This made me think of something. Thinking in terms of audio frequencies for a moment, and of musical tones in particular, nearly any sound you hear an instrument produce consists of a fundamental pitch (having a specific frequency) and an overtone or harmonic series consisting of higher tones (in varying intensities) which are frequency multiples of the fundamental. Which overtones are stronger or weaker determines tone quality - it it's the particulars of the overtone series which make a violin sound like a violin, a clarinet sound like a clarinet, and so forth. This would, of course, also be true of non-pitched sounds; the spectrum just gets a whole lot more complex.That's because "phased plasma that actually creates the field" is a backstage as opposed to canon source.
As it stands, the tech manual describes a different process altogether:
Notice that this an EM signal with a frequency measured in hertz, inside the warp core, not in the warp field surrounding the ship; is THIS the warp core frequency then?
I'm not wholly convinced that they aren't talking about the same principle in slighlty different ways. However, they still talk about a range of frequencies and not a single static frequency that could be memorised and input without the use of sensors.
Could not the warp core signature be an analogue to this? Might each warp core have its own unique "harmonic series" determined by mathematical relations to a fundamental operating frequency?
Just throwing that out there.
I think something along these lines should be correct. I don't think that equalising warp frequencies should be simple.
I think I just have a philosphical divergence from newtype_alpha: I like the existing tech to be developed, defined, and limited for consistency and to allow focus on the human drama, whereas he seems happy for writers to re-invent ways of doing the same thing for the sake of convenience to allow focus on the human drama.
One problem with beefing up transporters as we see in the movie is that they aren't restricted to living beings. If it was simple, then (cloaked) planetary defence posts or ships could just transport bombs onto enemy ships while still billions of km away. Does it really matter if a chemical bomb materialises inside a bulkhead or water pipe?
Obviously, it makes sense for starships to travel with shields raised at all times to prevent this sort of incursion and yet we know from decades of Trek that they don't (presumably because of energy consumption concerns). For that matter it would be quite a good tactic to use at sub-light too. Transponders are coded so Federation ships would be able to spot each other (or a stolen Federation ship) but without them, presumably long range sensors don't notice sub-light vessels as easily as a warp signature (and most races do not have the warp 'equation' yet).
For that matter, why use a bomb when you can just beam away part of the bulkhead (the bridge is a good start) or warp nacelle housing. Has anybody ever covered why this isn't possible?