Favourite Warp Effect...

I really don't understand why people like the NuTrek version. People…its the Star Wars effect without the stars.

Also, as a side note…Warp Drive is NOT FTL. Ships moving at warp speed are not moving faster than light. Warp is relativistic speed but the ships never move faster than light. Ships moving at full impulse are moving closer to genuine light speed in normal space.

 

The Alternate Universe 2009 where they just start up warp and BOOM! they're gone in a flash. I remember seeing that in IMAX and it was so loud and so awesome. It's probably also the closest thing to be "realistic" when seeing a ship going into warp.

 

I think people have explained pretty clearly why they like the effect. It conveys a sense of power and danger that has been absent from Trek when it comes to warp since the beginning.

It really doesn't remind me of the Star Wars effect.

 

In star wars, the streaking stars are only observed inside the ship. However from the outside, the ships just shoot off into the distance. While in hyperspace, the ships are inside a spinning blue tunnel. JJ Trek borrows all of that. It should not be surprising since Abrams has stated that he was always more of a Star Wars fan. Thus this is an example of him placing a star wars spin on a star trek concept.

 

Using a spinning tube of light to portray various means of space travel isn't unique to Star Wars. Off the top of my head I'd point to the credits from the current version of Doctor Who, the Borg transwarp network from Voyager and the wormhole from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (also used in the TNG episode The Price).

 

Power and danger? Never really got that vibe at all. Maybe the plot usage of it kinda undermined that when they're instantaneously traveling anywhere, transwarp beaming and warping right into gas giants.

It just seemed excessively flashy like basically.... everything else.

 

But wormholes and the Borg transwarp network weren't?

 

It reminded me of the hyperspace effect in Stargate. "Excessively flashy" to me is the TMP effect.

 

Tastes vary. I'm with Kai Winn on the wormhole bit... feeling nothing when I see that spiral of color and light. The Voyager/Borg transwarp bit wasn't quite in your face as the NuTrek one. I absolutely didn't like the TMP effect at all and would say that rates towards the bottom of my list. Excessively flashing -and- dated.

 

Yup, the hyperspace effect in later season of Stargate, particularly when they started using the Daedalus class, was pretty awesome.

 

There's still a rubber band effect going on in the 2009 version too.

If you run it frame by frame during the fleet warp scene you'll see that, artistically, the ships aren't just flashing their engines and disappearing, there's a very quick stretch before they vanish completely...

 

Yup, and the viewpoint of the bridge crew as the bridge, and the saucer section outside, rapidly stretch forward as the stars lense around them.

 

I personally like NX-01 entering warp the best.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG_uTCNWcm8[/yt]

Followed by the ST2009 Warp effect.
[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHyy6F_GgsM[/yt]

I don't care for the stretch blue pixie-dust effect added in STID. (Although I believe it was for a 3D effect)

 

Which is what I like.

NuTrek is WAY to flashy..

 

So, absense of effort versus effort and realism, nice to know.

 

Did you really use the word realism to describe faster than light travel?

 

It's not really faster than light if you're warping space.

For me, I actually prefer the stretch effect...

 

Quite a few of the ideas about warp drive involve the ship not actually crossing the speed-of-light threshold, but just appearing to do so by moving through a shortcut in space-time. In Trek, this shortcut could be a multilayered subspace (or warp) field.

 

The novels though not canon, make this pretty explicit. In the Destiny series, the Coulmbia's warp engines are damaged in deep space and it is there for forced to push its impulse engines up to the speed of light while acknowledging that its not fast enough to reach a nearby star system.

 

Off topic but I don't know where else to ask this:

Just seen the Enterprise episode where THE Columbia is launched.

Yes, it uses the crappy Ent warp effect but is it actually wise to warp out of the docking bay?
Considering depending on the episode, warping inside a solar system is either a massive issue or no problem at all (Voyager I guess has no issues with warping out of orbit in its title sequence...EVERY WEEK! ), warping out of a docking bay has to bring with it SOME kind of issues, surely?