Star Trek TOS Ship Speeds

[Timo]

...And in TNG, the characters even made mention of it, stating (in two separate episodes) that the E-D was doing much more high speed traveling than she was designed for, and thus requiring more maintenance.

However, I have tried coming up with more scientific explanations than that if you read some of my other threads.

Indeed, and I wouldn't want to detract you from that - unless the effort forces you to disregard some of the more magical aspects of the onscreen evidence. After all, I strongly feel that the magic will go away if it's not accepted as part of the Trek reality, and all we're left with is a not-so-fictional universe that happens to be rife with mistakes.

Going way past design specs is not a common feature of today's propulsive machinery, say. But it could be an inherent property of warp engines: as long as one feeds more power into warp coils, those will continue to propel the ship faster and faster, in an exponentially accelerating curve. And increase of speed becomes ever more cheaper in terms of added power, or at least does not become more expensive, as the input power levels increase. It's just that everything else falls apart unless one carefully stays within the limits of moderation.

There are plenty of things like that in the real world, yet somebody from a century past would have found it extremely difficult to believe that a nuclear power plant would work by reducing the reactivity of neutron cascades. A person educated in the 19th century would be convinced that the only realistic type of powerplant would be one that constantly tries to maximize properties of that sort.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Timo,

Of course a ship red-lining it more often would require increased maintenance. That's why you have a cruise-speed and a maximum-speed. Cruise consumes less fuel, is more efficient, provides reasonable speed and doesn't put too much of a strain on the engines, thus a longer service life; Maximum-speed provides more speed, but at much higher fuel consumption, less efficiency, and a shorter service life, requiring more maintenance.

As for the definition of maximum speed, it basically means the maximum speed you can do safely. Ships also have a maximum emergency speed which is faster. It puts an extremely heavy strain on the engines, is not particularly efficient and guzzles fuel, but if you need to go real fast it works. However you can damage the engine if you push it too far, and in any case maintenance requirements will go up and service life will decrease.

As for modern propulsive machinery, at least on military ships, the actual speeds and such are classified. The actual maximum speed is substantially higher than what is publicly disseminated. Yes there is an emergency speed figure which is a bit higher than the maximum, however, but it's only to be used in emergencies and isn't really safe to do for protracted periods of time.

As for your comment about nuclear reactions, if you're talking about moderators, that's to slow down the neutron's to increase the rate of hits.


CuttingEdge100

 

[Mytran]

...But it could be an inherent property of warp engines: as long as one feeds more power into warp coils, those will continue to propel the ship faster and faster, in an exponentially accelerating curve...

Thing is, would the rest of the ship's systems be able to keep up? Perhaps the warp coils are robust enough, but what about the deflectors? Assuming they can't keep up, that could place a limit on safe warp velocity, whilst allowing a faster non-safe speed at the same time (warp speed without deflectors? No thanks!)

 

[Timo]

The actual maximum speed is substantially higher than what is publicly disseminated.

That must be something of an urban myth. Sure, any self-respecting navy lists the top speed of its largest ships as "30+ knots", but it can't mean 40 knots in practice. Laws of hydrodynamics are unyielding: even the total power production of the United States would not make a Nimitz travel at a speed higher than 32-33 knots, which is basically what the "combat cruise speed" of the ship would be anyway, from the moment they start their frantic staying-alive maneuvering to the moment a volley of nuclear-tipped ASMs finally does them in. There's no secret speed reserve - not unless the carriers also have secret deployable air cushion skirts...

Thing is, would the rest of the ship's systems be able to keep up?

Indeed, whenever alien forces make the ship go faster than usual, it's the ship's structures that begin to fail, not the power train or the coils or other engine components... In VOY, one gets to infinite speed once one manages to reinforce the structures sufficiently, and installs a new power system that provides output past some special threshold.

Perhaps we just have to accept that when one mucks with the very geometry of space, it suddenly starts to make sense that infinities are achievable, and that a steady increase of "costs" is no longer a given. After all, the main obstacle for achieving infinite speed at zero cost is already alleviated or obliterated by Treknology: ships need not have any mass...

As for your comment about nuclear reactions, if you're talking about moderators, that's to slow down the neutron's to increase the rate of hits.

Exactly. But a 19th century physicist would laugh you out whilst throwing ink bottles at you before you could conclude your agrument on that. It simply doesn't make any sort of "layman" sense to strive to produce more power by deliberately limiting your very agents of power production.

Warp drive could be like that, too...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Timo,

The whole premise of "alien forces" making the ship go faster is patently ridiculous. The engine-design of the ship would need a serious re-design -- and with that said, the question would be why didn't the aliens leave the modifications in? Or why didn't the crew try and memorize the design changes, write them down so when they get back to SF HQ they could tell them "Holy shit, these aliens made all these mods to our engines, you should really see all the stuff we wrote down" and they'd be able to implement it to all future federation designs. Plus the navigational deflectors would have to be modified as well to withstand the risk of an impact at high-speed.

As for TNG, I don't like the re-calibration of the warp-scale. The Warp 10 is infinite speed is ridiculous. Gene Roddenberry only did that because he didn't want the ship's warp-factors to be "too fast" and they'd explore the whole galaxy in the first season.

Warp drive could be like that, too...

Well, assuming warp-drive works by compressing space in the front and stretching it in the back, the drive would probably work like this

1.) Energy is generated
2.) Energy is then used to warp-space
3.) Warping of space pushes ship

- The greater the warping, the faster the ship goes
- However the greater the warping, the more energy is required to do it
- Thus increased speed comes at disproportionate increases in energy required to do it
- Service live also drops from the increased strain


CuttingEdge100

 

[Timo]

The whole premise of "alien forces" making the ship go faster is patently ridiculous. The engine-design of the ship would need a serious re-design -- and with that said, the question would be why didn't the aliens leave the modifications in?

A relatively simple way to explain away the alien "modifications" is to say that they sabotaged the safety valve. That explains "That Which Survives", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" and "The Changeling" just fine - and the addition of several warp factors to the supposed safe top speed is the less implausible, the more we believe that the dangers of high warp are related to structural strength only, and that the power train can take several times (perhaps several thousand times) the usual workload.

The latter is by no means difficult to believe, if we decide that warp drive by its very nature already involves greatly varying power levels (say, between perfectly safe settings such as warp 1 and warp 8), and that high power levels in a plasma conduit aren't a big deal to begin with.

Jamming the safety valve would result in short (at most days-long) bursts of high speed, at greatly increased risk. But greatly increased risk doesn't mean the ship blowing up. It just means the odds of the ship blowing up going up. Starfleet would have a heart attack if safety levels went from 99.99% down to 73.21%, but that wouldn't yet necessarily do damage to the ship.

The single TOS case that this approach wouldn't explain would be "By Any Other Name". There, the high speed is a sustained phenomenon, so there can't be a vastly increased risk - and there supposedly has to be an all-new source of power or at least fuel, too. But it's completely plausible that aliens who already had moved from galaxy to galaxy would indeed possess a potent, possibly very compact power source, and would have the knowhow to hook it up to a primitive warp engine. Sort of like today's engineers rigging a fission reactor to a paddle steamer; a basically infinite increase in range and a major one in speed would be the result, and a bit of work by modern professionals would solve the durability and reliability problems, too. But the basic mechanism of a steam engine driving a paddle wheel would remain intact.

Or why didn't the crew try and memorize the design changes, write them down so when they get back to SF HQ they could tell them "Holy shit, these aliens made all these mods to our engines, you should really see all the stuff we wrote down" and they'd be able to implement it to all future federation designs.

This wouldn't help any with the "jamming the valve" scenarios, as the mods wouldn't be beneficial or useful. And it remains unclear how much the Kelvans would cooperate in the aftermath of "By Any Other Name". They'd hold all the trump cards: they could still turn all their enemies into salt lumps at the touch of a button, they could refuse access to their strange power source, and no Starfleet engineer would have had chance to study their technology in operation (Scotty being the only one alive at the time, and busy elsewhere). And they'd not have much reason to love Starfleet, because the organization probably wouldn't be able to offer them anything they desired. The UFP government wouldn't be any more willing to volunteer to surrender to an Andromedan invasion (even one of "peaceful" refugees) than Kirk was.

In TNG "Where No One Has Gone Before", there were no mods of use to write down - it was all done with magic way beyond the understanding of Starfleet engineers. The only case where the mods might have been written down was TNG "Nth Degree". But in that episode, the ship's computer was under alien control, and the engineers had no access to what was happening. For all we know, the aliens had planned it all so that no records could be made of the events - and they'd certainly have had all the means to ensure this.

Plus the navigational deflectors would have to be modified as well to withstand the risk of an impact at high-speed.

They already cope with a vast range of speeds, so flexibility might have been built into them from start. Today, we might build a car's chassis only barely strong enough to withstand the law-required forces the car meets in standard operations and certain types of emergency, because doing it better would mean adding weight. But we don't limit the performance of the car stereo interface to that which is required in normal operations: we generously oversize it because there's no penalty from providing thousands of times of excess processing power for the stereo's electronics. Perhaps the deflector is an "easy" technology like microchips, rather than a "difficult" one like chassis or engine?

- However the greater the warping, the more energy is required to do it
- Thus increased speed comes at disproportionate increases in energy required to do it

This part is far from given. And indeed the episodes themselves don't seem to support this idea at all. Lack of power never stops the ships from going ever faster. The rattling of teeth and self-sealing stem bolts, the groaning of the deck plates, and the redlining of safety instrumentation does.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[STR]

Just messing around with Excel while reading this thread. Funny thing is, aside from several classes of ship from ENT, the maximum speed of ST ships are rarely given.

 

[Wingsley]

Just messing around with Excel while reading this thread. Funny thing is, aside from several classes of ship from ENT, the maximum speed of ST ships are rarely given.

That's because starships in STAR TREK are rarely shown pushing their performance to the limit. It's repeatedly made clear, especially in TOS, but also in the later shows, "high warp" speeds are dangerous. The most common command for speed you'll hear a starship captain give in TOS and most of the other shows is for Warp 1 to 2. And that's not just on leaving planetary orbit, either. That seems to be a common deep space velocity.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Timo,

Normally, I respect your opinions, but in this case, I think you're just flat out wrong. Now, I'm quite sure you can thunder away for a seemingly endless period of time trying to justify your point of view.

I am simply trying to reconcile the actual speeds (distance/time) in the show vs the listed speeds in the show. And I'm trying to incorporate some basic physics into the equation as well.

There are episodes such as "The Doomsday Machine" in which two star systems are covered in less than one day. Assuming a typical star to be between 3.5 LY and 10 LY from each other, that would necessitate a speed between 1,278.375c to 3,652.5c assuming this distance is covered in 24 hrs. If this distance were covered in 18 hours, this would necessitate a speed of 1,704.5c to 4,870c, and if this distance was covered in 12 hrs, this would necessitate a speed of 2,556.75c to 7,305c.

Granted there are cases such as "That Which Survives" in which the speed of the Enterprise is too extreme to be taken seriously (If the ship could do 765,000 c, it would be able to cross the whole galaxy in less than 3 months).

Looking back at "The Doomsday Machine", though assuming two star systems were traversed in a twelve hour period, the velocities would necessitate a minimum speed of 2,556.75c to 7,305c.

These figures aren't too far off from Gene Roddenberry's "Star Trek Is..." maximum listed speed of 0.73 LY per hour which is 6,399.18c.

As for the statement about wanting to add some basic physical laws into the equation regarding ship's top speeds, I'm talking predominantly about the large discrepancy between the ship's cruise and maximum speeds.

The ship's listed cruise speed is Warp 6, which is 216c. The ship's maximum normal speed is Warp 8, which is 512c. Since there is no sound-barrier in the equation it would be logical to conclude that the higher the velocity, the energy required to reach it would be disproportionately higher, as a result energy levels would soar, and velocity gains would be comparatively small. You'd eventually reach a point of diminishing returns.

The cruise-speed would be probably around 2/3 to 3/4 the maximum normal speed. Maximum emergency speed would probably be a tiny amount (~5%) faster.

Part of me thinks when Gene Roddenberry wrote up the warp chart for the Enterprise he just figured "Okay, Warp 6 for maximum cruise, Warp 8 for dash" and failed to factor into the equation the fact that these numbers were exponents.


CuttingEdge100

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I didn't meant to silence all discussion on this thread, I simply told Timo that I felt his particular views were wrong.


CuttingEdge100

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Nobody?

 

[Wingsley]

Well, this subject is bound to cause some rigorous debate. Some debating is good, and sometimes it isn't. It seems silly, but this particular debate does expose some polarizing worldviews of the STAR TREK Universe and what it represents. It seems to me that some people become attached to a worldview of TREK based on a favorite form of it (gaming literature, for example) and anything outside of that context is seen is anathema.

For some people, FTL velocity in TOS is calculated by simply cubing the warp factor and multiplying that product by the speed of light. To be fair, there are some instances where this formula does make (limited) sense, given canon stories and dialogue.

For me, and maybe some others, STAR TREK MAPS (Bantam, 1980) provides at least a partial answer that is superior to the "simple" warp-factor-cubed-times-lightspeed formula. Cochrane's Formula suggests that warp velocity is further modified due to environmental factors in the form of Cochrane's Variable. This revolutionary way of looking at warp velocity in TOS seems to blend in perfectly with the established content of TOS and TAS, and, with some modification, could also work well with the rest of the TREK Universe. Unfortunately, it was never officially established as canon, and some dismiss it immediately. Over in the TrekBBS Art forum, BK613 and I had a discussion about MAPS and how it "fit" the TREK Universe so well.

As you can see from this thread, there are other schools of thought popping up as well. Each of them also has some merit, to one degree or another.

The bottom line is, it is never officially nailed down in canon, whether one isolates TOS from the rest of the TREK franchise or not, as to what warp factors "really" mean. It's a vague, fictitious construct, and (it seems, at times) the vaguer the stories leave it, the better. Fundamental to the appeal of Cochrane's Formula in MAPS is that it blends into the continuity of TOS-canon so well, and that's because of its built-in flexibility.

There are some things I've noticed about the overall content of post-TOS TREK, that seem to blend in with the continuity flowing through the speed theory in MAPS.

1: Earth/Federation starships do not typically spend much of their flight time at "high warp" speeds; the most common commands heard from characters are for speeds of Warp 1 to 3.

2: Occasionally, starships go beyond Warp 2, often to what I call "multi-warp speeds" (derived from "Metamorphosis"), which can be an intermediate ground between Warp 2 and "high warp". These speeds are possible, and are used more often than "high warp", but less often than the more common "low warp" speeds.

3: "High warp" speeds, which in TOS seem to be above Warp 5, are possible and can be sustained, but doing so "will be extremely dangerous" (Spock, speaking of sustaining Warp 7 in "Arena")

4: Based on 1, 2 and 3, one can project on the rest of the TREK Universe that once "low warp" and "multi-warp" speeds were possible for early classes of starships, limited exploration of the Galaxy began to take place, even though these "old style" ships were nowhere near as powerful or capable as the TOS Enterprise or her ilk. Still, this would at least partially explain why Pike's and Kirk's Enterprise are still lumbering along out there discovering expeditions that may have passed this way before. (The UES Valiant, the Horizon, the Archon, the USS Valiant, etc.) This also fits in well with STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE, because Archer's NX-01 was the first Earth Warp 5 ship, and yet she often did not go much beyond Warp 4. Plus she was re-tracing the footsteps of Conestoga, which obviously could not achieve anything above Warp 2. So "low warp" was just enough to get "out there" and explore... and get oneself into lots and lots of trouble...

These general tendencies in the flow of TOS stories seem to also fit fairly well with other TREK series and movies. As such, they all flow fairly well with Cochrane's Formula in MAPS, perhaps with some modifications.

 

[Timo]

For this evidence-based line of arguing, one might add the cubic formula since there indeed is some evidence for it - but one could add it "in part", under special circumstances only.

The Maps suggested multiplying the cubic value by a factor that slightly depended on local conditions but usually was about thousandfold. That's sometimes way too much, sometimes too little. But local factors could indeed play a role - one that varies more by the location than the Maps suggest.

Our best proof for the cubic formula (with a Cochrane factor of one) comes from ENT "Broken Bow", as referring to travel inside the Sol system; a good supporting pitch comes from TOS "Paradise Syndrome" where hours spent at warp nine don't get the ship very far. So perhaps the vicinity of star systems causes the cubic formula to hold, while deep space allows for the greater speeds, the deeper one gets. That way, warp nine might be a slow intrasystem speed, but warp two might be a fast intersystem speed!

I'd still hesitate from using thousandfold differences, as dozenfold ones would be all right for "low warp" and "multi-warp". "High warp" might be higher again than the cubic formula suggests, though; no doubt whoever invented the cubic formula in the Trek universe did so before he or she had access to real evidence from truly high speed starships...

There are episodes such as "The Doomsday Machine" in which two star systems are covered in less than one day.

Hmh? What evidence is there that either our heroes or Matt Decker surveyed those multiple destroyed star systems within the same day? No dates or stardates are mentioned during the teaser, which may well span weeks for all we know.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cary L. Brown]

For this evidence-based line of arguing, one might add the cubic formula since there indeed is some evidence for it - but one could add it "in part", under special circumstances only.

The Maps suggested multiplying the cubic value by a factor that slightly depended on local conditions but usually was about thousandfold. That's sometimes way too much, sometimes too little. But local factors could indeed play a role - one that varies more by the location than the Maps suggest.

Our best proof for the cubic formula (with a Cochrane factor of one) comes from ENT "Broken Bow", as referring to travel inside the Sol system; a good supporting pitch comes from TOS "Paradise Syndrome" where hours spent at warp nine don't get the ship very far. So perhaps the vicinity of star systems causes the cubic formula to hold, while deep space allows for the greater speeds, the deeper one gets. That way, warp nine might be a slow intrasystem speed, but warp two might be a fast intersystem speed!

I'd still hesitate from using thousandfold differences, as dozenfold ones would be all right for "low warp" and "multi-warp". "High warp" might be higher again than the cubic formula suggests, though; no doubt whoever invented the cubic formula in the Trek universe did so before he or she had access to real evidence from truly high speed starships...

There are episodes such as "The Doomsday Machine" in which two star systems are covered in less than one day.

Hmh? What evidence is there that either our heroes or Matt Decker surveyed those multiple destroyed star systems within the same day? No dates or stardates are mentioned during the teaser, which may well span weeks for all we know.

Timo Saloniemi

The only "real" evidence we have is that the two systems were discovered within an hour... not counting commercials, of course!

 

[Wingsley]

^ There is an implication that the star systems were surveyed in the Enterprise's search pattern within a short, unspecified period of time, as evidenced by Sulu's emphasis "Now entering the limits of System L-Three-Seven-Four, sir. Scanning showing the same evidence of destruction." This very strongly suggests that Enterprise has visited L-370, L-371, L-372, L-373 and now L-374, presumably within a matter of hours or days. It's not explicit, but it is strongly implicit.

 

[Ronald Held]

A spatially varying Cochrane factor might be as viable as varying the exponent, with the data we have.
BTW, are we talking the speed the crew thinks the ship is moving at or the speed a distant observer thinks the speed is?

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I actually computed up a warp-factor scale assuming the 0.73 LY/Hr figure is the ship's maximum speed.

I'm working in the following increments: Half, Thirds, Quarters, and Tenths. The first 1/20th and 1/16th, and 1/8ths are also listed. I'm listing the velocity in terms of C and the warp-factor from the TOS scale (W^3)

5% of maximum velocity = 319.959 / Warp 6.839611653339012
6.25% of maximum velocity = 399.98475c / Warp 7.367748306149947
10% of maximum velocity = 639.918c / Warp 8.617370695148097
12.5% of maximum velocity = 799.8975c / Warp 9.282781181245614
20% of maximum velocity = 1,279.836c / Warp 10.857206733564304
25% of maximum velocity = 1,599.795c / Warp 11.695571411819346
30% of maximum velocity = 1,919.754c / Warp 12.428399182256996
33.33% of maximum velocity = 2,132.8467c / Warp 12.872212888393864
40% of maximum velocity = 2,559.672 / Warp 13.679223306678024
50% of maximum velocity = 3,199.59c / Warp 14.735496612299894
60% of maximum velocity = 3,839.508 / Warp 15.658801746221817
66.67% of maximum velocity = 4,266.3333c / Warp 16.218782931166682
70% of maximum velocity = 4,479.426c / Warp 16.484437116257773
75% of maximum velocity = 4,799.385c / Warp 16.867932843196062
80% of maximum velocity = 5,119.344c / Warp 17.234741390296193
90% of maximum velocity = 5,759.262c / Warp 17.924853380219098
100% of maximum velocity = 6,399.18c / Warp 18.565562362491228

The reason I used the numbers I used was because I would assume a cruise speed around 2/3 to 3/4 maximum speed as it requires increasingly larger amounts of power to go faster. The energy levels required to go from 2/3 to maximum or 3/4 to maximum could potentially be considerable. However it's just a guesstimate.


CuttingEdge100

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Ronald Held,

That just sounds like re-packaging the Chi-factor...


CuttingEdge100

 

[Wingsley]

^ Perhaps a modification of Cochrane's Formula from MAPS is what is needed...

 

[BK613]

Don't know if this is useful but I worked this up for Warped9's TOS shuttle thread a few months ago. Using the fact that light takes about 8 minutes and 18 seconds to travel from the Sun to the Earth, I came up with some local travel times for low warp speeds.

(also, posting as a link since I am unsure of the image restrictions outside the art forum)