Watching Star Trek this evening on TNN, a question hit me.
The Enterprise is capable of traveling at several ‘warp’ speeds - Warp 1 to Warp 9-point-something.
What prevents them from traveling at Warp 9-point-something all the time? I assume they have to worry about fuel, but has the series ever stated what the most efficient warp speed is? They seem to travel at Warp 2 most of the time, but in emergencies they use Warp 9-point-something. But occasionally they’ll use something else, like Warp 6. Any particular logic to this?
Apparantly, energy needs (and presumably wear on the engine parts) increase exponentially with speed - warp 9 uses up more antimatter per light-year travelled, or something like that.
Seriously though…I always assumed that the faster you go, the faster the dilithium crystals wear out, so you get better mileage if you maintain a moderate speed.
Star trek technology is quite often not consistant with itself, let alone the laws of physics. The basic operation of a star trek starship has many parallels with old submarines. Combine that with the fictional writing of people who may not be the wisest people on the planet with respect to the laws of physics, and keep in mind that it’s not the same person writing each episode so the characteristics of the starship can actually vary a bit. And of course if you start going too fast someone has to say “she canna take much more capn” in an appropriate scottish accent.
In TOS, a warp was the square of the speed of light
Warp one = C
Warp two = CC
Warp three = CC*C
etc.
They also had a limit of warp nine; the concept was that it was the top speed if you opened the throttle all the way. In TNG, they upped the limit a bit.
<nitpick>
My TOS technical manual places Warp speed as the cube of the number.
Therefore Warp 1 is C
Warp 2 is 8C
Warp 3 is 27C
up to Warp 9 which is 729*C
</nitpick>
Sorry about that.
That’s clearly inconsistent with TNG because early in the series someone says they’re travelling at ‘half-impulse’ and Riker mentions that as being 3 times C. There have clearly been some changes made to the scale but I don’t have a NextGen technical manual here.
Are you sure it was three times C, Johnathan? I remember hearing that Voyager went at half the speed of light at full impulse, and if memory serves, it was a faster ship than the Enterprise. Maybe it was 1/3 C? I know that it has been established that warp 1 is the speed of light.
And as for the reason that the speed varies has something to do with the fact that in TNG and all subsequent series (except Enterprise) the Federation put a “speed limit” on it’s ships of warp 6, since it was found that high warp speeds damage sub-space, so higher warp speeds were saved for emergencies.
I’m pretty certain that Riker says, “3 times light speed” in that sequence. But I’ll go back and check. It’s a bridge scene in the second season somewhere. And early episode, I think.
Of course, we’re looking for consistency where there may be none.
As others have said, all the Star Trek series have played fast and loose with their science.
But basically, a warp drive is supposed to work not by newtonian physics (i.e. it doesn’t ‘push’ the ship thru space) but by folding or ‘warping’ space itself. A common analogy is to think of space as a piece of paper. You create a fast shortcut by folding it on itself. The matter/anti-matter stuff is what’s used to generate the enormous energy it requires to warp space. So the engines still have to work harder to make the ship go faster.
Also, this from startrek.com: Each increase of one warp is computed geometrically. Warp ten is theorized to be infinite and with current technology, unobtainable.
In the current series Enterprise (which takes place before the 60s series) they’ve got engines which can only generate enough power to reach warp 5.
In the original Kirk/Spock series ships could cruise pretty much indefinately at warp 6. They could reach a maximum speed of warp 8 but only for a limited time (before me engines blow apart!!!)
In an episode of The Next Generation they introduced a ‘speed limit’ of warp 5 because it was discovered that speeds over that were ‘polluting’ the space time continuom. This wasn’t really science. It was just a thinly veiled tree-hugger episode.
In Star Trek: Voyager (ick!) their ship was of a new design which gave a hoot, and didn’t pollute above warp 5 and which could also reach a maximum speed of warp 9.975 for limited times. Unfortunately U.S.S. Voyager also seems to have a lot of lead in its food replicators because everyone on board is an idiot.
As I said the writers don’t sweat the details but this stuff does have some basis in theoretical physics. Pretty good for a 1960s TV show.
Claiming that Star Trek is internally inconsistent is a valid complaint; claiming that it’s inconsistent with the laws of Physics is not. Just by going Warp 1 they’ve violated them. But even its internal consistency is not that bad. In the three original Star Wars movies alone there are more inconsistencies than in all of Star Trek, and there are what, 600 episodes of that?
But anyway, yes, I agree with Jonathan Chance about Warp speeds. It’s always (at least since TNG) the cube of the number, until you get to 10. Instead of being Warp 10 = 1000c, it’s infinity. This is not a smooth function, and not something that would be done in real life, but it’s not terribly counter-intuitive. I seem to recall that TOS did not follow the convention, but that Warp 9 has always been regarded as “really really fast”. The explanation was that somewhere in the 80 years between the first two series, the scale was redefined. Enterprise, though, is so far more consistent with TNG rules than TOS rules.
In the TNG episode where Picard is trying to put together the DNA strands to solve the puzzle of their origin(bad description), they do many Warp 9 jumps. At the end of the show, it was mentioned that the ship had to go to a Starbase for reconditioning because of the multiple jumps. So maybe you can get to speed once with no problem, just don’t keep doing it.
Tucker was right, though. The speeds are either:
[ul][li]Fast enough to arrive just in time.[/li][li]Not quite fast enough to arrive in time (forcing the away team to solve their own damn problems).[/li][li]Irrelevant. [/li][/ul]
The worst example I ever saw was in a novel called “War Drums”. The Enterprise-D gets yanked away for some stupid diplomatic mission and can’t get back in time to rescue the away team from the giant tidal wave created by the massive earthquake. Guess what? The warring factions must now work together to survive. Oy.
I find this the result of a mistaken memory, because just about every other mentioning of impulse speeds puts it at decidedly less than the speed of light. For example, in the TNG episode Arsenal of Freedom, the Enterprise entered a planet’s atmosphere at 1/4 impulse… that would be 1.5 times the speed of light if half impulse were 3C. The shockwave from such an entry would have decimated the planet’s surface and created a fireball that would have engulfed the Enterprise… yet in the episode, we see a small flaring of the shields that barely obscure the ship.
Clearly, Impulse power is nowhere near the speed of light.
As for Warp… in the TNG episode Bloodlines, it’s mentioned that Warp 9 would travel 300 billion kilometers in 20 minutes. That translates to about 830C. And let’s not forget the good ol’ episode Where None Have Gone Before, where Geordi states that it would take three centuries to travel 2.7 million lightyears, which comes out to about 9000C.
In Encounter at Farpoint, it’s mentioned that the Enterprise’s maximum Warp is 9.3, although 9.5 is available for short bursts.
