Quantum Slipstream V.S. Transwarp

[publiusr]

Then too there was the Varduuar "underspace" which looked like they stumbled into Babylon 5's travel method. Quantum slipstream seems very like SW and Stargate hyperspace--all isolated from the rest of the 'verse. Transwarp, like regular warp, still allows for some interaction with a ship that passes by systems and can scan them in transit (unlike JJ's movie, which has a strange quantum distortion/warp hybrid...

Perhaps Transwarp is really a very shallow hyperspace kept at bay with warp fields themselves.

The Voth city ship and AGT ENT-D seemed to master the effect, as did Paris shuttle.

The evolution-defect was a result of a virus we will say, that lived in hyperspace, where Kirk hung out in Tholian webland...

 

[Herkimer Jitty]

Paris's shuttle's transwarp system acted in an extremely different way from any other transwarp propulsion we've seen in all of Trek.

The whole "being all over the universe at one moment" thing seems a wee bit more impractical, exotic and dangerous than Starfleet would be comfortable with. And if you do go with the theory that Paris brought back a crazy virus, think about just what else could a ship bring back from the.... infinite transwarp place.

No way dawg, that's some Event Horizon shit right there.

 

[Deks]

Why not?
Being everywhere in the universe at the same time opens up pretty big possibilities.
Paris could have brought back a virus he picked up from phenomena that Federation would begin to dream of for the next thousand years.
Or simply could have been in a part of space that affects Human physiology in the way it did with him.
Coupled with effect of infinite velocity, it's possible this interaction and a combination of factors was precipitated in Paris 'evolving'.

TW as the Borg use it is actually quite similar to the QS technology as it was explained on-screen.
I would surmise BOTH are aspect that remove a ship from being able to interact with the known universe as Warp would allow.

TW that was achieved by Paris is a completely different beast apparently that the Borg never achieved.
And it's possible that the Voy and later on SF adopted a different explanation for what TW stands for.

 

[The Inquisitor]

Personally I would go with QSS. It seems to fit in well with the Federation look and feel. Transwarp feels a little bit Borg (obviously).

Having dabbled with QSS in the past I should imagine the Federation showing some keen interest in further developing the technology upon the return of Voyager from the Delta Quadrant. I should imagine, like with any new technology, there would be stumbling blocks and the occasional accident but the rewards of succeeding would be well worth the sacrifice of the odd mishap.

Much like Warp Speed it would probably take decades to master, much like the slow but steady improvement in Warp technology from 1 right the way up to 9.975 over the period of a couple of centuries.

As stated in previous posts the main problem appears to be the lack of computing/processing power. The ships themselves seem to be able to cope just fine in the slipstream without disintegrating after a couple of minutes.

This is only my second post. Im like a fat kid in a sweetshop after finding this site :-)

 

[publiusr]

Why not?
Being everywhere in the universe at the same time opens up pretty big possibilities.

And wasn't there a line in STIII where a crewman told Styles "All speeds available through transwarp drive?"

Excelsior at that time was also to be a wonderous ship--what we think of as ENT-J as being, before it was simply dumbed down as a heavy cruiser replacement.


There is also another way to look at this.

Remember what Barclay meant in the Nth Degree in his line "There are no limits" after saying Starfleet always looked at things as a function of warp?

To me this means that Warp 10 really wasn't everywhere at once--that the tables had to be recalculated yet again. Warp 10 in the ST:TMP era was not warp 10 in the TNG ear as we know. Therefore transwarp meant that yet another scale came along by the time of "All Good Things."

There transwarp 25 or whatever is "everywhere at once," somehow unattainable, and that gets broken by Ent-J or whatever, as we broke the wall that was the "sound barrier" the lightspeed barrier, etc.

No limits...


Now as we have this conversation, Stargate ships travel between galaxies with second/third tier hyperspace drives, with the Tardis doing better, and there was the Stargate Universe jump drive that allowed travel between universes like how nuGalactica jumped from point to point, while trek ships were sadly limited to interstellar travel. This was never said to be a limit early on, and shouldn't be, since the ship-as-sculpture seems to indicate a very high level of technology.

Thus I have a little pet theory that once a civilization stumbles into hyperdrive, its innovation stops. A caveman who gets a maglev train ticket stagnates and never invents the muscle car or jeep, which allows more direct access to surroundings. Trek ships are superior in this, in that they can interact at FTL, thus the fact they they haven't slown technological progress down. With treck you are always doing one better, pushing where you wouldn't have to with hyperspace, which seems only tier one in SW.

The Stargate Earth ships, especially the Prommie, is very clunky, but could ford galaxies the way Enterprise couldn't, even with the Kelvin-race additions. But they have to have zats and the overall tech level is all Cheyene Mountain gear. I say the same thing happened in the Star Wars Universe that happened with the Varduaar. Very old, able to skip around enemies and encircle them, colonize a galaxy more quickly, yet remain stagnant--no transporters, replicators, Voyager tech, etc.

In Star Trek, you had to earn every light year, face hostile neighbors head on instead of jumping over them. This forced rapid tech progression. In Star Wars, the scale is more vast, yet everything seems sedate in a sense. The old Republic gets stale, and the first really big conflict and new blood was in the rise of Empire. But focus on militarism and less on exploration still leaves trek ships more advanced overall than a lot of the other ships we have seen, even if they have the hyperspace transrapid ticket that leaves them lazy.

 

[C.E. Evans]

The whole "Warp 10=Infinite velocity" thing was lifted out of the TNG Tech Manual, IMO, and was meant to be the reason why ships couldn't go to Warp 10. Ever. At least not with the current warp scale.

IIRC, the idea was that warp engine efficiency dropped dramatically as a ship neared Warp 10, ultimately requiring infinite energy to reach it. A correlation was made that an object with infinite energy would be traveling infinitely fast and would then be occupying all points in the Universe simultaneously. I think it was supposed to be an impossibility per the TNG Tech Manual, but easily done in VOY's "Threshold."

 

[publiusr]

Well there, in the tech manual, they were trying to make Warp 10 impossible to attain as lightspeed is to us. We really would have to have infinite energy to get to light speed, and even then we still can't quite do it (law of diminishing returns, Einstein and all that.)

What Sternbach did was to have a 24th century equivalent of this problem still exist for warp designers. It was all meant to have dramatic effect instead of going "warp 11, warp 12," etc. It's always nice to have that unattainable to shoot for--for it means more when you reach it by the VOY episode, either that or the ultimate form of transwarp, with a lower tier used by Voth and the three nacelle Ent-D we will say...

 

[C.E. Evans]

Under an ideal situation, Warp 9.9 might have been considered "ludicrious speed," but the temptation for the writers to go even faster than that was impossible to ignore, IMO...

 

[shipfisher]

And wasn't there a line in STIII where a crewman told Styles "All speeds available through transwarp drive?"

That line of dialogue was the first clue that transwarp actually supplemented warp-drive instead of outright replacing it. Traditional warp engines appear to dawdle along reasonably well ( although obviously enduring increased operational stresses) within what may be some sort of deeper penetration into subspace than the nacelle fields can achieve without help (kinda' like jogging along the travellators at the airport). The visual evidence suggested that help might have come (or at least have been intended to, in the case of ol' NX-2000) from the deflector dish, what with the new, chubby mid-section the Excelsior was sporting around it, perhaps crammed with experimental gear (not to mention that matte-black {radiator?} grille on that chubby neck).

It's interesting to note that the subsequent Ambassador class, presumably designed after the transwarp program had been abandoned, returned to the more slender-necked profile of pre-Excelsior ships.

 

[Ronald Held]

I always thought warp 9.99 sounded worst than Warp 30(or whatever the TOS scale speed would have been)

 

[sojourner]

^yep, Gene and the gang wrote themselves into a corner when they decided warp 10 was the cap.

 

[C.E. Evans]

In a way, it was a result of "Eugene's Limit" not being strictly enforced, especially after Roddenberry stepped back from being a showrunner during the first season. From that point forward, Roddenberry became less involved in the show's onscreen technical details due to his failing health, IMO.

But had Eugene's Limit been actually enforced, I could see most ships playing in the Warp 1 to Warp 9 range, with speeds above Warp 9.1 being very rare occasions, and Warp 9.8 being even more so...

 

[SWHouston]

Speaking of "writing themselves into a corner"...
I think it was a mistake to state Dates/Year so frequently. It would have been a lot better, and easier to connect things if they just wouldn't have done that.

 

[Unicron]

Maybe it would have been easier to use a more simplistic route like Star Wars or B5 do, with ships within a certain range having FTL capacity and smaller ships usually not having it. That solves the problem of the speed factor increasing exponentially to Ludicrous Speed.

 

[Lorna]

^yep, Gene and the gang wrote themselves into a corner when they decided warp 10 was the cap.

I always looked at it like Warp 10 entered the ship into time-space as opposed to space-time.

In space-time (where we live) time is linear and space is not, in time-space it's space that's linear and time is not which means that in time-space you are stuck in the exact moment you hit warp 10 but every point in the universe is accessible.

The episode in question made it clear that the affects of time space (as I call it) causes an evolutionary mess which makes warp 10 completely unappealing. .

All it takes for the writers to brush past the warp 10 problem is do the same as what they did with the transporters. The transporters use a Heisenberg compensator, Starfleet just needs to invent a warp 10 compensator to prevent entry into time-space and to remain in space-time.

Anyway, on another note. I'd be interested in learning if it's possible to activate the Slipstream drive whilst travelling through a Transwarp conduit. That must be an incredible speed.

 

[sojourner]

^The issue is not how fast warp 10 is, it's that they set an upper limit on the number. So we ended up with each new ship going 9.995, 9.9997, 9.999999999999999, etc. which is confusing for the viewer.

 

[C.E. Evans]

^^^
And likely not what Roddenberry wanted. In addition from keeping ships from being able to cross the Galaxy too quickly, the redefined warp scale was probably supposed to keep warp factors from getting too cumbersome and out of control (i.e., Warp 47, Warp 106, Warp 5783, and so on).

Ironically, writers found another way to do that instead with fractional warp factors. But I believe that the Voyager's declared Warp 9.975 was the highest spoken onscreen (not including transwarp and slipstream), and was more often than not simply called "maximum warp"...

 

[sojourner]

^exactly, but it would have been easier on the viewers to just use warp 19, warp 43, warp 305, etc. Hence my "wrote themselves into a corner" statement.

And I think the Prometheus topped Voyager's top speed. not sure though.

 

[sojourner]

^exactly, but it would have been easier on the viewers to just use warp 19, warp 43, warp 305, etc. Hence my "wrote themselves into a corner" statement.

And I think the Prometheus topped Voyager's top speed. not sure though.

 

[C.E. Evans]

The Prometheus was said to be the fastest ship in the fleet, but it actually "only" went to Warp 9.9 onscreen (it's actual top speed is the stuff of non-canon material, I suppose).

But I actually agree with Roddenberry's original idea to simplify the warp scale for TNG. I do think after a certain point--like Warp 21 or Warp 101--they get really silly. I believe the problem with Roddenberry's revised scale was simply in its execution. I think that some writers just couldn't accept the idea of "keep it simple, stupid" and that Warp 9 was really more than fast enough for dramatic storytelling, IMO...