One of the badges my Scouts are doing right now is the PR badge and part of it is to interview a local celebrity. Anyway, when brain storming ideas, they had know idea who Peter Gabrial was which at 25 actually made me feel old.
Is it time for a new warp speed scale?
- Thread starter camefromhell
- Start date
One of the badges my Scouts are doing right now is the PR badge and part of it is to interview a local celebrity. Anyway, when brain storming ideas, they had know idea who Peter Gabrial was which at 25 actually made me feel old.
Personally, I'd rather see warp scales completely done away with eventually. They're just kind of meaningless technobabble, IMO, because a ship will get to its destination as quickly (or as slowly) as a story requires it to regardless of speed or distance. Basically, it just boils down to Warp 8 is faster than Warp 7 and Warp 9 is faster than Warp 8 and so on...
I really like the Aventine's slipstream drive in which a ship makes a Star Wars-style leap across vast regions of the Galaxy at once. No warp factors to contend with there, IMO.
I really like the Aventine's slipstream drive in which a ship makes a Star Wars-style leap across vast regions of the Galaxy at once. No warp factors to contend with there, IMO.
Slipstream doesn't quite work that way. It does take a specific amount of time to cover a given distance in slipstream, and there seems to be a roughly linear relationship. "Hope and Fear" gave a figure of 60,000 light years in 3 months, or 240,000 time the speed of light. "Timeless" implied something much faster, though; Voyager spent only minutes in slipstream and took ten years off their journey, meaning 9-10,000 light years, more than half a month's distance using Arturis's slipstream. Still, in both cases there was evidently a linear time-distance relationship, same as in warp drive, only a lot faster. So slipstream travel can presumably be characterized in terms of effective velocity.
I'm quite aware that--like the hyperdrive in Star Wars--slipstream isn't an instantaneous process. In the cases you demonstrated, how quickly a slipstream ship moves across the Galaxy could depend on how powerful or advanced the particular ships are and they could vary even further still by local stellar conditions (in short, a really big fudge factor). The slipstream drive in "Timeless" could be substantially more powerful than the one used in "Hope and Fear."
I could live with that as a replacement for warp drive.
Christopher, where was it written that once you get past warp nine, the decimal factors are increasing at an exponential rate, thereby meaning that you're going a damn sight faster at warp 9.999 than you are at 9.99?
^^Well, in various places, but the TNG Tech Manual is the main one.
But yeah, the whole thing is kind of a mess. Originally Roddenberry wanted there to be a cosmic speed limit, which he declared would be warp 10. But then the speed-limit idea was done away with while the idea of warp 10 as the highest attainable velocity remained, and so we got this bizarre situation of a finite number representing infinite speed. It's quite awkward and I'd love to see a new scale replace it.
But yeah, the whole thing is kind of a mess. Originally Roddenberry wanted there to be a cosmic speed limit, which he declared would be warp 10. But then the speed-limit idea was done away with while the idea of warp 10 as the highest attainable velocity remained, and so we got this bizarre situation of a finite number representing infinite speed. It's quite awkward and I'd love to see a new scale replace it.
Similar threads
