Yes, that shot was good - it gave a very good impression of the Enterprise r-e-e-e-ally belting along. Still, the Quantum II hyperdrive (Niven, from “At the Core” and later Ringworld) would have got them there in about five years by my literal back-of-the-envelope calculations - it allowed a speed of one light year per minute and a quarter, which is about 400 kly yr[sup]-1[/sup].
Do Paris and Janeway still have lizard offspring running around somewhere in the gamma quadrant, btw? That must be kinda hard to come to terms with… Janeway: “I always wanted kids, and now they’re lizards and never call.” Boy, I’d want to listen in on those therapy sessions…
I’ve allus wanted to know where The Borg came from, their home planet.
And why do they want to assimilate all beings.
Bastards
One of the novels retconned this into a barrier around part of the galaxy, put there by the Q continuum to keep out something REALLY nasty.
Another one of the novels had someone hit Warp 10 and disappear, and it was deemed that they were everywhere and nowhere. This was not told from the shipboard perspective, though, so it was not revealed whether the crew turned into lizards.
No, Star Trek is not all I read. 
I will never forgive what TNG did to the warp speed values. In TOS although never actually stated in the series but used in the book The Making of Star Trek by Gene R. Warp speed was the cube of the warp factor in times the speed of light. So Warp 1 is 1x1x1=1, W2 is 2x2x2=8c all the way up. TOS Enterprise could reach W9 or 729c the refurbished Enterprise from TMP W12 or 1728c.
When TNG came along Gene R decided Warp 9 sounded fast enough so no ship could reach warp 10 which was infinite speed. So then they were stuck with ship speeds that looked ridiculous.
Enterprise-D W9.96545
Defiant W9.97687
Voyager W9.98767
ENT-E W9.98898
It’s altogether unclear to me what’s happening the the Enterprise in The Tholian Web. Two kinds of space were overlapping and they were alternating between them, or something. The other Federation ship in that episode in fact did leave this uinverse and fell into the Mirror Universe, as depicted in a much later Star Trek: Enterprise episode.
A starchart made from the Milky Way would be millions of years out of date for a ship that suddenly finds itself in another galaxy. Of course, since it’s Star Trek, there could very well be some sort of subspace telescope to be revealed a convenient point in the plot.
Was there any sort of justification for the Warp 10 lizard thing in Voyager? I saw that episode once but immediately dumped it from memory in some sort of desperate attempt by my brain to keep itself from thinking about it.
Wait - what? Using the numbers in that link that means that a ship flying at warp 9.9 can travel 8.36 light years a day. Wow, that’s really something. I mean, that’s twice as far as from Earth to Alpha Centari, in one day.
Come on! If that’s “top speed” then it would take over three years to fly all the way across the Federation (which is 10,000 LY across), so if that’s the case how did the TNG Enterprise get from the galactic rim back to Earth in one season? Or indeed get from anywhere outside the Federation and to Earth in one season?
Someone once said the Enterprise flys at the maximum speed the plot demands.
There was some handwaving explanation that going that fast changed their genetic structure somehow (easily reversed by the EMH in the last three minutes of the episode, of course). :smack::smack::smack: Jeez, that really was a gawdawful episode. One of the worst of a very uneven ST series.
I can only imagine how awkward things would be for Janeway and Paris if they ever found themselves on the same turbolift alone together. “So… it sure was fun fucking when we were salamanders, wasn’t it?”
Human salamanders are sexy.
IIRC, they supposedly picked up alien DNA as they passed through the universe at infinite speed. This somehow made them start to “evolve”.
I note that the chart for the original series is the cube of the warp factor until you get to warp 21, and then it’s arbitrarily infinity. In the later series, it seemed to be slightly over 10 ^ 2log(warp) up to warp 9, after which it seems to follow some other formula (or is just arbitrarily decided) and then arbitrarily hits infinity at warp 10. Warp 1 isn’t even exactly light speed but roughtly 1.024 times light speed. Now I’m no mathematician yet I’m sure I could still come up with a single formula where warp 1 is light speed and warp 10 is infinity. But I guess I may be expecting too much from a series where nearly every alien life form speaks English as its native language. (I’m a fan of Star Trek by the way. Just certain things could have been thought out a lot more.)
Warp speed (expressed in multiples of c) = 9 / (10 - warp factor)
Warp 1 = 1c
Warp 2 = 1.125c
Warp 3 = 1.28c
Warp 4 = 1.67c
Warp 5 = 1.8c
Warp 6 = 2.25c
Warp 7 = 3c
Warp 8 = 4.5c
Warp 9 = 9c
Warp 10 = infinite
It starts a bit slow, I admit.
I have one that works a bit better. It could go up a bit faster, but that would probably only require putting in some constants. I’m tired of working on it for right now.
1 / cos ((pi - (pi * (1 - (log w) ^ (1/w)))) / 2)
Logarithm is base 10 and cos is radians.
gnuplot> print f(1.0)
1.0
gnuplot> print f(2.0)
1.5359926748733
gnuplot> print f(3.0)
2.97035214852379
gnuplot> print f(4.0)
5.37505435584105
gnuplot> print f(5.0)
9.22790826127886
gnuplot> print f(6.0)
15.5593035087647
gnuplot> print f(7.0)
26.8039320897779
gnuplot> print f(8.0)
50.2860446565464
gnuplot> print f(9.0)
122.648968630284
gnuplot> print f(9.9)
1441.10915270559
gnuplot> print f(10.0)
1.63312393531954e+16
Okay, 10 is really infinity, but there seems to be a rounding error.
That’s just what God said!
As I recall, the “explanation” only made it worse. Something to do with Warp 10 super-accelerating human evolution – that is, evolving them into the lizard creatures that we’re all apparently going to evolve into in a few hundred million years or so. Which is stupid not only because it makes no sense but because it suggests that evolution has some pre-determined endpoint, as opposed to being governed by environmental factors and natural selection and such.
That has to be one of the worst episodes of Star Trek ever made.
Ah, it’s all coming back. That’s worse than Genesis in TNG. Star Trek shouldn’t do biology. Of physics, even.
I don’t know, I think I am coming down with an acute case of Barclay’s Protomorphosis Syndrome.
Well, I can’t remember what planet, but the “why”, according to one of the Trek novels that Shatner wrote, is that the V’Ger probe (from the first movie) ended up there. Spock was about to be assimilated by the Borg, and then they stopped, saying it was already done and didn’t need to be repeated. Some kind of leftover brain imprint from his mind-meld with V’Ger.
Which brings up another question: I know that the books written for the trek continuum are considered cannon (for the most part) - does that include the fiction books that the actors have written?