I thought I'd share my pet theory about the 25th-century warp scale recalibration, to see whether anyone else had similar thoughts (also, maybe someone wants to use this in their fan-fiction or something, idk) I know this was discussed by scientific advisor Andre Bormanis and he suggested that the scale was recalibrated to make Warp 15 equate to infinite velocity and that Warp 13 on the new scale equated to roughly Warp 9.95 on the old, but that doesn't really make sense to me. First of all, I can't think of any sensible mathematical function that maps 13 to 9.95 and 15 to 10, especially if we want to (as we presumably do) map 1 to 1 so that Warp 1 is still c. Secondly, throwing out the 9.95 figure, if you are going to simply stretch the scale so as to still have a Warp 10-like "infinite barrier" somewhere on the scale, the only obvious thing to do would be just to multiply the whole thing and scale it evenly. The problem is that this would result in relatively slow and conventional warp speeds suddenly being much higher. Warp 13 divided by the rescaling coefficient that moves 10 to 15 (so, 1.5) is 8 2/3. Why exactly anyone would want to go at exactly warp 8 2/3 so often that it merits being given an integer designation is anyone's guess. In fact, we know that integer warp factors on the TNG scale are more energy efficient than fractional ones, so such a scale would be tremendously inconvenient, as 5 out of the 9 usable integer warp factors would now end in .5 - and what's even worse is that old Warp 1 is new Warp 1.5, meaning that Warp 1 to 1.5 describes sub-light speeds. That's...just dumb. So, my solution: Don't rescale Warp 1-8.99999..., but adopt a definition where for Warp >= 9, the new warp factor is defined as 9 - log_10(10-X), where X is the old warp factor. Sounds complicated and random, but what this means is that Warp 9.9 -> Warp 10, Warp 9.99 -> Warp 11, Warp 9.999 -> Warp 12 and so on. This seems like a sensible change - as maximum speeds kept increasing, Captains would grow tired of saying things like "Warp 9.999". It also removes any kind of infinite barrier, which just isn't helpful (so now you can have arbitrarily large warp speeds; a new warp factor of 50 would simply be a 9 followed by 51 decimal 9s in the old system. Crucially, no warp factor would be more complicated than it used to be. Granted, technically the Intrepid max cruise speed of 9.975 would now be 10.60205999132796..., but obviously this could just be stated as 10.6 without much of an impact; calculating 10.6 in reverse gives us 9.97488..., which is clearly close enough. Similarly for Intrepid's max rated speed, 9.992, we can state this as 11.1, which reverse-calculates to 9.9920567..., which again seems close enough. So basically this recalibration keeps existing integer warp speeds as they are, but makes higher warp speeds a whole lot easier to express. Thoughts?
I still prefer my way, Take the TNG scale, chop off the hand drawn curve after Warp 9. Keep using the same formula for Warp 0-9 and scale onto infinity. It's super simple and inherently has major backwards compatibility. Gets rid of the ever increasing decimal place that isn't intuitive to most people other than Trekkies like us.
What I want to know is what the "Warp Scale" is for other species. I highly doubt everybody agreed to the "Federation Warp Scale" like most countries have agreed to the Metric System here on Earth.
I'm pretty sure that's gonna come out as roughly the same thing as my solution, except done graphically rather than numerically? I'm tempted to actually sit down and do the math (assuming the Berry-Shields equation is good for the hand-drawn bit) but it's incredibly complicated. Re: Alien warp scales, I'd assume that depending on your warp drive technology, the relative efficiency will differ from that of Starfleet drives, and you would probably want to define your integer warp factors to correlate to the high-efficiency points like Starfleet does. What's interesting there is that in the TNG era Starfleet's warp drive configuration results in exactly 9 points of optimum efficiency (not counting idle), which explains why infinity is set at warp 10 because beyond warp 9 there are no more energy-efficient points with current drive technology. But that need not be true for all races' drives, some might have only 3 such points, and depending on how those are configured (maybe they only run stably *at* those points), perhaps that race would then use letters to designate their warp levels rather than numbers. So like "Set a course, warp B." Except of course in their alphabet, not ours.
It is also possible that they discovered a new set of "optimum efficiency points" that allow for higher speeds that the traditional Warp 9. If so , they might establish a new base from 11 to 19 with 10 and 20 being "infinite" (Daystrom Institute website's method), and each time they find a new set of these they add more numbers 21-30, 31-40. With the time needed to get to place shrinking rapidly. Were it use to take say 300 years to get to Andromeda Galaxy at the old Warp Factor 11, with the upper Warp 30s you could get there in hours.
What I don't like about that is the idea of a fundamental property of warp physics being so convenient to humans. We have ten fingers so we count decimally, and whaddya know warp levels come in sets of 10, every 10th of which is an infinite barrier. Why? Why 10? Why is it a fundamental property to begin with? Why wouldn't the energy efficiency of generating the warp field depend on the warp drive design? It all seems too convenient and "on rails" to me. It almost requires Intelligent Design (which, of course, being a fictional universe, it *has*, but you don't want it to seem like that in-universe or every rational character will have to be religious!)
Why do you think I got rid of the hand drawn curve up to infinity after Warp 9. It was silly, and FTL speeds above that have been recorded during TNG/DS9/VOY era that already fit on my scale. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1sIjk8m9-0GH-OlgXImLTiPJTf23LJ6al I've already filled out my Excel SpreadSheet with what it would look like along with how fast things would have to travel.
Why does spacetime have four dimensions? Is that evidence of intelligent design, because humans have four limbs? Of course not.
You work with what you are given. If warp power has 9 or 10 convenient power troughs than that's what it has....you work from there going forward and upwards in speed and power in a way that makes sense without forcing a starship to have more and more power than the matter-antimatter reactors can possibly give. Instead you make it more efficient to use the power they have or increase the number of warp cores providing power the warp nacelles.
No need to assume that. After all, the first set would be one of nine factors, not ten - and there's no telling what the second set would be like. Or the third. Or the seventeenth. Do these power consumption minima or efficiency maxima or whatnot really come in sets, or is it just that our brave engineers haven't been able to to build engines that could test the higher factors yet, even though those lie along a nicely consistent curve? This, too, is possible, although I personally prefer the idea of esoterically arranged groupings and maximal weirdness. Timo Saloniemi
I've never done the math in detail, but I think it would make a certain amount of sense that WP13 is an attempt to accommodate speeds faster than subspace radio (Warp 9.9999 or just under 200k x c). The endurance speed of the "quantum slipstream drive" claimed to be just over this (~241k x c), on-screen support for no less than 466k x c and no greater than 1.2M x c is available for "Dauntless" (the quick hop scene), and the final Captain's Log mentions three hundred light years in one hour, or about 2.7M x c).
Why does there have to be anything recalibrated at all? Warp 10, 11, 12 etc...could just plain and simple be shorthands for Warp 9.98753, 9.99345, 9.9994553 etc., and Warp 1-9 just the regular TNG-Style factors.
No re-calibration is suggested up to warp 9. But clearly if warp 10 is "infinite" speed, than anything else has to be slower than "infinite". So some sort of adjustment needs to be made after Warp 9. The question is, do you make a new warp 10? Do you ignore Warp 10 (leave it at "infinite" and just make keep the up to Warp.9.9 and then just to Warp 10.1 (without a Warp 10), or would Warp 11 be the first new number and you start over like its the new "Warp 1" on the scale going up post-Warp 9, or 9.9? The only people that really need to know how it work are Starfleet engineers, captains, first officers, Conn, and Ops. And only the engineers need to understand it at all. The rest just have to have an idea of how fast they are going so they can get places.
Who was the wise guy who thought Warp 10 was "Infinite Speed"? And thought it was a good thing? That creates a un-natural distortion along the numerical line. The TNG formula was fine, just stop with the bloody hand drawn curve up to infinity after Warp 9. Let the TNG formula flow naturally. -_-
AFAIK, Sternbach & Okuda (in the TNG:TM) were the first to put into the "public domain". However, IIRC it didn't become primary canon until Threshhold (VOY) about a decade later.
In-universe, it of course was the Chief of SF R&D Manfred "Manny" Fein-McHines. Ach, the Highland sense of humor... And Riker made offhand mention of it in "Time Squared" already: time travel would result from going faster than Warp 10, which is logically consistent if Warp 10 means zero travel time from A to B and any excesses thus result in negative travel time. Timo Saloniemi
1. the "time traveling" Picard and the "new warp scale" was all a Q dream, again, or 2. In the end, the Q's judgement was that humanity does show promise and are worthy to expand into the galaxy. Q allows humanity to best continue in Picard's current TNG universe which will not be the fake past/present/future dream Q presented to Picard. Why was this era in human history important to the Q? Since Q started with the Borg, I'd say the Q decided that Borg were not worthy to continue and humanity was more worthy. Something needed to be the other side of the scale of justice. With no humans, the Borg conquer the galaxy and maybe the universe. It was a simple binary choice.) The Borg technology is now in humans hands which will allow humanity to more quickly expand into the galaxy and maybe the universe.
My understanding is each warp integer is a power trough. It takes less energy to do warp 5 than warp 4.9. During TNG they had only discovered power troughs up as far as warp 9, therefore the next known "trough" would be warp 10. However lets say that 9.975 is say 3,000c in a given area of space, and used 3.8 TW (compared to say 1.5TW at Warp 9) Perhaps by the AGT future engines had got fast enough that they could travel at 5,000c, and found that once they hit 4000c the energy use dropped from 4TW to 2TW. That new threshold would be warp 10, and later thresholds at warp 11, 12, and 13.