There is a speculative notion of something called an “Alcubierre drive” which works by contracting space-time in front of your ship while expanding it behind your ship; this could very well be referred to as a “warp drive”, since you would in fact be warping (distorting) space. If you could actually warp spacetime in this way, then the crew of your hypothetical starship would in fact not experience time dilation.
As Chronos points out, proposals for ways of actually “contracting space-time in front of your ship while expanding it behind your ship” are roughly on a par with “a wizard does it!”, so (alas) there is no reason to think the Universe will ever actually let us go gallivanting about the Galaxy at warp speeds. There’s also that whole “FTL=time travel” difficulty (although to be fair to Star Trek, time travel featured repeatedly in its various incarnations).
Oh, wait a sec–full impulse is not the same as warp drive.
I knew that. :smack:
But I don’t get your next remark: the Enterprise could travel at sublight speeds as well as warp, so are you saying any sublight ONLY vessel? Sure, I would then agree, but we weren’t talking about exclusively sublight vessels, were we?
I get that the speed of light is still to slow for the distances involved, but it wouldn’t be for SOME travel.
Note: Kirk did NOT fall in love with Miss Spoiled Bitch Princess With No Table Manners. He let her down easy because he didn’t want to crush her spirit. He’s nice like that. IMO he rarely fell in love with any of the female aliens–but he sure did enjoy them. He loved Carol Marcus, Mirramonee (spelling?), Edith Keeler (suppresses gag reflex) and maybe one other (I’m not counting alternate reality Antonia). I think he had a soft spot for his yeomen, Janice Rand ( he certainly found her attractive–I wish they had explored that a bit more in subsequent episodes). 3-4 really serious relationships spanning a 20+ year career sounds about right to me. YMMV.
Not exactly; it says you can’t accelerate past lightspeed. So you also have ideas like tachyons, which never go slower than light, and the idea of somehow “jumping” past the limit without accelerating past it. And of course wormholes.
Wasn’t that about how fast the enemy ship was going, in THE THOLIAN WEB?
“Mister Spock, a vessel approaching on an intercept vector.”
“Status, Mister Sulu.”
“Range, two hundred thousand kilometers. Velocity, zero point five one C.”
That sounds right. Think the economic part had something to do with collecting interest earned over decades by investing on a planet, then returning several decades later local time due to time spent at warp.
And even that makes no sense. As long as you apply thrust you will increase your speed. It’s not like there is friction or air resistance to provide a top speed. I never liked Star Trek or Star Wars or any other “science” fiction that ignores science.
And the trouble with that piece of dialogue is that long before you’ve finished announcing that something 200,000 km away is approaching at 0.51c, it’s right next to you. :smack:
Going at exactly light speed, unless you play with some sort of warp, has the problem that time stops and you need infinite energy for any mass. That’s why photons are massless.
I read the first one of those, but have never gotten the stomach for the second. All I remember is that Busby must have been paid by the world - in this book Ghod forbid he skips any trip to the bathroom a character makes. I don’t remember if the book had Faster than Light drive, but it sure had a Slower than Life narrative style.
Impulse drive is clearly not a standard reaction drive, since no way are they carrying enough reaction mass to accelerate something as big as the Enterprise to 0.25 c, and nearly instantly also. The least likely thing is that the Captain can order “full stop” for a vessel moving that fast and get it.
There are quite a few. Tau Zero by Poul Anderson is one that is all about relativity. L. Sprague de Camp had the Viajens series which explored the problems of taking years to make the trip between stars. As I understood it, he didn’t believe in ftl travel and refused to put it in a story.
She’s pretty, but high, high maintenance. Not Kirk’s type. He likes 'em feisty and independent.
Ahahah–Kirk is beyond Judaism and religion. He’s a 23rd century explorer. And unlike most Jewish men, he never, ever mentions his mother and he never calls her.
I’ve never really felt that Star Wars was properly classified as sci-fi. It’s space opera, or fantasy set in space, or something like that. Lucas usually didn’t even try to make up some technobabble to explain stuff.
But perhaps they account for that–Chekov says to the Captain, " The wessel is 200,000 keelometers away at blahblahblah" having estimated that it is actually 600,000km away, but knowing that by the end of his sentence their ship will be only 200,000 km away…
How is 0.5 FASTER than 1.0?
