My understanding is that the cases where Impulse went faster than light are due to mistakes or lack of care. Impulse is supposed to be slower than light. I Voyager’s technical manual, full impulse is stated to be 0.25c.
I believe Zephram Cochrane does show that warp can be used for speeds less than c, but it would seem likely to be very inefficient. Whole number warp factors seem to be the most efficient.
And this does not seem to cause time travel. Otherwise wlthey wouldn’t need more complex methods.
[Mixed fandom]Well if they routed the transporter matter stream through the Stargate they found in the old NORAD headquarters, it would work.[/mixed fandom]
Some of these folks aren’t as well known now, but among the professional/published SF authors that wrote for the original series:
Jerome Bixby
Robert Bloch
Harlan Ellison
DC Fontana
David Gerrold
Norman Spinrad
Theodore Sturgeon
At least, those are the ones I’d consider “real” SF authors. And yes, for the most part they knew something of physics and the size of space but while they might have written the bones of a story they didn’t have complete control over the scripts and the final product. Harlan Ellison was quite eloquent about his feelings regarding the “butchering” of his story “The City on the Edge of Forever”, and David Gerrold wrote an entire book (The Making of “Trouble With Tribbles”) about all the changes his initial story/script went through prior to being broadcast.
Even if a writer had said “hey, this violates the laws of physics” there was a strong possibility of being overruled by the people running the show.
Which sort of begs the question of why in 12 years did the Federation never bother to look for their lost ship?
We all know space is really really big. But short of getting shot through a wormhole or plot singularity or whatever, it’s not clear to me how Star Trek ships sometimes get so far from the rest of Federation space they can’t be found.
Also light speed is pretty freakin slow IRL. It would take like 5 hours to get from the Earth to Pluto at light speed and that’s not even leaving the solar system.
How big is Federation space relative to the rest of the Milky Way anyway?
As I understand the physics, as an object approaches the speed of light, its observed mass becomes infinitely large. As a result, an infinite amount of energy is required to make an object move at the speed of light. So, to travel at even 80% of the speed of light, the energy needed is prodigious. Warp technology, however, attains speed by warping space instead.
What I want to know is, how do the “inertia dampeners” function at sublight speeds? And how come the crew isn’t reduced to strawberry jam when they go “offline,” as happens often in Voyager?
Apparently Picard says in First Contact that it “spreads out across 8,000 light years”, which is sort of like answering what Missouri looks like on a map by saying that it encompasses millions of acres.
In the real world, the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years from end to end.
They function so that the writers’ imaginations and episode plots can develop uninhibited. LoL
A more useful and interesting answer may be found in what I found to be a very well written book, The Physics of Star Trek. I think it is well worth the read.
It appears that relative time travel affects of high speed travel in ST has been moved from c to Warp 10 in the newer warp scale introduced in STTNG. And for all Star Trek the engines have always moved the ship at the speed of script, and not anything related to physics. So with both of these factors the magic that happens at c IRC is changed to warp 10 (or some anomaly), and diminishing the importance of c to the point of irrelevance.
Just chiming in to say that relativistic effects are sort of acknowledged. In TNG, the episode with Kelsey Grammer I believe, they reference checking a “time beacon”(I’m pretty sure that was the exact term used). To me this implies at least, the recognition of the effects of traveling at relativistic speeds. Unless time loops are more common in the star trek universe than is let on. It’s the only mention of “time beacons” I know of so… for what its worth and all that.
We’ve got “time beacons” in the here and now, in the form of cell towers and the GPS navigation system; he was just referring to one of many functions their navigation buoys provide.
[/fanwank]
Which anybody with a functioning brain* just has to disregard that. Case in point, The Galileo 7. If the Enterprise was warping away form the plantet at c**, then their sensors would show no change on the planet. They couldn’t see the G7 dump its fuel and ignite it, because they were moving away at the same speed the image was hitting them.
Also, you’d never get anywhere! Four years to reach the nearest star, what(?) twelve to reach Vulcan.
Which writer said it?: an interstellar ship’s maximum speed is it’s only speed. Why go slower?
*Hollywood writers exempted
** also disregarding the reality that you can’t in real space, so just figure “warp speed of light” is different than “normal space speed of light”
Oh, I know that! Just using your post as a starting point.
I have my own “head canon” about how warp drive and more importantly the transporters work. It makes it more enjoyable than fighting the writers’ “ignorance in service of plot.”
The writers did put “Heisenberg Compensators” as a component of transporters in a nod to one of the physics problems a transporter would have. Of course, the Heisenberg compensator was never explained and essentially magic but they were thinking about it a little.
Yeah. We see this a lot when they are in the Sol System (Earth). A Borg cube flies by the “Mars Defense Perimeter,” blasts some little ships then flies to earth in a few more minutes. All seemingly at sub-light speed.