Cool beans man. thats one thing I’ve noticed about trek fans…we can bash some of the shows, talk trash about different ideas we may have but at the end of the day we can always get along.
I have a strange idea forming for the premis of a new series…but I need to work out some details before I say anything…
That makes no sense. Is there some kind of government-mandated governor that makes the impulse drive (essentially, if I recall, a very powerful ion rocket) automatically cut off when .25c is obtained? If so, I’d take the governor off, fire that sucker back up and continue accelerating.
Impulse being 0.25c is only fanon, actually, so take it with a grain of salt. I imagine it’s probably not too large a fraction of lightspeed due to time dilation issues, though.
Actually, I thought the Through The Mirror Darkly episodes from ST: ENT was the best of them all. So nyahhh.
Time dilation isn’t a huge issue until the fraction is very large. The equation is something like t[sub]v[/sub] = t[sub]0[/sub]/sqrt(1 - v[sup]2[/sup]/c[sup]2[/sup]), which doing the math means the time dilation is only two or three percent at one-quarter cee. Even at point nine cee the dilation’s only a little over 2. Mind you, keep pushingalong closer and closer to light speed, and before you know it you’ve got a grandstand view of the Big Crunch.
The TNG tech manual by Michael Okuda himself states half impulse is 0.25c.
An amusing fact from the real world of science, when Lawrence Krauss wrote the Physics of ST he calculated how much fuel the Enterprise would really need to accelerate the ship to full impulse. The Enterprise’s Impulse Engines are hydrogen fusion rocket engines and would need 81 times the ship’s mass in fuel to reach this speed. Even more funny is the amount it would take to slow down from that speed and stop, it would not take twice the fuel needed to accelerate because you not only have the ship’s mass but the fuel needed to start and stop as well so that comes to 6642 times the Enterprise’s mass (4 million metric tons) so that is 26 billion tons of fuel needed for a 4 million ton starship to reach 0.25c and slow down and stop again.
I like this idea very much. I’d like the next ST series (if there is ever is one, which might be a looooooooong time in coming, no matter how well the Abrams movie does) to be in ST’s “present,” after ST Nemesis, and set aboard a new starship with a new crew. Maybe have Patrick Stewart show up once in awhile as Admiral Picard? Keep Roddenberry’s optimism, but not in a Pollyannaesque way. Fewer Treknobabble last-minute solutions. A clearly gay crewmember, at long last. Chinese and Asian Indian characters (badly underrepresented, considering their proportion of humanity nowadays). And a lot more nonhumanoid aliens, if the CGI can be done well.
And Lumpy, you’re right - Dark Mirror by Diane Duane is one of the best ST books I’ve ever read (right up there with Imzadi, by Peter David).
These are the voyages of the starship Obama . . .
Without reading the thread, just posting after reading the OP, I would like to see a Starfleet Academy series, set in the 24th century (after Wesley left) written for adults, not kids. NOT Space Academy. It would be possible to incorporate characters from TNG, DS9 and Voyucker as instructors.
That is also supported by events in Star Trek: the Motion Picture (Yeah, I know remembering that film can cause flashbacks for some people. Cope). Once impulse power was online, Kirk gave the order, “Ahead warp .5” Remember, Kirk was in a “We need to get there sooner than now!” hurry. You’d better believe that was as fast as the ship could possibly go without warp.
That does bring up an interesting point, they never explain on the shows just how fast the warp speeds are. Yeah, you can get all that from tech manuals and such, but should the casual viewer need a study guide to have something explained that is so central to the show?
Well, for the average viewer:
-impulse speed: Sunday drive speed, we’ll get there when we get there
-Warp 1-6: Got somewhere to go, stuff to do, but let’s not blow any space gaskets doing it
-Warp 7-9.5: Shit en route to fan
-Warp 9.5-> : Borg’s on your ass, gun it or die.
Warp isn’t actually that fast - in the Voyager “Scorpion” they say the nearest Borg cube is 40 light years away and Chakotay says “that’s a four day trip”. So basically top warp speed is about 10 light years a day. Actually, thinking about it in Voyager the ship starts of 70,000 light years from home and Janeway says even at maximum speeds that will take 70 years to get there. My maths tells me that means Voyager (a ship with a stable warp speed warp 9.975) travels about 2.7 light years a day (or less than the distance between Sol and the nearest star system).
Thinking about it they must have tampered with the figures for the show’s sake, that kind of speed could barely be considered interstellar travel.
Here’s my own list of things I’d like to see in a new Trek series…
Speaking of which, some of my favourite episodes overall were “Piece of the Action”, “Arsenal of Freedom”, and “The Royale” in which characters get caught up in some nutty situation and the solution is just to shut up and roll with it - no moralizing.
So for my ideal Star Trek series - no moralizing. If there’s ever a scene that ends with good guy holding a weapon on bad guy, and secondary good guy says “Don’t do it - you’ll be as bad as he is!” I want the first good guy to say: “Are you kidding? Of course I’m better than he is I didn’t massacre any hostages. ZAP! And he won’t ever again. Now let’s get some lunch.”
What if your so-called ‘bad guy’ massacred those hostages for the good of the Federation?
Star Trek: 24.
I’m trying to find JMS’s rules for Babylon 5. They were quite similar to this. They included “no teleporting” as well.
To be fair, they did do time travel once, but it was an anomaly and a huge shock to every character.
Probably they’re more limited by the strength of their deflector shields, than by the power of their impulse engines.
In warp, they’ve got the warp field (presumably) fending off interstellar dust coming at them at trans-light speed.
At impulse, they’ve only got the deflector shields. And, let’s face it, from what we’ve seen, those things would go down if a Romulan just sneezed at ‘em. They’re not terribly good at defending the ship from just regular ol’ weapons, let alone from space dust incoming at 0.25c
I’d love to see those rules. B5 was more consistent with its history and technology than any Star Trek series. If you find it, please post a link. 
Like Sloan the Section 31 agent on DS9?
The episode “In the Pale Moonlight” Captain Sisko enlists the help of garak to trick the Romulans into helping the federation and the Klingons in the war against the Dominion. People get killed and he is forced to throw his ideals and ethics in the trashbin for awhile because its more important that he succeeds than it is to be the good guy. Heck, in the season before that Sisko threatens to poison an entire planet…in fact he actually did it…to get the mission done for the greater good.
I agree with Chimera’s rules especially number five.