Yes, but that was only a problem because they’d burnt rubber at warp 9 getting there. There isn’t any good way to reconcile a sustained warp 9 (if we’re given to believe that warp 6 is sufficient for interstellar travel in a reasonable amount of time) with two months of sublight travel - and fairly slow sublight, at that, barely 0.00033c, and that’s a liberal estimate. The time it takes you to say “warp nine” should be far more than enough to cover that distance at that speed.
Not one of my faves, either. It could have tweaked in a few minor ways to make more sense to the nitpicker (and make Spock seem less like an idiot), but it’s a drama show, not a science show.
Don’t remember that, but there was a fuzzy sense of time versus distance under warp. In Tomorrow is Yesterday they went forward in time by slingshotting around the sun at high warp, but it took a long time for them to get there. Not to mention the tons of time they had to get John Christopher back in his plane.
So it’s true that time to go any distance is directly proportional to the needs of the plot.
It’s a common time travel fallacy: the discovery of time travel automatically includes both forwards and backwards travel, even though the mechanisms must be completely different. E.g., if going 88 mph sends you 50 years into the past, doing it again should send you 100 years into the past.
Or, they used the dumbass superman method and just went around the sun in the opposite direction.
Since we are a nitpicky bunch, it was the warp factor cubed, not squared.
Either way, the numbers never matched plot. Say you are traveling Warp 6, or 216c. That means you cover a light year in 14 hours. To go to the nearest star would take 2 1/2 days. To go 1000 light years (excuse me. 990.7 light years. I do endeavor to be precise) as in *That Which Survives *at Warp 8 (512c) would take nearly 2 years, not the 12ish hours the episode took.
Why ANYONE would ever travel at Warp 1 is a mind boggling question. You’d have a better trip if you went .999999c. The trip would take just as long, but you’d benefit from the relativistic effects. It would only seem like a few days-ish.
At interstellar distances, your maximum speed would be your only speed.
It’s just vaguely possible that there are fuel considerations. Dilithium crystals might wear out; you only have so much antimatter; etc. If it’s just a milk run, and you don’t mind taking an extra month, warp 4 is okay.
There are probably junk freighters and robot freighters that can’t go beyond Warp 2, maybe in star clusters where the stars are only a half light year apart.
(And who needs freighters if you have replicators anyway…?)
Not just fuel, but wear and tear on the components might also be an issue. It’s obviously significant at the upper end-- How many times have we heard that “the engines canna take much more a’ this”? Presumably, even a sedate Warp 6 puts some wear on the engines, and a lower speed would put less.
You see, the universe is like an eight-track player . . .
Ah. My favorite pet peeve. Somehow it isn’t irritating when Doctor Who ups the ante and reverses the polarity of the neutron flow. I guess lampshading it makes it funny.
