Or becoming friends with the ground which would probably be very bad.
How dangerous would this be?
- Thread starter Gingerbread Demon
- Start date
Or becoming friends with the ground which would probably be very bad.
HELM OFFICER: Captain, coming out of warp in five...four...three....two...one...
CRASH!
(The ship's arrival was off by 0.02 degrees--television series ends.)
CRASH!
(The ship's arrival was off by 0.02 degrees--television series ends.)
Oh, the spore drive is a jump drive by definition, as it allows instantaneous point-to-point FTL travel over arbitrary distances.
I liked the bit in the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters episode where Colonel Shaw was reporting on a mission where his vehicle crashed and he said "We experienced uncontrolled flight into terrain."
It's a very peculiar warp acceleration we see in Star Trek IV anyway.
Kirk gives the order, Sulu announces warp speed, and the ship is presumably accelerating/going into warp from that moment on. Next, Kirk goes with Gillian watching the whales, having some nice conversation with her and Scotty. The ship starts to shake and Kirk is called to the bridge.
Then (and this is over 2 minutes after warp engines have supposedly been engaged), we get an exterior shot with the ship and a small part of an unmoving and huge Earth sphere behind it. Indicating the ship hasn't even reached a modest fraction of light speed yet (light speed would mean traveling an Earth's diameter distance in about 0.04 seconds). Next shot, we hear them calling out 'warp 7.5' and counting up.
Next shot we see them slingshotting around the sun. Earth-sun distance should be crossed in around 1 second at warp 8, so even that is significantly too slow, but I'll buy it.
So what to make of all this? My guess is Sulu was smart enough to ignore his superior's orders to go to warp within the atmosphere, and only actually activated warp once he was well clear of the planet's atmosphere
Kirk gives the order, Sulu announces warp speed, and the ship is presumably accelerating/going into warp from that moment on. Next, Kirk goes with Gillian watching the whales, having some nice conversation with her and Scotty. The ship starts to shake and Kirk is called to the bridge.
Then (and this is over 2 minutes after warp engines have supposedly been engaged), we get an exterior shot with the ship and a small part of an unmoving and huge Earth sphere behind it. Indicating the ship hasn't even reached a modest fraction of light speed yet (light speed would mean traveling an Earth's diameter distance in about 0.04 seconds). Next shot, we hear them calling out 'warp 7.5' and counting up.
Next shot we see them slingshotting around the sun. Earth-sun distance should be crossed in around 1 second at warp 8, so even that is significantly too slow, but I'll buy it.
So what to make of all this? My guess is Sulu was smart enough to ignore his superior's orders to go to warp within the atmosphere, and only actually activated warp once he was well clear of the planet's atmosphere
So what to make of all this? My guess is Sulu was smart enough to ignore his superior's orders to go to warp within the atmosphere, and only actually activated warp once he was well clear of the planet's atmosphere
Yeah, I've always just shrugged it off as a filmmakers' mistake, assuming the underlying "reality" of what happened was dramatized incorrectly. The narrative doesn't require them to go to warp in atmosphere, so it's easy enough to assume there was a gap between Kirk asking when they could go to warp and Scotty saying "Full power now" (and indeed there was a brief intervening scene in the script that was cut for time). Most starship VFX shots are figurative, with unrealistic elements like too much fill light in space, ships being too close together and moving too slowly, phaser beams being visible in vacuum, etc., so we don't have to take the shot of the BoP warping in atmosphere as literally correct either.
^Indeed, and, as you said, the narrative didn't even require them to go to warp immediately.
After all, they're going to time travel, and as long as you can exercise some degree of control over the temporal end point of your jump (according to Spock's 'guesses'), there's no particular reason to hurry before you make the jump (or else they should have invented some reason for that).
After all, they're going to time travel, and as long as you can exercise some degree of control over the temporal end point of your jump (according to Spock's 'guesses'), there's no particular reason to hurry before you make the jump (or else they should have invented some reason for that).
Also known as "lithobraking." Followed immediately by "rapid unplanned disassembly."
Maybe they mistake lithobraking for literal breaking haha
If you can warp inside a planet's atmosphere, I would think you should be able to use warp drive as a weapon.
Let a ship drop towards a fortified position, engage the warp drive near it, and let the warping of space around the ship and the surface rip everything apart.
It's part of the reason I think it would be better if they had a rule that the stronger the gravity well, the harder it is to establish a stable warp field. So maybe you can go to warp after a certain distance of separation from a planet, star, black hole, etc., but within a certain range it becomes problematic.
Let a ship drop towards a fortified position, engage the warp drive near it, and let the warping of space around the ship and the surface rip everything apart.
It's part of the reason I think it would be better if they had a rule that the stronger the gravity well, the harder it is to establish a stable warp field. So maybe you can go to warp after a certain distance of separation from a planet, star, black hole, etc., but within a certain range it becomes problematic.
That's one reason so many science fiction universes do have a rule like that -- because it would be too easy to use an FTL drive as a weapon of mass destruction. (Another reason is to make it more difficult for the characters to escape danger at FTL, e.g. in Star Wars productions where a ship has to reach the hyperspace jump point before it can escape pursuit.)
Really, though, you could use impulse drive to accelerate a shuttlecraft to a high percentage of lightspeed and it could hit a planet with enough energy to cause a mass extinction. Kinetic energy is mass times velocity squared, so something a million times lighter than the dinosaur-killer asteroid moving a thousand times faster would hit equally hard. Realistically, any civilized planet in an interstellar age would need a damned robust planetary defense grid -- something that Trek only infrequently acknowledges, e.g. in ST:TMP and ST '09, when V'Ger and Nero respectively had to get the codes to shut down Earth's defense grid.
I am not sure that is true. I think ships in the Star Trek universe warp subspace, not real space. We have seen examples of ships engaging their warp drive quite close to other stationary objects and not causing disruptive effects.
One example would be Kirk stealing the Enterprise from Spacedock and engaging the warp drive right outside the doors. Spacedock was completely unaffected.
Perhaps a ship at warp in Star Trek might carry very little 'real space' kinetic energy.
But of course you don't need to go to warp to smash a planet. The Enterprise-D is 4,500,000 tonnes and has powerful enough engines to reach 0.25c within minutes, and could likely get to 0.5c in a ramming situation with ease. This would be around 10^25 J of kinetic energy, or ten billion megatons.
500 million nuclear bombs going off at once. This is roughly the energy you'd need to blow our entire atmosphere off into space and/or boil all the water in every ocean.
Last edited:
Not exactly. You have to warp normal space to access subspace. Subspace is a higher-dimensional realm, and the term "warp" refers to a topological distortion of 4D spacetime, such as distorting it into higher dimensions (like how gravity wells in science-museum demonstrations are depicted as heavy weights warping 3D pits into a 2D rubber sheet representing spacetime).
The warp model that NASA propulsion scientist Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer posited in his technical advisor's notes for Star Trek: The Motion Picture was essentially the same one that physicist Miguel Alcubierre worked out with more mathematical rigor some 16 years later: the ship is encased in a bubble of flat spacetime that "surfs" on a propagating distortion of the surrounding spacetime, which can travel faster than light because there's no speed-of-light limit on how fast spacetime can expand or contract. Von Puttkamer used the term "subspace" (a term that TOS had used exclusively in the context of subspace radio) to refer to the pocket space within the warp field, but Rick Sternbach & Michael Okuda reinterpreted it for TNG as a hyperspace-like higher-dimensional realm that the warp bubble was "submerged" into as it propagated.
As for the lack of disruptive effects, it stands to reason that the gravity gradient of the warp field would have to drop off quickly enough on the inside that the ship would be undamaged, and thus the gradient on the outside would presumably drop off equally quickly. Something right on the edge of the warp bubble would probably be torn apart, but anything further away than the distance from the warp bubble to the ship's hull would be as unaffected as the ship itself.
Really, all that matters is that the spacetime distortion is extreme enough at the edge of the bubble, even if it flattens out quickly beyond that. Think of a microsingularity as an analogy -- as a black hole, it's an infinitely deep gravity well, but it's so tiny that you can be unaffected by it just a few feet away. It's only right up against it that you'd be in trouble.
It was relatively close, but "right outside the doors" is an exaggeration: https://movies.trekcore.com/gallery...1/chapter-05/st-tsfs-remaster-bluray-0516.jpg
Anyway, as I said, you can't necessarily take spaceship shots literally. There are cases where ships were shown in FX to be only a few ship-lengths apart when dialogue stated explicitly that they were thousands of kilometers apart. It stands to reason that the FX shots we see are not literal images, but artistic interpretations designed to convey events clearly to the audience, placing the ships far closer together, moving far more slowly, and being far more brightly lit than they realistically would be. (Also, you can see the matte lines around the miniatures in the shot above, all the more reason not to take it as literal photographic evidence. The Moon never looked quite right to me either.)
The warp has to have at least some connection and effect on matter within normal space with kinetic energy in the process, otherwise why would a starship need a navigational deflector?
Also, TNG's Best of Both Worlds implies that it's possible to do a suicide run by ramming a starship into an object in normal space at warp.
RIKER: Mister Crusher, ready a collision course with the Borg ship. You heard me. A collision course.
WESLEY: Yes, sir.
RIKER: Mister La Forge, prepare to go to warp power.
I don't think its ever been made canon, but I do remember reading that Matt Jefferies thought process for designing warp pylons and nacelles was that the warp drive was so dangerous the Enterprise's saucer section needed some distance away from the drive when it engages.
It really shouldn't need one at warp, since the warp field itself would perform that function (and a beam propagating at lightspeed or slower could obviously not project ahead of a warp field moving faster than light in any case). But it definitely would at significant sublight speeds.
Yes, but that was more to do with the heat and radiation such powerful engines would logically produce. Although TMP and all subsequent productions threw that out the window by putting the antimatter reactor smack dab in the middle of the engine room.
For warp flight in atmo.. just think of time, you would only be IN atmo for.. a quarter of a second? Maybe? You have what, 10 miles of atmo before it really starts to thin out?
now you would probably drag a good portion of that atmosphere with you, like a gyser from the Earth composed of air.
Now, there is no "Speed limit" on a warp bubble, you could technically go 5mph in a bubble, don't have to go faster than light.
now you would probably drag a good portion of that atmosphere with you, like a gyser from the Earth composed of air.
Now, there is no "Speed limit" on a warp bubble, you could technically go 5mph in a bubble, don't have to go faster than light.
Similar threads
