For a spacefaring civilisation, planets are sitting ducks.
You can rain down asteroids on them, you can do all sorts of nasty things to the atmosphere, you could even tamper with the sun to have it emit a lot more radiation.
For any civilisation that can travel between the stars and has expanded from its home system, we are as weak as a small island nation against the Elizabethan British Empire.

Driving a planet? You need a Feersum Endjinn for that.

Or you could expand space in front of your planet and contract it behind and just surf along.

asteroids can easily be blown out of the sky, and we can move our civilization underground and use the whole surface as a huge amount of solar panels to power our engines and agricukutural industry as well as missile silos and hydroponic domes.
And with mobility comes security, we can always bail out on suns that are tampered with.

Heck, if we can figure out how to bend light and invent cloaking we can just render our mobile ass kicking loaned invisible and do runs from asteroid fields to gain resources and stars to recharge our infrastructure.

Rinse and repeat and we can have a fleet\solarsystem of cloaked planets.

Thats true, but the anology still stands.
I dont think we would have a snowballs chance in hell against aliens that can traverse interstellar distances.

Even if they are peaceful, it will be the end of our culture as we know it.
This is what happened to isolated tribes on Earth, even when met with peaceful intentions. They were just absorbed into the global culture.
These days everyone knows about McDonalds, but very few people still know how to prepare the poisonous bark of the native tree into a nourishing gruel or carve an exquisite statuette from a seal tusk.

The Earth would still maintain its rotation, I guess, but how would we experience turns and change of momentum? Something tells me that we wouldn't experience any of that because our space is stationary and only our surrounding region of spacetime is being altered

The thing about this though is that should we ever have the tech/resources to "drive" our planet, we would have no reason to. We would have many other, more practical, solutions.

Walrus is the preferred nomenclature.

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feersum_Endjinn I mentioned has a very good reason for wanting to move the planet (well, the whole solar system).

Allrighty

not if we cloak and flee galactic vcivilizatiob.

Although we wouldn't have a reason too, if the other culture was peaceful and not xenophobic towards us we would have no reason too hide just to preserve our culture.

I still think a cloaked and moving planet would be defensible, even though it wouldn't be hard to see evidence of a planet the universe is vast enough we could hide in a backwater solar system and avoid a warmakign civilization, possibly even wage war using the stations you described as battle stations that can feed themselves without risking civilian life back on the homeppanet.

Still not sure about that. I was going to say something like a giant protective shell around Earth could be used, but I'm actually thinking about checking that book out to find out the specifics of that spoiler.