Well someone just slagged Discovery so we are probably gonna be here a while
Short Question About Warp Drive.
- Thread starter Tenacity
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Broadly speaking we seem to have seen significantly more of going to warp inside the solar system than we see it being an issue - in The Voyage Home the bird-of-prey goes to warp while it's still in Earth's atmosphere.
Best we not look too closely at the science behind that movie
Also if you're flying at warp it should be impossible to target you with weapons. Besides I doubt the weapons also travel at light speed, you should be able to randomly vary your speed by .01 of warp speeds and your enemy would keep missing you by light seconds.
Regardless, it's still evidence one way or another when we're discussing whether or not starships can or can not go to warp inside a solar system.
Thanks!
Then a minute or more later we see the same BOP leaving the area of Earth. Maybe it just takes a BOP a real long time to get to warp?
Wouldn't be a GTD thread without it...
Off topic but youre avatar pic just made me very happy
The way it relates to the topic was that I think 4 nacelle ships could do the type of warping in and warping out that OP was talking about in their first post, and in fact could do it faster, so 2 nacelle ships should have no problem.
Sorry I meant my love of Johnny 5 was off topic not your post
ah.... oops, sorry!!
yeah i love Johnny 5, I use him as my avatar on all my profiles!
It originates in TMP with Kirk's comment about risking warp drive "while still within the solar system" - however, it wasn't specified if this was because the warp engines were untested or some change in thinking in how they wanted the warp drive to work.
It was never an issue in TOS, and since then it's occasionally been a problem for plot reasons.
Yes, they can. For example in TNG: Encounter at Farpoint, the battle section of Enterprise made a tight turn while in warp. Also, in TNG: the Wounded, the Phoenix broke formation with the Enterprise to chase a Cardassian ship.
Also, I seem to recall about ENT era tech that while the Vulcan ring drive was faster than Earth and other designs, it had the downside that the ship couldn't maneuver under warp. Can't remember the source of that tidbit, though.
Not onscreen, alas.
If one wants to nitpick, the VFX in "Encounter at Farpoint" loses the warp streaks for the scene where the saucer separates and makes the U-turn. Perhaps Picard decided in favor of dropping out of warp after all, finally believing Data's warnings that this untested warp separation maneuver really was not just inadvisable but also unsurvivable?
On the other hand, Kirk commands his ship to "pivot" at warp 2 in "Elaan of Troyius". It's one of those episodes where the heroes heavily imply that warp drive gives one more maneuverability than impulse, not less.
Timo Saloniemi
If one wants to nitpick, the VFX in "Encounter at Farpoint" loses the warp streaks for the scene where the saucer separates and makes the U-turn. Perhaps Picard decided in favor of dropping out of warp after all, finally believing Data's warnings that this untested warp separation maneuver really was not just inadvisable but also unsurvivable?
On the other hand, Kirk commands his ship to "pivot" at warp 2 in "Elaan of Troyius". It's one of those episodes where the heroes heavily imply that warp drive gives one more maneuverability than impulse, not less.
Timo Saloniemi
Yeah, "Elaan of Troyius" stated outright that under impulse power Enterprise would be sluggish, which implies that maneuvering at warp is the ideal situation.
The battle in TOS: the Ultimate Computer was also done at warp speeds.
My recollection about the Vulcan ring drive was from the Star Trek Adventures RPG. "Like many Vulcan designs, the VSA survey vessel uses a toroidal subspace-field generation system in lieu of the more standard dual warp nacelle designs seen elsewhere in the Federation. This gives the vessel a highly stable warp field at the expense of being able to change course at superluminal velocities." But so far I haven't seen any confirmation of this onscreen or from the designers.
Edit: Doug Drexler just confirmed that the info didn't come from them, so it must be the game writers' own reasoning.
My recollection about the Vulcan ring drive was from the Star Trek Adventures RPG. "Like many Vulcan designs, the VSA survey vessel uses a toroidal subspace-field generation system in lieu of the more standard dual warp nacelle designs seen elsewhere in the Federation. This gives the vessel a highly stable warp field at the expense of being able to change course at superluminal velocities." But so far I haven't seen any confirmation of this onscreen or from the designers.
Edit: Doug Drexler just confirmed that the info didn't come from them, so it must be the game writers' own reasoning.
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Kinda related, why is it assumed that when a ship leaves any solar system (especially ours), that the ship will intercept the orbits of every planet in the system? Surely there are times when the orbits of any given planet will be at the opposite side of the system.
The same thing happens when a starship enters a solar system, it often passes one or more planets on the way to the destination planet.
What is worse is the fact that the planets in a star system normally orbit within the same plane, more or less, while stars are distributed in three dimensions in space. So a starshp may leave a solar system at a large angel relative tot he plane the planets orbit in, and arrive at the destination planet at a large angle to the plane that the planets there orbit in. And so a starship usually shouldn't pass planets leaving or entering a star system.
Possibly there are one or more portals in each star system, that lead to other star systems, so that it is often much faster to travel through the portals to a star system than to travel across all of the space between two star systems. And possibly those portals orbit the star in the same plane the planets do but outside the orbit of the planets. So travelling from a habitable inner planet to the portal and vice versa would require travelling though the orbits of the outer planets.
But that would not remove the problem of any specific outer planet sometimes being directly in line between the inner planet and the portal, and usually being a varying number of degrees from that line. Sometimes 45 degrees, sometimes 90 degrees, sometimes even 180 degrees. A particular outer planet would be on the other side of the Sun from the line about half of the time.
Onscreen, it's actually pretty rare for a starship to fly past planets. Major exceptions are ST:TMP, where Kirk for some reason grazes Jupiter on his way out, and "Best of Both Worlds II", where the Borg visit all the major sights of Sol before entering Earth orbit. Otherwise, ships only go near those planets they have direct business with.
We could and probably should argue away these two outliers easily enough. Kirk might have felt his untested ship would fall to pieces from under him, so flying to the civilized neighborhood of Jupiter (but OTOH away from the densely populated Earth space) for the warp engine activation event would be a safety measure. And the Borg might very well have had direct business with every single planet at Sol, maximizing their assimilation yield by fighting the Feds at Saturn, Jupiter and Mars all before tackling Earth. (It's also prudent to eliminate all mobile resistance before settling down on Earth orbit...)
We might just as well accept that starships leave Earth, DS9 and like places in all sorts of directions, warping right out of orbit directly towards the destination star. Traffic management through forcing ships to leave through a limited number of "lanes" appears insane!
Timo Saloniemi
We could and probably should argue away these two outliers easily enough. Kirk might have felt his untested ship would fall to pieces from under him, so flying to the civilized neighborhood of Jupiter (but OTOH away from the densely populated Earth space) for the warp engine activation event would be a safety measure. And the Borg might very well have had direct business with every single planet at Sol, maximizing their assimilation yield by fighting the Feds at Saturn, Jupiter and Mars all before tackling Earth. (It's also prudent to eliminate all mobile resistance before settling down on Earth orbit...)
We might just as well accept that starships leave Earth, DS9 and like places in all sorts of directions, warping right out of orbit directly towards the destination star. Traffic management through forcing ships to leave through a limited number of "lanes" appears insane!
Timo Saloniemi
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