Warp 4.5. Wow, that’s pretty zippy.
The Original Series Enterprise kicked along at, what? Warp 8? 10?
So is the Enterprise (X whatever) fast by the new show standards? (Yeah it’s the fastest Earth ship. Being the first real Starship and all.)
But do the Vulcans (or Klingons) have faster ships and they are just sitting on the technology to keep us Earth people down? (Damn the pointy-eared Man!)
-Rue.
Very very slow. The puniest warp shuttles in the New Stuff can run rings around the Enterprise.
The Vulcans might well have faster ships, and withheld the information to make the humans learn for themselves. However, as I recall from some of the books (which are not canon), you need dilithium crystals to exceed warp 4. It’s entirely possible the Vulcans didn’t know that, either.
Whoops, sorry, misread the OP. Compared to the other human ships, yes, it’s the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy.
From the attitude of the Vulcans I’m figuring they have faster ships and are intentionally holding back (as was indicated several times in the show) because they don’t think we’re ready for it.
Not only is the Enterprise “fast”, but it magically makes star systems appear within a 1 lightyear radius of Earth… pretty spiffy, huh?
Having way too much time on my hands, I did some calculations. In the show they said “Neptune and back in six minutes”. Taking Neptune as 4.5 billion km from Earth (in actuality that is it’s distance to the sun) we are left with the Enterprise traveling at 25 billion meters/sec. Pretty fast, but only one twelth the speed of light. The nearest star system is Alpha Centauri, 4.35 light years away. It would take 52 years for the Enterprise to reach our closest star.
Somebody’s got some 'splaining to do.
Time to accelerate/enter warp and decelerate/exit warp??
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Time to accelerate/enter warp and decelerate/exit warp?? **
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Nope, didn’t want to do the Calculus. The calculations assume that the top speed is achieved pretty much instantaneous, which seems to be what you see in the show anyway. It’s just back of the envelope math.
Well, it’s faster than my Chevy!
See, that’s my rationalization…
I think you’ve go a little math error there Beltane. The speed of light is approximately 300 million meters/sec. Getting there and back makes warp 4.5 closer to 80 times the speed of light.
A long, long time ago, in a galaxy the very same as ours, my brother was a Trekkie (later a Trekker and sometime in the 80s found the whole thing geeky). Anyway, he had the original technical specifications spend your money here Star Trek crap. The Original Series (TOS to non Trekkers) Star Fleet technical manual unequivocally stated that a warp was equal to the cube of the warp so that warp three would be 27 times the speed of light. Thus warp 4.5 is 91.125 times the speed of light, still making it several weeks to get to the nearest star system if it is 4 light years away as is the Alpha Centuri system. That’s a long time to be trapped with Alpha’s tiresome crew and one hot and uninterested vulcan!
I brought up the speed issue in this thread:
100c appears to be pretty consistent with the “Neptune and back in 6 minutes” quote.
BTW, Aviator’s calculations are correct. Going to Neptune and back (from the Sun) would require traveling at 83.5c.
Inadvertently chopped out part of my sentence.
That should read: "Going to Neptune and back in six minutes (from the Sun) would require traveling at 83.5c.