How Fast Could "All Good Things" Enterprise Go?

[Dayton3]

The fastest the Enterprise in ST:TNG ever went was Warp 9.65 during "Q-Who"- though the ship was still accelerating and probably ended up in the Warp 9.8 range.

In "All Good Things", the three engined Enterprise-D was apparently capable of Warp 13 as that is the speed Admiral Riker ordered after the battle with the Klingons.

So presumably that was quite fast.

But.

The U.S.S Pasteur was capable of Warp 13 as well. Captain Crusher ordered that speed when leaving for the area near the anomaly.

And the Pasteur didn't look like it was a real speed burner.

So how fast could the Enterprise-D go in all likelihood?

 

[TheRealNaveed]

Considering Voyager's Warp 10 limit, I think it's safe to assume that Star-Fleet adopted a new warp scale. Saying "Warp 13" as opposed to "Warp 9.956" is probably easier all-around.

 

[DontFeedPhil]

Weally Weally Fast...

 

[msbae]

It doesn't matter. That Anti-time future never really happened.

 

[Dayton3]

It doesn't matter. That Anti-time future never really happened.

Actually a number of things present in the anti time future were later seen in the "real" timeline.

For example, later examples of Galaxy class starships had the added phaser banks on top of the engine nacelles like the Enterprise D did.

 

[Timo]

And a couple of other portrayals of "future" in DS9 or VOY used the same uniforms and other trivial features of "AGT..". So why not the probably equally trivial change of warp scale?

My pet theory is that the TOS scale was mankind's (and the general neighborhood's) first clumsy attempt at understanding the natural laws that make certain "sweet spots" preferable to the speeds in between. TOS engineers, with their coarse understanding based on coarsely tuned engines, believed that the "sweet spots" fell on speeds that were lightspeed times the cube of the warp factor (as old trek fandom sources claim), or some other such formula (as would probably be preferable). They also assumed that there would be an infinite number of "sweet spots".

But that wasn't quite correct, and by TNG, engineers had realized that nature had arranged warp so that there were just nine "sweet spots" within their grasp, and that they didn't quite exactly follow the cubed formula (or whatever), but required a slightly retuned formula where each TNG warp factor actually was faster than the TOS approximations.

Now that was more or less correct - but the TNG folks didn't realize that after those nine "sweet spots", there were more, at higher speeds unattainable by TNG era engines. By the end of the 24th century, the first of these had become the new Warp 10, the second had become Warp 11, and so forth...

So yes, the revamped E-D and the Pasteur would each be faster than the TNG-era E-D at her best. Which sounds rather logical if we assume that the Voyager brought secrets of superfast drive systems to Earth in that future as well. Apparently, in the late 24th century, silly Nova class tubs and even shuttlecraft can outperform the best TNG era starships, as per the VOY finale.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Unicron]

Considering Voyager's Warp 10 limit, I think it's safe to assume that Star-Fleet adopted a new warp scale. Saying "Warp 13" as opposed to "Warp 9.956" is probably easier all-around.

Agreed.

 

[Praetor]

Considering Voyager's Warp 10 limit, I think it's safe to assume that Star-Fleet adopted a new warp scale. Saying "Warp 13" as opposed to "Warp 9.956" is probably easier all-around.

Agreed.

Thirded. I'm no mathematician but I like to think that they recalibrated it so warp 10-15 or so fit between warp nine and infinity, given how sharp the parabolic warp curve climbs in that vicinity. And I agree with Timo's scheme of how it probably happened.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Of course, the real reason behind the "warp 13" citation was that Braga was giving us Trek Tech afficionados the finger by throwing in a detail that apparently flew in the face of what had already been established.

What he didn't count on was that we've been working around bigger contradictions than that since before the original show went into syndication.

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

The TNG warp scale was inneficient by the time of Voyager anyways. "We've gone to warp 9.986591919!!"

Jeeze, might as well start using a new freakin scale. I'd be pissed if the speedometer was like that on my car.

 

[USS KG5]

The TNG warp scale was inneficient by the time of Voyager anyways. "We've gone to warp 9.986591919!!"

Jeeze, might as well start using a new freakin scale. I'd be pissed if the speedometer was like that on my car.

It is perfectly logical from that POV. It seems an increasing proportion of Starfleet was regularly travelling at warp 9.975 or equally silly and difficult to understand speeds, hence the use of "maximum warp" a great little phrase which just seems to mean "push the throttle wide open".

A re-calibration along these lines and those Timo suggested makes a lot of sense.

 

[Captain Robert April]

It was either that, or adopt the Spaceballs scale and call it Ludicrous Speed...

 

[Ronald Held]

I never did see why warp 9.99... is better dramatically than warp 13?

 

[SoM]

I never did see why warp 9.99... is better dramatically than warp 13?

Dramatically, it's not. It was an attempt to stop the writers constantly one-upping the speeds of ships - even if Warp 9.75 is a *lot* faster than Warp 9.5, it doesn't *sound* a lot faster, hence it's less tempting to do that than if they can just +1 the speed the last writer used.

 

[shipfisher]

I agree with the whole verbal shorthand for warp 9.99999... thing. You could get plugged by the local bad eggs while your helmsman waited for you to spit that lot out, however just to stir the pot, could transwarp/slipstream factors be in use 25 years from TNG? Might be easier to have a common scale, with twp/slpstrm starting at warp 10 - not as likely as the verbal shorthand for multi-decimal place warp 9+ factors, but still a small possibility.

A likely speed scale for the "verbal shorthand" scenario is the imposition of the sub-warp 9 10/3 warp factor exponent over the "true" warp 9.999..whatever, making warp 13 about 5166c.

 

[Timo]

Well, usually these fancy futuristic drive systems have warranted the "transwarp" name only when they have been significantly faster than ordinary warp. But the Pasteur and the E-D didn't seem to be going all that fast in the episode - no special effects different from the usual warp ones.

And I rather like to think that the "AGT.." warp factors aren't merely shorthand, but also have a "law of nature" to back them up. That is, the new warp thirteen is a "sweet spot" just as much as the old warp eight was, and not merely randomly chosen new name for warp 9.999. But since all we have to go by is a tiny bit of dialogue in a single episode, there's even less authority for such claims than there is for the original TNG Tech Manual idea of "sweet spots" existing in the first place.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[shipfisher]

Your "new sweet spots" scenario has its appeal Timo.

Warp drive is so synonymous with interstellar exploration in trek that it would be preferable to think of it as a continuous lineage of developments throughout the future history of the fed drive tech, with each integer warp factor actually signifying some local threshold or transition in the drive continuum.

Perhaps even the Wells class USS Relativity of the 29th century, when engaging in anything as quaint as travel involving spatial displacement only, has its temporal impeller backed up by a good ol' warp drive, albeit in the "ahead warp factor 52", or so, class.

 

[Lyon_Wonder]

I wonder if the three-nacelle Ent-D dreadnaught was a pet project of Riker, or part of a 2370s experiment to turn a Galaxy class ship into a heavily-armed dreadnaught, assuming the Dominion war happened in the AGT time line.

 

[Captain Robert April]

No reason to assume that anything happened different at DS9, so no reason to assume the Dominion War didn't happen.

Clearly, something happened differently so that the Enterprise wasn't destroyed at Veridian III.

But this is veering off onto a tangent...

 

[Unicron]

Tigger's ASDB work assumes the latter, and I like that description. This Enterprise was refitted as an Entente class dreadnought, and this class marked the second attempt to make a heavy warship based on the Galaxy's spaceframe. The heavy phaser cannon on the saucer was mounted because the Galaxy doesn't have a lot of space that could be converted into torpedo tubes.