Damn, so they do. What a brain fart! Apologies for that.
So that would cut the average speed to .29 of lightspeed, still higher than .25 but not by that much.
Killer Asteroid
- Thread starter MAGolding
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So that would cut the average speed to .29 of lightspeed, still higher than .25 but not by that much.
I always wondered about the asteroid in "The Paradise Syndrome" apparently traveling at a respectable portion or the speed of light and Enterprise having to gun the engines up to Warp 9 in order to get to the interception point.
1) I assumed the asteroid wasn't a regular asteroid but was in fact a part of a body near a supernova or another space disaster that was blasted into an eventual collision with the planet at an immense velocity that few objects ever obtain naturally.
2) Spock specifies that the asteroid is the "size of the Earth's moon". If it was even a fraction of that size it would be smooth as a billiard ball. Instead the only way it could ever hold its "wrinkled shape" would be if it had not existed but for a relatively short time and/or was composed of some kind of ultra dense material that resisted being formed into a circular body . Probably the former
3) I figured that there were reasons of spatial navigation that prevented Enterprise from heading directly to the interception point at warp nine. I figured Enterprise had to follow some kind of "roundabout" course to intercept the asteroid necessitating a high speed dash.
1) I assumed the asteroid wasn't a regular asteroid but was in fact a part of a body near a supernova or another space disaster that was blasted into an eventual collision with the planet at an immense velocity that few objects ever obtain naturally.
2) Spock specifies that the asteroid is the "size of the Earth's moon". If it was even a fraction of that size it would be smooth as a billiard ball. Instead the only way it could ever hold its "wrinkled shape" would be if it had not existed but for a relatively short time and/or was composed of some kind of ultra dense material that resisted being formed into a circular body . Probably the former
3) I figured that there were reasons of spatial navigation that prevented Enterprise from heading directly to the interception point at warp nine. I figured Enterprise had to follow some kind of "roundabout" course to intercept the asteroid necessitating a high speed dash.
There are several instances of ships doing "warp speed" within the confines of a solar system but in fact travelling much, much slower than even lightspeed. We can assume that this is due to the star producing subspace distortions thanks to its large mass, making warp speed far less efficient than it normally is.
That would also explain why even in a crisis like TBOBW the Ent-D still cuts to impulse once it reaches a certain distance into the solar system - under such conditions, Impulse Power may actually be faster and more efficient than the warp drive!
That would also explain why even in a crisis like TBOBW the Ent-D still cuts to impulse once it reaches a certain distance into the solar system - under such conditions, Impulse Power may actually be faster and more efficient than the warp drive!
Thanks, that was brilliant!
Isn't the asteroid actually going faster than lightspeed?
When they head out for the intercept they take "several hours" to reach it at Warp 9. If we go with speed = WF^3 and assume several is three, that puts the asteroid about 2,187 light-hours from the planet. For it to then take 59.223 days to get back, they would need to be doing about 1.5xc all the way.
For the asteroid to make sense we'd have to assume that Warp 9 was only 473 x c, which seems quite slow.
If it was an ultradense material then the mass would be higher than normal, meaning the gravity would be higher than normal, and there would be even more force pulling it into a sphere. Probably best to go with it being very recent.
If the asteroid is indeed nearly 2,200 light hours from the planet at the opening of the episode then it's too far away to be considered part of the system they're in, but also too close to be part of another system. So if one were writing a back-story to the episode, one might have the Enterprise monitoring a collision event between two rogue planets in deep space. They realise that one of the resulting fragments is headed for a nearby M-class planet, and inform Starfleet.
Starfleet orders them to investigate the planet to see if it is inhabited; if it is, they are to attempt to divert the asteroid. If not, they can monitor the collision for whatever science purposes this has.
This would explain a couple of oddities - why such a large asteroid is irregular (it's brand new), why they took time to look the planet over first (under orders to see if it's inhabited).
But as to why the asteroid would be going faster than light, you got me. IIRC Data once said that was impossible, no natural phenomenon goes faster than light.
Since natural phemonema do not travel at hyper lightspeed velocities, the speed of the asteroid must in fact be sublight. Whatever Warp 9 might be in deep space (which the WF^3 is wholly unsuited for, BTW), within the confines of the solar system it is demonstrably much, much slower.
To expand on my earlier post, I imagine that the closer a vessel warps to lightspeed within a solar system, the disproportionately higher Warp Factor is required. Warp 9 can just about get you to the speed of light. Ordinarily, Impulse Engines would achieve the same result but it has a slower acceleration than Warp (and time really was of the essence in this episode).
So, what do the maths look like?
If the Enterprise was making 300,000 KM/S for 3 hours, she would travel 3,240,000,000 KM. If the asteroid then takes 59.223 days to travel that same distance, it is going at 633 KM/S which is only 0.002% of lightspeed but still 25 times faster than an average asteroid in our real world.
Why is the Enterprise moving so slowly? Well, it is seriously BROKEN! It also matches a pet theory of mine that the mass reduction systems in the 23rd century (which allow the ship to travel high STL velocities without needing huge amounts of fuel) are part of the warp drive machinery, specifically the nacelles. We see similar slow "full impulse" speeds at the end of ST:TWOK, which also feature a vessel without a working FTL system.
I must admit that I really like this source of the unusually large and fast asteroid featured in this episode.
However, it clearly can't be an isolated event, as the planet is practically an asteroid gallery, being pelted so often that the "Preservers" who moved the American Indians to the planet went to the trouble of building a machine to push those troublesome rocks out of the way, even those as large as this one!
What demonstrates this?
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Kirk in "The Lights of Zetar" says specifically that "no natural object can exceed the speed of light" which is one way they know early on that the "storm" (Zetarian life entity) is in fact an artificial phenomena.
I like the explanation that "warp speed inside a solar system" (or in any gravity well) is quite different from that in "regular space".
This solves a lot of questions in the original series. For example in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" Spock states they are traveling at Warp 8 and are "inside the orbit of Mercury". Even if you go by the remastered special effects that show Enterprise approaching the sun at an angle, Warp 8 under any kind of typical standard would have Enterprise impacting the surface of Sol within fractions of a second. Obvious the ship didn't do that.
Likewise IIRC in "Operation: Annihilate" Enterprise goes to a high warp factor traveling toward Deneva's sun in order to intercept the Devevan ship before it can burn up
Kirk in "The Lights of Zetar" says specifically that "no natural object can exceed the speed of light" which is one way they know early on that the "storm" (Zetarian life entity) is in fact an artificial phenomena.
I like the explanation that "warp speed inside a solar system" (or in any gravity well) is quite different from that in "regular space".
This solves a lot of questions in the original series. For example in "Tomorrow is Yesterday" Spock states they are traveling at Warp 8 and are "inside the orbit of Mercury". Even if you go by the remastered special effects that show Enterprise approaching the sun at an angle, Warp 8 under any kind of typical standard would have Enterprise impacting the surface of Sol within fractions of a second. Obvious the ship didn't do that.
Likewise IIRC in "Operation: Annihilate" Enterprise goes to a high warp factor traveling toward Deneva's sun in order to intercept the Devevan ship before it can burn up
Because the asteroid travelled in 60 days the same distance that the Enterprise travelled in 3 hours at Warp 9
Ergo, Warp 9 in this episode is equivalent to the speed of light, and that's still assuming that the asteroid is going ridiculously fast
The warp nine point might infer the distance the Enterprise was from the asteroid not that it was travelling faster than the speed of light! Plus later on the engines had been seriously damaged necessitating the Enterprise travelling at sub light speed just in front of the asteroid! The only point I would bring up here is why did the Enterprise have to go in reverse or should I say backwards for eight months?
JB
JB
This old chestnut never ceases to delight me - thanks to the writers not thinking things through, there's endless fun to be had doing it for them. Even if in the form of zombie threads.
The upsides of a very fast asteroid:
+1 High speed would give the rock great kinetic energy, adding to the difficulty of deflection (at least as regards accelerating or decelerating the rock to cause a miss). Elsewhere in Trek, we learn that asteroids aren't much of a threat, and a single starship can easily play goalie for a planet if there's no local doodad for the task.
+2 High speed also might result in relativistic increase of mass, allowing for a small irregular lump to indeed be as massive as Earth's moon (Spock is speaking of mass, not spatial dimensions, as he speaks of deflection when making the comparison, not of the later emerging alternate approach of splitting the rock).
+3 High speed would "compensate" for the starship's high speed, multi-hour dash at high warp.
+4 Perhaps the Trek universe features an absolute frame of spatial reference (subspaaaaace!) or an element of interplanetary drag that makes it impossible for a starship to move faster than the fast-moving rock, hence Spock's "leading the rock by four hours all the way" when in normal circumstances the starship could always accelerate relative to the rock.
The downsides of a very fast asteroid:
-1 The faster the rock, the farther out the deflection takes place, and the easier it ought to be to create a miss. How come the job is so difficult if the deflection point is far away?
-2 "Four hours" ahead of a fast asteroid ought to be a looooong distance, making it impossible for the rock and the starship to be in the same picture. (Then again, they are not in the same picture when the ship returns to the planet and rescues Kirok. And if the distance we do see is indeed "four hours", then the rock is moving at about 500 m/h... And started out about a thousand km away from the planet in a generous estimate!)
-3 The faster the rock, the more difficult it would be for its effects to predate its arrival (the "winds" mentioned and seen may be from the deflector rather than the rock, but even if the rock comes from the direction of the sun, its shadow would only precede it by what is left between the time light takes to arrive from the sun, probably about ten minutes, and the time the rock takes to travel that distance).
-4 If the asteroid arrives from a great distance, the statistical odds of it being on a collision course are necessarily lowered. The heroes ought to wonder more about this "asteroid alley" thing and see even less sense in deflecting just this single particular rock when obviously a malicious longterm campaign of carefully aimed bombardment is underway here (yet producing no damage).
Overall, the episode nicely supports the idea that warp close to (certain?) stars is slow as molasses. If we want, it may even dovetail to the time travel often involved in such cases: perhaps it was already too late in the teaser to deflect the asteroid, except by going back in time through high speed warping close to the star? Thus, perhaps Kirk only spent a couple of days down there, and Spock's decision to sit and wait for most of the two months was due to Kirk not yet being available for rescuing?
Timo Saloniemi
The upsides of a very fast asteroid:
+1 High speed would give the rock great kinetic energy, adding to the difficulty of deflection (at least as regards accelerating or decelerating the rock to cause a miss). Elsewhere in Trek, we learn that asteroids aren't much of a threat, and a single starship can easily play goalie for a planet if there's no local doodad for the task.
+2 High speed also might result in relativistic increase of mass, allowing for a small irregular lump to indeed be as massive as Earth's moon (Spock is speaking of mass, not spatial dimensions, as he speaks of deflection when making the comparison, not of the later emerging alternate approach of splitting the rock).
+3 High speed would "compensate" for the starship's high speed, multi-hour dash at high warp.
+4 Perhaps the Trek universe features an absolute frame of spatial reference (subspaaaaace!) or an element of interplanetary drag that makes it impossible for a starship to move faster than the fast-moving rock, hence Spock's "leading the rock by four hours all the way" when in normal circumstances the starship could always accelerate relative to the rock.
The downsides of a very fast asteroid:
-1 The faster the rock, the farther out the deflection takes place, and the easier it ought to be to create a miss. How come the job is so difficult if the deflection point is far away?
-2 "Four hours" ahead of a fast asteroid ought to be a looooong distance, making it impossible for the rock and the starship to be in the same picture. (Then again, they are not in the same picture when the ship returns to the planet and rescues Kirok. And if the distance we do see is indeed "four hours", then the rock is moving at about 500 m/h... And started out about a thousand km away from the planet in a generous estimate!)
-3 The faster the rock, the more difficult it would be for its effects to predate its arrival (the "winds" mentioned and seen may be from the deflector rather than the rock, but even if the rock comes from the direction of the sun, its shadow would only precede it by what is left between the time light takes to arrive from the sun, probably about ten minutes, and the time the rock takes to travel that distance).
-4 If the asteroid arrives from a great distance, the statistical odds of it being on a collision course are necessarily lowered. The heroes ought to wonder more about this "asteroid alley" thing and see even less sense in deflecting just this single particular rock when obviously a malicious longterm campaign of carefully aimed bombardment is underway here (yet producing no damage).
Overall, the episode nicely supports the idea that warp close to (certain?) stars is slow as molasses. If we want, it may even dovetail to the time travel often involved in such cases: perhaps it was already too late in the teaser to deflect the asteroid, except by going back in time through high speed warping close to the star? Thus, perhaps Kirk only spent a couple of days down there, and Spock's decision to sit and wait for most of the two months was due to Kirk not yet being available for rescuing?
Timo Saloniemi
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Or the Enterprise could have gone back in time a few years using the light speed breakaway factor and discover how to switch the Asteroid Deflector on yarns before it was needed and hence saving the Indian civilization on the planet earlier than necessary! 
JB
JB
Cochrane factor takes care of spatial varaitions in actual speed per warp factor.
Has the "light speed breakaway factor" (whiplash effect time travel) ever been used in Star Trek other than near Sol or that uncharted black hole near it?
I always figured there was something unique about Earths star that allowed warp drive to create time travel conditions near it.
I always figured there was something unique about Earths star that allowed warp drive to create time travel conditions near it.
Ah. I'd be willing to go with "it was slower in this instance", but it only really needs to be about half as fast as the cubed formula. I'm generally a fan of the idea that there are "faster" and "slower" areas of space, and would say that putting this system in a slow area where warp speeds are about a third of normal would do as an explanation. That would make Warp 9 about 243 c and the asteroid speed about 0.5 c.
Not a great explanation, IMO. Making warp 9 anything like 1 c is just not credible to me.
I've always wondered about the "variable warp speed" explanation though as how people square it with "That Which Survives" where according to detailed dialogue in the episode the Enterprise is capable of traversing 880 light years in about 8 hours if they maintain Warp 8.4.
I think a writer went way overboard on the "8s".
Or how in "Obsession" Kirk plans to warp to a planet described as "1,000 light years from here" and back to rendezvous with the other starship carrying perishable medicine in merely 48 hours.
I think a writer went way overboard on the "8s".
Or how in "Obsession" Kirk plans to warp to a planet described as "1,000 light years from here" and back to rendezvous with the other starship carrying perishable medicine in merely 48 hours.
An asteroid (i.e. a natural phenomenon) travelling at half the speed of light? That by itself would require an extensive explanation to justify - unless the rock was launched by unfriendly aliens?
FWIW, I wouldn't put too much stock in the WF^3 formula - even at its best, it is far too slow for what we see in TOS.
Except that we have explicitly seen both the Enterprise (in Tomorrow Is Yesterday) and a Bird of Prey (in ST4) fly at the sun at Warp 9 speeds and yet only slowly approach it. I could also toss in Elaan Of Troyius as an example of a warping Klingon battleship merely crawling along at speeds measured in KM/H. So, in the Trek universe it really does seem to be a thing that whatever other benefits the use of warp drive might bring (such as initiating a time warp) high speeds (compared to deep space) is not among them.
I think you may be misremembering - the distance was 990.7 light years, the speed was Warp 8.4 and the time is 11.337 hours.
I suppose Kirk could be using hyperbole when he says it's "over a thousand light years from year". However, there's also other episodes where the term "parsec" is thrown around without any thought as to the implications of its meaning. Two of the worst offenders are:
- Arena, the ship travels 22 parsecs in seemingly only a few hours. At the end of the episode they are hurled 500 parsecs by the Metrons
- Bread & Circuses, where Chekov informs Kirk that the planet is "only 1/16 of a parsec away" and that they should be there in "seconds". Sure enough, after only 30 seconds of continuous dialogue later they are in orbit!
If the asteroid was travelling beyond the speed of light then maybe it was another Fabrini refugee ship? Only the Enterprise hadn't encountered the first one at this point in time yet so may have sent that other big rock away from it's intended course unlike the other Fabrina in ignorance! Just joshing, it was a big empty rock!!!
JB
JB
I was thinking the exact same thing!! Stock footage is both a blessing and a curse. Ironically, both the killer asteroid and the Fabrini refugee ship would've retained their "rocky" shape even if they were as large (overall) as the Earths moon given the visible part was a mere shell and it wouldn't have sufficient mass to be pulled into a ball shape.
Thirty years ago they always showed asteroids as brown jagged rocks where as today I've noticed they are rounded white stone shapes, mysteriously enough!
JB
JB
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