Many Questions - Warp Speed

[xyzzy]

1.

I believe this is possible in that you can bend the space / time continuum ...

But if the maximum speed of anything in the universe is the speed, or slightly short of the speed of light then how can messages be transmitted so fast?

There are a few episodes where Pickard says 'warp factor X, Mr Crusher. Mr Worf send a message to Outpost XYZ that we will be there in 4 hours'.

Surely the ship is travelling at warp speed but a transmission can only travel at the speed of light so the ship will get there before the message does?

2.

As warp speed bends the universe around the vessel - such that it is impossible to crash into anything whilst travelling at warp speed. What happens when you drop out of warp and hit something?

e.g. the Enterprise is travelling from earth towards the sun at Warp 1. If the enterprise does this for 8 mins and then does a full stop will it find itself in the centre of the sun and thus be obliterated?

 

[Tiberius]

As for your first question, they don't use radio, they use subspace, which travels many times the speed of light.

 

[darkwing_duck1]

1.

I believe this is possible in that you can bend the space / time continuum ...

But if the maximum speed of anything in the universe is the speed, or slightly short of the speed of light then how can messages be transmitted so fast? Surely the ship is travelling at warp speed but a transmission can only travel at the speed of light so the ship will get there before the message does?

Trek makes use of something called "subspace" to bypass the limitations of Einsteinian physics. One of the properties of subspace is that the speed of light is vastly greater than "realspace". (There is evidence for this in theoretical physics in the tachyon, a particle whose MINIMUM speed is the speed of light.)

Surrounding a ship with a subspace field allows it to "warp" realspace around it and bypass the light speed barrier. Energy being faster than matter in both frames of reference, a "subspace" radio signal is faster than a ship under warp drive, just as it is in realspace.

2.

As warp speed bends the universe around the vessel - such that it is impossible to crash into anything whilst travelling at warp speed. What happens when you drop out of warp and hit something?

1) It's possible to do so, just VERY unlikely

2) If you do, you blow up.

e.g. the Enterprise is travelling from earth towards the sun at Warp 1. If the enterprise does this for 8 mins and then does a full stop will it find itself in the centre of the sun and thus be obliterated?

Essentially, yes. Furthermore, some have speculated that an active warp field that intersected with a sun might destabilize the sun and cause it to go nova.

 

[xyzzy]

Thanks for clarifying that. I will read up on subspace.

 

[Timo]

Actually, we don't have any good or explicit reason to think that the Trek starships go to "otherspace" when they fly at warp speeds. They are still "here", they just move very, very fast. And they can and will collide with objects "here", despite being at warp.

That is, ships moving at warp speed have deliberately or accidentally come close to colliding with each other, and everybody has acted as if there would have been a risk of impact ("Best of Both Worlds II", "Scorpion", "Affliction" et al.). And OTOH, nobody has ever acted as if ships at warp would be transparent to the rest of the universe, or vice versa. Such transparency is a completely novel thing in TNG "The Pegasus" where it is achieved by means unrelated to warp drive.

Warp engines may compress space. But they are likely to also compress any objects in that space, so if a ship moves forward by compressing space in front of her bow, she is going to collide with a rock in front of her bow (no matter how compressed) unless she dodges.

That said, a starship may well be capable of flying into the heart of a star. That would depend on the strength of her shields; the Enterprise-D has been able to spend considerable lengths of time in the chromosphere, photosphere or corona of a star ("I, Borg", "Descent", "Redemption" et al.), withstanding temperatures of tens of thousands or even millions of degrees, so the feat of flying all the way into the core shouldn't be impossible. That is, unless pressure is the limiting factor, or unless pressure combined with heat is (since the millions of degrees of heat in the corona occur in what's almost entirely vacuum). And perhaps certain types of radiation are more penetrating than others, so that sitting inside a fusion reactor won't be a good idea even with shields up.

Timo Saloniemi