Except that would make Warp 10 equal to 1,000 times the speed of light, not infinite.
But then of course, they changed the speeds according to the Need of Plot. In the beginning, DS9 was ‘months’ away from Earth. At the end it was what, 2-3 days?
You’ve got the answer for Warp. Now, what is the answer for the impulse engines.
The Enterprise seems not to accelerate under impulse. Since they can reach close to light speed using them, there must be something going on beyond a fancy name for a reaction engine, but impulse has been even less defined than warp.
Between Kirk’s time and Picard’s, the warp scale had been recalibrated at least once. The Enterprise-E, travelling at warp 9, was going a lof faster than the Enterprise-no-suffix. Also, warp 10 meant travelling infinitely fast, and wasn’t possible.
And no, I have never seen that episode of Voyager. It doesn’t even exist.
Warp 13. When you absolutely, positively have to get there yesterday.
Inertia dampeners.
Just…yuck.
They work much better than the old inertia moisteners used to.
“The Immunity Syndrome.”
Pretty much this. It’s a variant on the Tipler Machine. Instead of an infinite rotating cylinder, you just go really fast around a large rotating mass. The exact trajectory through space-time defines the end-points of the intersecting curve.
(In “real life,” Roger Penrose has shown that, near a rotating black hole, spacetime “tilts” a little, with space becoming a little “timelike,” and time becoming a little “spacelike.” The whole idea has that much theoretical justification.)
Think of the caterpillar drive from Red October. Impulse engines provide ordinary Newtonian impulse…but without rocketing out reaction mass. It’s probably based on their antigravity (and inertial dampening) tech. They’ve got a working “Dean Drive.”
I do have an argument for why ships “slow down” when their normal-space drives stop working. What really happens is that the “point of view” can easily match velocities, so the ship appears to stop.
Pretend that the show is being observed by a little scout craft with a camera. When the big ship is maneuvering violently, it’s all the scout ship can do to keep it in sight at all. But when the big ship stops maneuvering, the scout ship can also stop maneuvering, and the two are relatively stationary.
(Hey, I got applause for that one at a LosCon!)
Kirk: Mr. Spock, have you accounted for the variable mass of whales and water in your time re-entry program?
Spock: Mr. Scott cannot give me exact figures, Admiral, so… I will make a guess.
Kirk: A guess? You, Spock? That’s extraordinary.
Spock: [to Dr. McCoy] I don’t think he understands.
McCoy: No, Spock. He means that he feels safer about your guesses than most other people’s facts.
Spock: Then you’re saying…
[pause]
Spock: It is a compliment?
McCoy: It is.
Spock: Ah. Then, I will try to make the best guess I can.
McCoy: Please do.
I don’t get what the big deal with that scene is. During TOS, Kirk often told Spock to “speculate”.
And I don’t get why they didn’t just go to a whale weigh station.
I think it’s all about Nimoy’s deadpan delivery.
Yes, but…
Remember that Spock had just been resurrected from the dead, and his memory was a bit … patchy. As McCoy had said, he wasn’t exactly firing on all thrusters, either; so much so that Gillian believed Kirk when he told her Spock had taken a little too much LDS during the '60s.
We’re both partially right. The episode was “Obsession,” but they were chasing the Vampire Cloud, not the amoeba (“It was outrunning us.”/“It turned and attacked.”). My bad! :smack:
Who says you canna change the laws of physics…? :rolleyes:
Doesn’t going faster than Warp 10 turn you into a lizard or something?
Salamander. I think it’s a giant salamander. 
The dangers of going too fast are well documented.
On reflection, I guess the biggest disconnect between warp speed and reality (at least in TOS) may have been in “The Paradise Syndrome”. The Enterprise briefly visits a planet, then zips off to intercept and deflect a large asteroid on a collision course with that planet. The trip apparently requires a sustained warp 9, which strains the engines sufficiently that the deflection attempt both fails and damages the ship, sending it limping back to the planet at impulse power, a trip taking about two months, with the asteroid right behind them the whole way.
Now if the asteroid was really moving along, twice as fast as Mercury in its orbit and faster still than any real asteroid we’ve ever detected, it might be moving at 100 km/s. A two-month trip would be a little over 500 million kilometers. That’s about 30 light-minutes, not even as far as Earth to Jupiter at their closest. Does it really take a sustained Warp 9 to cover such a distance, i.e. sustained for more than a few hundredths of a second? Seems to me the time saved over travelling at a more sedate and sustainable Warp 6 would be negligible, far less than one second by any chart I can find on the topic.
IIRC they burned out the engines by directing warp power to the tractor beams to try to deflect the asteroid. But a reason for them not zipping to the planet on impulse was not mentioned - they’d need it to go into orbit anyway.
I hate that episode, btw.