Hi guys, in my favourite Episode of TNG (where no one has gone before) the Enterprise flew very very fast. Data said: "All over all scales". But later the Producers said: "The Enterprise didn't flew over warp 9,9999. Warp 10 isn't possible to travel. It is a neverending Speed...". What the truth?
We don't know the extent of the "scales" in question. Quite possibly the mechanism of their speedometer can't cope with very high speeds, so anything beyond warp 9.999 is a blur. But LaForge read a different set of scales that said the ship never exceeded warp 1.5. Seems the ship was doing something so alien to the speedometers aboard that it's meaningless to speak of a speed at all. After all, our heroes didn't exactly travel from A to B in time T, but more like from A to fairyland and back in no time at all. Timo Saloniemi
I know that. But La Forge said on his helm-station, that the Enterprise is faster than warp 10. Why did he said this? Warp 10 is impossible to fly ... Anyone knows that...
They came up wit the warp 10/infinity speed thing after this episode was made. And then a few years later went faster than infinity warp 10 in an episode of Voyager. And then they were doing it 100 years before in Discovery.
Just because a certain warp speed in particular such as warp ten isn't itself precisely achievable, it does not mean necessarily that other higher warp speeds aren't. Look at the tangent trigonometric function. The tangent of 90 degrees is undefined. But the tangent of 200 degrees equals the tangent of 20 degrees. Maybe some integer warp values higher than warp nine on the TNG scale, such as warp 13 in "All Good Things...," are for speeds higher than warp nine; I think that was the intention in "All Good Things...."
After twenty years of most ships doing between Warp 9.2 and Warp 9.99 it started to become tedious to rattle off warp speed. So Warp 11, 12, and 13 (and possibly 10) get tossed back in for better communications purposes. Or Starfleet redesigned the Warp Scale Chart to reflect various warp methods discovered by Starships in the 2370s to 90s and reevaluated the concept. Perhaps taking into accound various Transwarp systems and Quantum Slipstream technologies.
I fixed that in my version of the Warp Scale: https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/heres-my-warp-scale-excel-table.293802/ It's just the TNG scale, without the hand drawn curve after Warp 9. But the #'s work
As for the specific dialogue of "Where No One Has Gone Before", Data is the one to conservatively say the velocity cannot be reliably defined, while LaForge exclaims with extreme disbelief that they are passing warp ten. Evidently, LaForge is just less willing to hold back, and OTOH unwilling to speculate on why the speedometer is reading wrong; nothing suggests he would actually believe in what his displays are telling him. The next time "warp ten" becomes an issue in TNG, Riker suggests, apparently in a bout of irrelevant sophistry, that exceeding warp ten means time travel. D'oh, to quote a great thinker: if you take less than zero time to get from A to B, you time travel... But it's not as if the w10 hard limit concept were invented on the spot. It already was penned by Roddenberry before TNG hit our sets, and was the very reason LaForge was written to exclaim "We're passing warp ten!". Timo Saloniemi
So after this Episode the Producers explained that the Enterprise flew only Warp 9.9999!!!! What's right? Over Warp 10 or Warp 9.9999?
Nobody has explained anything about "Where No One Has Gone Before". As per the episode, the heroes were at loss to describe the speed; using the instruments available to them, they only came up with figures they considered nonsensical. Trek writing has not returned to the issue after this. So anything is possible. Perhaps the heroes went faster than infinitely fast (whatever that means). Perhaps they just went pretty darn fast. Perhaps the speed could be marked out in terms of warp factors. Perhaps it could not. Certainly there's nothing "wrong" about it all. Except for the very bit where LaForge clearly indicates that the speedometer reading more than warp ten must be wrong. And there's nothing wrong about that. Timo SALONIEMI
Or maybe it was evolve. After being exposed to warp ten travel for the first time, Tom Paris began to evolve into a form that would thrive on the planet that in time he and Janeway would reach and inhabit. That planet being unsuitable for long term inhabitation by non-technological Humans.
Or then salamanders or similar lounge lizards are the optimal lifeforms for dwelling inside a hotly transwarping Starfeet shuttlecraft, which is the biotope within which the evolution took place? Timo Saloniemi