One problem with really high warp speed values starts to become the great risk of running into things. The navigation computer and the sensors all are so good. USS Voyager's problem could have been speed related, but it might more have been map related. Warping at extremely high velocities into uncharted space isn't like dusting crop, after all.
I actually figured the problem with traveling at high warp speeds was two-fold- one, the power required to maintain the speeds would cause the M/AM reactor to run at ever higher power levels, until containment was an issue, ergo Scotty sweating bullets. The second would be that at higher speeds the navigational deflector would have a harder and harder job of protecting the ship from whatever was in its path in the ISM (interstellar medium)- you only have so much range/power and I would think that there would be limits of some kind. Not to mention the type of energy problems that the old article, "Biaxial warp pods: The 'new' warp drive" talked about.
A lot of the higher than warp drive style FTL systems seem to take place in some form of "other space" more devoid of stars, planets, and other things the ship might run into. While a starship warps in a subspace bubble, it seems to pass realspace object normally and could run into them easily. Transwarp, Quantum Slipstream, and some of the others seem to be on other space realms, aside from the Voth's transwarp drives and the Traveler's intergalactic warp drive formula. And even thoughs might be outside real space in order to avoid hitting stuff.
It could be that ships really travel through subspace while at warp, but subspace fields can be impacted by things in normal space. Conversely, things moving through subspace may also cause disturbances in normal space (the occasionally encountered subspace distortions perhaps).
No, it assumes that relativity of ANY kind is basically correct (Einsteinian, Lorentzian, Maxwellian, take your pick) and that the normal laws of motion are at least slightly applicable to starships. Special relativity doesn't apply to warp drive because warp fields represent a non-inertial reference frame and would therefore fall into General Relativity. Cool. But the basic concept of relativity still applies, and is the cornerstone of all modern physics including and not limited to Einstein's thoeries. That being, that all measurements are only said to be valid in the specific coordinate system of the observer. Lorentzian Relativity, as an example, postulates time as a fixed coordinate and instead reconciles observational differences through contraction of distance rather than the dilation of time. Warp drive could very well obey a Lortentzian system, considering how often we have seen the Enterprise either accidentally fold, twist or even tear space with its warp drives. Measured relative to WHAT? The center of the galaxy? The planet they left? The luminiferous aether? That's kind of how it's depicted because the writers Did Not Do The Research, but it makes a lot more sense if you simply retcon it as a measure of acceleration and the exact flight dynamics of warp travel are simply not fully or accurately described (which, either way, they're NOT). And yet the odds of accidentally running into an object in the kuiper belt or the oort cloud are astronomically small, even at FTL velocity. We call it a "cloud" but the average distance between any two objects in the oort cloud is something like 200 AUs even even at its inner edges. The Kuiper Belt is even more diffuse; despite its far greater mass, its density is less than a thousandth of the asteroid belt, where accidental collisions are already incredibly unlikely. Which renders the ship totally immune to those kinds of problems. As it stands, a single particle of gas moving at the speed of light (hydrogen or helium atoms, let's say) is not actually that big of an issue. Conventional space ships with no shielding get hit by those all the time in the form of alpha and beta radiation. Cosmic radiation is believed to be lighter particles at much higher energies. Traveling at very high FTL velocities would simply add energies to those particles and they would strike the hull as a constant rain of high-energy radiation, and a shielded starship is fully capable of just shrugging that off without a problem. There are all kinds of flight sims and space sims where you can put some of these assumptions about speed and distance to the test. Celestia is a good one for this; pick a random direction and fly there, and you're unlikely to run into anything AT ALL, even if you have all the known asteroids and comets plotted. The same thing happens in Elite Dangerous, which does a pretty good idea of simulating the positions of asteroid belts and even the Jupiter Trojans in the Sol System; it turns out that, when cruising through an unfamiliar system, accidental encounters with planets are not only very rare, they're also totally avoidable with the smallest of course corrections, and are actually kind of difficult to pull off if you don't already have the planet/asteroid's orbital data in your computer. Space is BIG. Planets, in the grand scheme of things, are tiny, tiny things.
See above. Space is very, very big, and the objects within it are relatively tiny. It is extraordinarily difficult to arrange a collision with an object while traveling at any significant speed, so having it happen by ACCIDENT would be a one in fifty trillion coincidence. It kind of IS, actually. Specifically, it's like dropping a basketball out of the back of a C-130 and trying to hit a basket at the edge of a cornfield from 50,000 feet. The odds of that happening by ACCIDENT are too small to even take seriously.
The speeds suggested are higher than two light-years an hour, and praying that their sensors can see ahead of them far enough to dodge star systems they may not have charted at all in the Delta Quadrant. Back home, in the relatively charted Alpha and Beta Quadrants, those speeds might be easy, but in the basically unexplored side on the galaxy, such speeds might be considered too dangerous. This would be a valid excuse for USS Voyager to be one of the faster ships in Starfleet, but still have a 70 year trip home as its baseline course from its relatively unknown position in the Delta Quadrant back to Earth, while the USS Enterprise, a hundred or so years earlier, could make it from Earth to the Core regions of the Galaxy within months at the most, if not days or hours.
But you can see stars. From hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of light-years away. The trick to not hitting a star system is not pointing at a star. You don't have to be in charted space to see if there's a star directly ahead of you on your course. You can look out a window. And before you mention "speed of light delay", you can also identify stars that are likely to be undergoing rapid change in the astronomically-near future. We can do that pretty well today, by the 24th century they'd have to be even better at it. What's the problem with just saying that "one of the fastest ships in Starfleet" really does mean "about 1000 light years a year", and just ignoring the other earlier references where the specific values given weren't actually relevant to the important parts of the episodes in question?
First of all why would you need to dodge a star system? It's not exactly a solid object with the planets all bumping up against each other like a sack of baseballs. The amount of collidable surface area in a flat disk 80 AUs in diameter is less than a fraction of a trillionth of a percent of the entire area of the disk, so you would have to be ridiculously unlucky to hit anything in that system. Put this another way: even Galaxies, which appear pretty solid from a distance, are so diffuse that should two galaxies collide (as Andromeda and the Milky Way eventually will) none of the stars or planets in those galaxies will actually hit each other. Second of all, it shouldn't really be all that difficult to see what solar systems are directly in your path in the first place, considering that any star large enough to have a planetary system or even a dusty disk of its own will be visible to an ordinary telescope from 10,000 light years away. Just take a deep field long-exposure photograph of the space directly in front of you (say, one arcsecond should do it) and if you're so worried about passing through any of those systems, just aim for the dark patch of sky between the visible stars.
You've gotta make those fans work for it! Never mind that they give people both the distance from Earth and the time it would take to get back, thus allowing viewers to easily calculate the effective velocity. The amount of effort the viewer has to expend to determine the effective velocity of the ship must always be greater that the amount of effort the writers put into maintaining internal consistency with regards to velocity in the first place. If 1000c is how fast your starship goes, will the audience be able to tell that 1500c is really fast? I don't know. Let's just call those two speeds FTL Charlie and FTL Omega. Then we won't even have to think about how fast those are. Problem solved.
Considering all the random stuff Enterprise (any of them) runs into between star systems without even seeing them on sensors until they run into it, I would think that extreme speeds in uncharted space would be unwise. If the navigation defector or shields don't pop up in time, an object the size of a microchip could ventilate a starships and rupture the warp core. Voyager's seemingly more lax speeds of roughly 1000 light years a year verse whatever Enterprise goes at to get not only around Federation Space by also to the Galactic Core regions from Earth within the span of a few days, would make sense. After charting a region, the particle density can be identified, and safer paths calculated so that a ship can travel faster in some regions that in others. No to mention the whole subspace eddies, ion storms, and other subspace related things that seem to get the drop on out heroes regardless of how advanced their sensors are.
...honestly, like what? How often does that trope actually happen? Because just offhand, I'm struggling to think of what examples you're talking about. Especially if you're talking specifically about an object randomly on their flight path, rather than just a) suddenly in sensor range or b) having its own motive power and moving into the Enterprise's flight path.
@Idran, the funny thing is, all these excuses illustrate why we don't need a Warp Scale. The star systems may only be 1000 light days apart as-the-space-crow-flies, but it'll take us 3 days to get there at maximum warp (1000c) because we have to go around the dark nebula. Or it could be ion storms, or subspace distortions, or interstellar mine fields (no, wait, that's Galaxy Quest). Bottom line is that if your fans are paying enough attention to notice inconsistencies in real units of distance and velocity, fake ones will only trick them for so long. Might as well just confess to fans that you screwed up the numbers and say you'll get it right in the next episode.
99% of the things they encounter in deep space are things they are specifically aiming for or things that are going out of their way to deliberately intercept them... how "random" could it be? I feel like they could have gotten away with this excuse in the 80s when people were still doing complex math on slide rules and adding machines. These days, though, you can pop a couple of numbers into an excel spreadsheet and figure out exactly what you want to know in about fifteen seconds. Just enter a distance, enter a speed, and there's your [tech] dialog for how long it'll take you to cover that distance. So, accelerating at 200 Gs, how long would it take to travel from Earth to Vega? Answer: 127 days, give or take a few hours. So traveling at about 200 C (neighborhood of warp 6 on the usual scale) how long would it take at a constant velocity? Answer: about 42 days, give or take a few hours. You do a few of these, and you start to notice that a travel time of just a few hours pretty much never works for traveling any appreciable distance. That any sort of cruising velocity other than a full-tilt sprint is going to take a couple of days because space is really, really, BIG. So the better solution is to just adjust your storylines accordingly: either built the long travel time into the story itself, making it a plot device rather than something to ignore, OR re-work the premise of stories so that all of the action takes place within a single star system or close enough to it that you never need to travel anywhere else.
I don't really think this gives anything in either case. The exact speed rarely narratively matters, so there's no real difference between saying "warp 3" or saying "30c" except that the latter's easier for nerds like us to get mad at when it goes wrong while the former's easier for us to make up justifications for. But honestly, we shouldn't be the ones they write for anyway because we're such a small fraction of the audience, so both of those are irrelevant when it comes to how the general audience would take it. And since it doesn't actually matter to the story, it's all a big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ in the end either way I'd think.
Why hasn't anyone mentioned "Cochrenes"? Thats the simplistic Faster than light unit in comparison to "C - Light speed". Warp is probably more to do with a relation to subspace and reflects a more set number involving velocities through subspace.
Cochranes are simply a measurement of warp power, with various numbers of cochranes required to achieve various warp factors.
I think @Johnny7oak is referring to the Cochrane factor, that cunningly invented notion (from Star Trek maps) for the variable velocity in Warp speeds!
Wait, if Warp factor isn't a unit of power, and it isn't a specific effective velocity, what the heck is it a unit of, and how is it consistent across multiple ships of different designs?