'm not sure what other sources of fuel or power you might have...hydrogen ram scoops would work but then you have hydrogen not sorium or some other source of fuel. Hydrogen unless you couple it to a fusion or plasma drive isn't itself that useful. You need deuterium and tritium for a fusion reactor to make a torch not the basic stuff you find in the wild.