In Star Trek canon, was there ever any reason presented why a warp-capable vessel couldn’t push their warp engines or impluse drive right up to just under warp 1, aka 1x the speed of light, aka c? A ship going at say warp 0.9999995 would have a gamma of 1000, and thus easy time travel into the future.
Numbers courtesy ChatGPT with the Wolfram Alpha plugin:
For γ=10^3, v≈0.9999995c
For γ=10^4, v≈0.999999995c
For γ=10^5, v≈0.99999999995c
I remember in ST:TMP, in their initial test flight with the modified warp engine, they gradually approached warp 1 before finally hitting it and then having issues. But if they had stayed right below warp 1?
ETA: Interesting, Discourse automatically added that star trek tag and reformatted my numbers in that highlighted box.
Presumably, if you’re under warp at all, you’re not subject to the usual conditions of Special Relativity, even if you’re only at Warp 0.9 or whatever.
Forget about ever getting anything that makes the remotest trace of sense in Trek physics. The writers seem go know or care nothing about it. Ships on impulse already travel at high multiples of light speed, for example.
They claim it doesn’t. But then they show ships traveling light hours or light days inside of solar systems in minutes on impulse. That’s my point–they either don’t know or don’t care how stupidly wrong they are.
In Star Trek physics, the “c” doesn’t stand for “consistency”.
In some dialog (TOS if I remember…), it seems that warp ships accelerate to (just under) c and then jump over to warp speed. That really doesn’t make sense, and causes other problems, such as slipping slipping slipping into the future, relativistically, so they forgot they ever said it.
If high impulse was nearing the speed of light, as noted there would be relativistic effects. Which are never mentioned. (Though the original handwavium descriptions of Star Dates had some techno lingo saying they varied due to this very effect.)
Having the capability of running at high percentages of c does give you a “lifeboat” way to get home if your warp drive is unrepairable, Of course, you’ll be hundreds of years in the future, but there’s probably a 25th century Department of Temporal Dislocations to get you a new house and re-acclimated to society.
Yeah, I understand that’s the ultimate answer any time anybody questions why some sci-fi thing doesn’t obey real world physics. I know Trek employed some well known SF authors, who at least some of them had the background to understand the problems. I’m curious if any of them attempted to state outright “this tech can’t do that” at any point.
Can you name one? An established hard SF author who told Start Trek that “FTL doesn’t work that way.”
I know of one sorta-hard-SF author (Larry Niven) who never addressed the issue, since his own FTL rules (though mostly internally consistent) were nothing like any incarnation of Star Trek’s “warp”.
I think they refused to give definitive answers for speeds in Babylon 5 to avoid nitpicking. The truth is warp always seemed to be at the speed of plot. In TNG in particular, it didn’t seem to take the Enterprise very long to get back to Earth when necessary.
And then there’s the Abrams-verse, where warping from Earth to Vulcan takes a couple seconds - a conceit of his that carried over into his Star Wars films, because the man seems to have absolutely no idea how big space is. At the risk of going off-topic, if hyperspace jumps worked the same way in A New Hope that they do in The Rise of Skywalker, Luke and company would have beat the Death Star to Alderaan, then died when it blew up the planet.
I’d have to look up a definitive list of script authors, but I know off the top of my head they include Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison. I remember seeing other big name authors but their names aren’t coming to mind at the moment. I’m making an educated guess that at least some of the writers knew the basics of relativity, even though they ignored it when writing their scripts.
I am not asking about any behind-the-scenes discussions that might have happened. I’m asking about what could have made it into a script, where a writer decided to try to head off all the true nerds in the audience by explicitly side-step-stepping the issue of travel less than light speed, by having a character or some in-universe reference say: “no, these ships just can’t do that thing.” That is the totality of my question, did that ever happen on screen, or in a novel that was declared canon?
In the Star Trek: Destiny novel “Gods of Night”, the NX-class USS Columbia is attacked by the Romulans and, while they defeat them, they’re left stranded far away from anyone and anything, and very little on the ship is working, let alone the warp drive.
Captain Hernandez chooses to set a course for the nearest M-class planet, so that they can restock on food and water. But without warp drive, they take the impulse drive to within one-thousandth of c, causing severe time-dilation effects.
63 days on the Columbia turned into 12 years of passage in the real world.
And also where you can get knocked out of warp early, and still be so close to your destination that you can resolve details on the planet with the naked eye. Man, it’s a good thing they got knocked out of warp, or they’d have missed it!
It’s a good trilogy. You should read it. Of course, the thought that the crew was missing 12 years with their families caused lots of problems with crew morale.
In “The Naked Time,” one of the first TOS episodes filmed, the Enterprise traveled “faster than is possible in normal space” after they mixed matter and anti-matter cold, due to a “theoretical relationship between anti-matter and time.” This allowed them to go three days back into the past, though the arrow of time inside the ship wasn’t affected at all.
Viola, QED! All you need to do to go faster than the speed of light and travel in time is to mix matter and anti-matter cold!
