I know all about science. Travelling at warp 10 will in fact trigger a mutation into a rock entity. Star Trek insulted the scientific community with this salamander nonsense. Seriously, rock entities. That's a proven fact.
Warp 10 is a just confusing term for infinite speed. It's like assigning infinity an actual number when counting - you're just begging for it to be misinterpreted as something you can reach or surpass.
I had as good a laugh as the next fan watching Paris turn into a salamander. But it had many logical fallacies, the biggest is that they went infinite speed, and it had the ethical problem of just abandoning the ridiculous salamander babies. I'm thinking of it the same way I think of the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special. It's more fun than most episodes, but screws up the broader story. So I don't count it. And while nature abhors simplicity, I happen to enjoy it. So I choose to count infinity as Warp Infinity on the warp scale. And it's way faster than warp 10, and even faster than ludicrous speed.
I think I understand the science of warp ten plus now: Warp 10 turns you into a salamander Warp 11 into a turtle. I mean the weird part is when you start growing a shell... Warp 12 into a (giant) clam, oddly enough also a state of permanent happiness... It's not well explained though Warp 13 into an octopus: By the time they got to the "all good things" third period they had invented a new device called the Cousteau compensator (named after Jacques-Yves Cousteau who incidentally had a pet octopus that he called Marcel after Marcel Marceau, because of "The Silent World" that was his nickname for the ocean.... So you see, "silent" "mime", the connection is obvious) that allowed you to reach warp 13 WITHOUT turning into an octopus... And that is why they could travel safely at warp 13 in All Good Things...
Haha! Turning into a clam, and a Cousteau Compensator! Great! As for the sense of humor of the person who invented the warp scale, I imagine the first person who invented it in the Kirk era knew the general concept of logarithmic scales but not how they usually work. Then 20 years later, somebody else thought "Oh boy. They're going so fast, they must be near infinity. Why don't I just round warp 10 up to infinity. That should do nicely."
Yes, do not forget that in the same show Janeway thought you could just punch a hole through the event horizon of a black hole.
The writers of Voyager aren't guilty of inventing that idea though. It was the writers of the Technical Manual. The writers of Voyager are only guilty of putting the idea into a show. Every show has done lots of ridiculous stuff, and lots of dull stuff, but more good stuff than anything else. By the way, I don't remember Janeway ever punching a hole in a black hole. I'll take your word for it.
When was there ever a black hole in Voyager? You mean Parallax? I think one of the writers didn't understand that a quantum singularity was another name for a black hole and he thought he just made up science words.
Fun story! There's an equation floating round which gives fairly accurate numbers for the warp factors on the TNG scale in terms of c (the original curve for this was drawn freehand on graph paper by the production team so there's some minor differences). I modified the equation to set 20 at infinite speed rather than 10, but keeping warps 1 to 9 more-or-less the same. Doing this makes warp 13 approximately the same as warp 9.975 on the TNG scale. This "AGT" scale makes sense to avoid the silliness of warp 9.9xx factors becoming increasingly common, especially as on the TNG scale tiny numerical differences in incremental speeds above warp 9.9 result in significant speed differences (for example, warp 9.985 is about 65% faster than warp 9.975). The TNG scale introduces more problems than it solves in my opinion, especially as ships for some reason got faster between 2360 and 2370 than they did between 2260 and 2360...
Can you show us your version of the equation? If I understand it correctly, the original Warp scale was speed = warp^3. And then the TNG era warp scape was speed = warp^3.3 until some undisclosed point around 9.9, where they jump the shark and head to infinity.
I think warp 10 is 'infinite speed' and you can get 'past' warp 10. Let me draw a comparison with light speed. In Einsteinian physics, lightspeed is an insurmountable barrier(requires infinite energy), and it is 'infinite speed' too, in the sense that those traveling at lightspeed would experience no passage of time getting from A to B. Yet with warp, it's possible to go 'past' lightspeed.. Similarly, proper transwarp engines might have a way a way of 'circumventing' the infinite warp 10 barrier, going in a subspace domain that allows for a higher speed/energy expenditure efficiency. Transwarp could be to warp as warp is to impulse. Of course, it is required to dismiss Threshold in this line of thought since there infinite speed is actually attainable, so apparently doesn't cost infinite energy, and why would you want to mess with transwarp if you could just as easily get infinite speed? (I'm sure those mutation side effects could be solved with a little more research, and they are reversible in any case).
I could show you the octopus warp 13 equation and you'd see, it's right there in the formula. I just need to find it, it's in some of my old stuff still in moving boxes from the last time. I'll get back to you as soon as I find it, promise. I mean it's well known in Starfleet, it's called the cephalopod effect... You need to count your limbs every morning, as soon as you find more than four, you have to call your doctor right away. He'll know what to do. Believe me. Don't worry if people with a big net come to your house. It's part of the healing process.