Warp Drive
“Nothing natural can move faster than light” This is a very blunt and unapologetic statement made by Spock way back in the original series (TOS) episode “Obsession”. This basic caveat is one of the core concepts of Star Trek technology. In space, normally, nothing goes faster than the speed of light (with the occasional exception of the tachyon). To go the speed of light, you need to either have infinite energy, infinitesimal mass, or take an infinite amount of time.
Even approaching the speed of light has its own problems, requiring a massive amount of energy as well as a phenomenon called ‘time dilation’ where, basically, the faster you go, the more time slows down. At high rates of sub-light velocity, a journey that seems to take a few days inside the ship, could turn into years, decades, or even more for everything outside the ship.
Obviously, these are a problems for a ship that needs to traverse several light-years between each episode. To make it possible for our heroes to go from star system to star system, we need to do something decidedly unnatural. We need to go faster than light, which is the theoretical speed limit of the universe. How do we do this? We cheat!
Once the format of Star Trek was reformulated to have a ship journey between the stars, it was clear that the show would have to have some sort of FTL (faster than light) mechanism for ships like the Enterprise to take advantage. A basic concept from science-fiction was quickly thrown into as yet largely non-existent “treknology” catalog the Star Trek , the “Time Warp” as introduced in the original pilot “The Cage”.
From the writer’s point of view, the “Time Warp” is merely a plot device, and that’s about as far as the thinking went into the concept. We’re not supposed to know how it works, except that it makes ships go really fast and that it breaks the “time barrier”.
From here, we learn a few things in the original series, such as how the ship is powered, and that it can generally go up to warp eight without too many problems, but the ship will tear itself apart going much faster. We also even learn that “Warp Factor 1” is the same as the speed of light. Most of what we learn is really given to the audience for the sake of drama, and not too seriously thought out.
Indeed, the basic rules for “Warp Drive” in the series is that it allows FTL travel, “Warp 1” is light speed, the Enterprise generally cruises at Warp 6, and that Warp 8 can be used in an emergency. Warp 6, the cruising speed, is also the speed most commonly used to get the ship from one star system to the next.
Eventually, Star Trek will give a number of conflicting answers on how this Warp Drive actually works, ranging from fairly simple theories to sub-dimensional travel. Many of these theories border on outright magic, particularly those written in Star Trek’s later years, such as certain episodes of Voyager and Enterprise.
The simplest solution, as well as the one that seems to fit the actual use of the drive within the franchise, is that the ship’s warp engines (the nacelles) create a “distortion” in space. In essence, it shrinks space ahead of the ship, and normalizes it again behind the ship. The area within this ‘warp’, the ship, is a ‘subspace bubble’.
So what does this actually do? It basically means that within this subspace bubble, things are warped in a way that the same distance appears longer, multiplied and magnified, than things outside the bubble. An item that is 100m long within a subspace field can appear to be 200m long to outside observers.
The effect of this is that a ship that is only moving at .5C (half the speed of light) within subspace may be effectively moving many times that velocity to observers outside of subspace. So, Warp 1 may actually refer to a ship that’s moving within subspace at .5C, but has warped space around it so that the ship is moving 1C in relation to normal space.
This concept is actually hinted at many times in the original series, though never explicitly state. “Space Normal”, as ordered in “The Galileo Seven” would refer to a ship that’s pushing it’s engines but not invoking the warp drive.
Now, to get speeds of greater than 1C, we merely push the ‘warp drive’ even more to have more severe ‘bends’ in space. Keeping our ship’s speed at .5C ‘normal’ speed, we get 8C (or Warp 2) by compressing space to 16 times. The more we ‘compress’ space at the front of the warp field, the faster the ship can go in the galaxy, though the ship itself is really never going more than .5C (for our example).
We now have a ship that goes much faster than light, but never has to deal with relativity issues since it never really travels more than a fraction of light-speed—within it’s subspace bubble.
“Nothing natural can move faster than light” This is a very blunt and unapologetic statement made by Spock way back in the original series (TOS) episode “Obsession”. This basic caveat is one of the core concepts of Star Trek technology. In space, normally, nothing goes faster than the speed of light (with the occasional exception of the tachyon). To go the speed of light, you need to either have infinite energy, infinitesimal mass, or take an infinite amount of time.
Even approaching the speed of light has its own problems, requiring a massive amount of energy as well as a phenomenon called ‘time dilation’ where, basically, the faster you go, the more time slows down. At high rates of sub-light velocity, a journey that seems to take a few days inside the ship, could turn into years, decades, or even more for everything outside the ship.
Obviously, these are a problems for a ship that needs to traverse several light-years between each episode. To make it possible for our heroes to go from star system to star system, we need to do something decidedly unnatural. We need to go faster than light, which is the theoretical speed limit of the universe. How do we do this? We cheat!
Once the format of Star Trek was reformulated to have a ship journey between the stars, it was clear that the show would have to have some sort of FTL (faster than light) mechanism for ships like the Enterprise to take advantage. A basic concept from science-fiction was quickly thrown into as yet largely non-existent “treknology” catalog the Star Trek , the “Time Warp” as introduced in the original pilot “The Cage”.
From the writer’s point of view, the “Time Warp” is merely a plot device, and that’s about as far as the thinking went into the concept. We’re not supposed to know how it works, except that it makes ships go really fast and that it breaks the “time barrier”.
From here, we learn a few things in the original series, such as how the ship is powered, and that it can generally go up to warp eight without too many problems, but the ship will tear itself apart going much faster. We also even learn that “Warp Factor 1” is the same as the speed of light. Most of what we learn is really given to the audience for the sake of drama, and not too seriously thought out.
Indeed, the basic rules for “Warp Drive” in the series is that it allows FTL travel, “Warp 1” is light speed, the Enterprise generally cruises at Warp 6, and that Warp 8 can be used in an emergency. Warp 6, the cruising speed, is also the speed most commonly used to get the ship from one star system to the next.
Eventually, Star Trek will give a number of conflicting answers on how this Warp Drive actually works, ranging from fairly simple theories to sub-dimensional travel. Many of these theories border on outright magic, particularly those written in Star Trek’s later years, such as certain episodes of Voyager and Enterprise.
The simplest solution, as well as the one that seems to fit the actual use of the drive within the franchise, is that the ship’s warp engines (the nacelles) create a “distortion” in space. In essence, it shrinks space ahead of the ship, and normalizes it again behind the ship. The area within this ‘warp’, the ship, is a ‘subspace bubble’.
So what does this actually do? It basically means that within this subspace bubble, things are warped in a way that the same distance appears longer, multiplied and magnified, than things outside the bubble. An item that is 100m long within a subspace field can appear to be 200m long to outside observers.
The effect of this is that a ship that is only moving at .5C (half the speed of light) within subspace may be effectively moving many times that velocity to observers outside of subspace. So, Warp 1 may actually refer to a ship that’s moving within subspace at .5C, but has warped space around it so that the ship is moving 1C in relation to normal space.
This concept is actually hinted at many times in the original series, though never explicitly state. “Space Normal”, as ordered in “The Galileo Seven” would refer to a ship that’s pushing it’s engines but not invoking the warp drive.
Now, to get speeds of greater than 1C, we merely push the ‘warp drive’ even more to have more severe ‘bends’ in space. Keeping our ship’s speed at .5C ‘normal’ speed, we get 8C (or Warp 2) by compressing space to 16 times. The more we ‘compress’ space at the front of the warp field, the faster the ship can go in the galaxy, though the ship itself is really never going more than .5C (for our example).
We now have a ship that goes much faster than light, but never has to deal with relativity issues since it never really travels more than a fraction of light-speed—within it’s subspace bubble.
