Don't jump to the end of a conversation without reading the earlier posts first.
Sorry, I had read the whole thread, but when I got to your later statement I didn't remember those quotes.
Not sometimes, but frequently. If anything, a warp field and a subspace field are one and the same.
Sure, I agree this is true in the TNG era onward (in the TOS era they didn't talk about a warp 'field' or use subspace for anything besides communication and sensors). But none of those quotes you mentioned say that the ship actually travels through subspace as another dimension (which I took to be implied by your statement in the post I was responding to that they need the deflector dish because 'subspace isn't entirely empty. There are subspace particles--like tetryon particles--that a ship at warp can collide with.'). They just say that a subspace field has to be created for the ship to travel at warp. Like I said, this is consistent with the idea that subspace fields exist in some higher dimension called "subspace", and that manipulating these fields has a feedback on the curvature of regular space adjacent to the altered fields, causing it to "warp" in a way that allows for faster than light travel.
Or it could mean that a ship sits in a subspace distortion that allows it to do the same thing. If you really look at how warp drive has been presented in Trek, there is a lot of vagueness there (and rightfully so, IMO). It's not really pinned down, and it definitely isn't pinned down to Alcubierre's theory, although it's one of the more popular ones. My position is that there's more than one way of looking at how warp drive works in Trek. You got to remember that these TV episodes really aren't written by scientists. Yes, they can have scientific consultants to help them, but it's still largely fictional.
I agree they weren't thinking in terms of anything as specific as the Alcubierre solution in general relativity, but like I said, if you look at old science fiction from before the original Star Trek, there are plenty of authors that know the general idea that Einstein's theory allows for the "warping" of space, and they use this justify the idea of faster-than-light travel by manipulating space in some new way. And Gene Roddenberry's
original 1964 pitch document for Star Trek referred on p. 9 to the "space-warp" drive, suggesting he was drawing on this sci fi tradition. When Sternbach and Okuda tried to come up with a more consistent imaginary physics for Star Trek, they seem to have imagined subspace fields were involved with distortions to our own spacetime continuum--for example, p. 54 of the TNG Technical Manual discusses Zefram Cochrane's early discoveries:
Beginning in the mid-twenty-first century, Cochrane, working with his legendary engineering team, labored to derive the basic mechanism of continuum distortion propulsion (CDP). … Their crusade finally led to a set of complex equations, materials formulae, and operating procedures that described the essentials of superluminal flight. In those original warp drive theories, single (or at most double) shaped fields, created at tremendous energy expenditure, could distort the space/time continuum enough to drive a starship.
Page 40 of the
TNG writer/director's guide also mentions that subspace is imagined as a different dimension, with the comment "Fortunately, we have subspace radio which operates through another dimension of space." But earlier on p. 38-39 they described the navigational deflectors in a way that made clear they were needed to deflect matter that exists in ordinary space, not special subspace particles:
Under normal conditions, we will always have “navigational shields” operative. These are deflector shields which sweep out far ahead of the vessel’s path through space, deflecting from the ship’s course everything from stray hydrogen atoms (which could cause considerable damage at warp speeds) to full size meteorites and asteroids and other space debris.
P. 87 of the TNG Technical Manual likewise describes using the deflector shields to "deflect the stray hydrogen atoms of the interstellar medium". And there was also a bit of onscreen evidence in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2" that ships moving at warp can collide with objects in ordinary space--after the Borg cube halts its approach to Earth to engage the Enterprise, and the Enterprise's weapons aren't working against them, Riker says "Mister Crusher, ready a collision course with the Borg ship", and then says "Mister La Forge, prepare to go to warp power." This wouldn't seem to make sense if warp took the ship to another dimension where it would no longer be able to collide with ordinary matter not moving at warp speed.
Best question ever! Answer, it gives another doo-hickey to create drama with.
