Nimoy talks Spock—1967.

An interesting interview of Leonard Nimoy on Spock and Star Trek from 1967.

 

Nimoy evidently didn't understand the Warp scale thinking Warp 8 was eight times the speed of light.

 

TOS Warp 8 was 8^3 times c.

 

According to Franz Joseph’s tech manual. Which I loved btw and still have.

 

Even thats too slow within context of the stories.

 

Yes there is a Cochrane factor in front of the official formula.

 

IDK if that was really articulated during the run of the series. I think it came into 'being' when Franz Joseph did his Star Trek Technical Manual, and that wasn't in Bookshops until 1975.

I mean even in the series you have situations (like in TOS S3 That Which Survives, where they cover a distance of 990.7 light years in a couple of days (with a brief stint at Warp 14 for about 15 minutes). Even if it were WF^3 <--- That's still not fast enough to cover that distance in a little under 3 days - as they did in the episode.

My point being: I don't think the actual 'speed' was even really nailed down at the time of the series run - it was always 'Speed of Plot'/whatever the story for that week required.

Given that - I think Nimpoy's answer is just fine as it just highlights that the ship can travel faster than light.

 

Nope, Roddenberry established the formula while the show was in production and it’s in The Making Of Star Trek.

 

There's ample evidence that GR didn't do the arithmetic when he was deciding this stuff. He blue-skyed a claim that the Hangar Deck would hold a whole fleet of jumbo jets, for example. I remember looking at "warp factor cubed" as a teenager, and compared to even "local" interstellar distances, it's too slow.

There's even a song about it

 

Whether GR blue skied it is irrelevant. He put forth the formula back when the show was in production so it definitely predates FJ’s publications by several years.

The fact that GR’s formula is still too slow within the context of TOS’ stories is also irrelevant. But he did have a somewhat better grasp of the subject than Nimoy.

 

Regardless of the ensuing dull-discussion about the warp scale, it's a lovely interview. Thank you for sharing!

 

The Richter Scale is a base 10 logarithmic scale....something like that?

 

No a factor greater than one that is spatially varying.

 

On TNG, the warp scale is an asymptotic curve which approaches but never reaches warp 10, because warp 10 is defined as infinity.

TOS exceeds its definition of warp 10 in "The Changeling" and "That Which Survives," and IIRC, the TNG Technical Manual expressly states that Starfleet changed the scale for the TNG era. But the old scale remains open to interpretation.

 

One thing about getting older is that the past seems closer. This interview was only a few decades ago.

Yet…in the 1980’s…the ‘60’s seemed more distant

 

In a weird way our memories allow us to travel back in time seemingly in an instant.

 

That's so true. Being young gives you less perspective, so "a few years back" seems like distant ages ago.

In the 1970s, it seemed like 20 year old songs were from way back, from a whole different culture. But today, any song less than 33 years old is in my "Contemporary" playlist. To me, that's when the decades stopped having their own distinctive sounds, and pop music stopped evolving. From about 1990 on, I can't tell the difference anymore.

 

There was a lot of music I liked, and still love, from the latter half of the 20th century. It did start unravelling in the 1990s, but it really all fell apart in the 2000s and has been nose-diving since. There is so little new music during the past twenty some years that I’ve actually liked. The vast majority of music on my playlists is from 25-65 years ago, and most of that from before the 1990s. There is very very little music on my playlists from the past twenty some years, and practically all of it is from 10-20 years ago.

 

My experience exactly.

 

Periodically I enjoy those Youtube reactions of people in their 20s-40s listening to music or watching films and television from before they were born. So often they are astounded, often exclaiming, “WTF! Why don’t we have stuff like this today?”