Warp 10 Barrier
- Thread starter Thomas Kelvin
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Well, sure, but generally people know that, and it's fairly well publicized. This was the first time I heard that about Arnold.
When people talk about Arnold, it's usually in a negative context. Shatner and Doohan are generally well-liked. (Well, Doohan is, anyway!
)Warp 10 = infinite speed
Infinite speed = Infinite power
Infinite power is impossible
Therefore warp 10 is impossible, hence the barrier.
There's also the fact that it would take infinite time to reach infinite speed, so you could get closer and closer but never actually get there. (Which is one of the many conceptual problems with "Threshold.")
The thing that can be hard to understand is that infinity is not a number. It's not a quantity. It's the property of limitlessness. It's the fact that no matter how big a number you can reach, there will always be bigger ones. The word literally means "the state of having no ending." So the idea of reaching infinity is a contradiction in terms. Infinity is not a destination, it's a direction. You can go toward it as long as you like, but you will never get any closer to it.
Yet there's nothing conceptually wrong with being at a standstill, say (relative to whatever you wish to be at standstill with), even though this means being "infinitely slow" - it won't take you infinitely long to slow down from your previous speed, nor do you need to bleed off infinite energies to reach the zero kinetic energy state, despite appearances.
Since we don't know how warp works (only that it does!), we cannot solidly argue that infinite speed = infinite power. At warp, speed and power might not be related particularly closely. Perhaps infinite (warp) speed is more a zero than a lazy eight?
Timo Saloniemi
Since we don't know how warp works (only that it does!), we cannot solidly argue that infinite speed = infinite power. At warp, speed and power might not be related particularly closely. Perhaps infinite (warp) speed is more a zero than a lazy eight?
Timo Saloniemi
I see where you're coming from Timo, if you are at infinite speed you are everywhere simultaneously and therefore not moving at all (0 speed). So imagine a Pacman game where the right side of the screen is infinite speed and the left is 0 speed, if you moved to the left, slowing down more and more until u hit absolute zero, the universe may "slingshot you" to the right side of the screen. If you understand what i'm getting at hats off because I worded all this terribly.
Since when at warp, space is moving (not the ship) so the ship could be defined as having 0 speed at all warp speeds, including warp 10. Star Trek warp drive is theorized by many to involve the ship partially or fully submerging itself in subspace. The deeper you go, the more compressed subspace is relative to normal space. I wonder if there is a layer of subspace that is, relative to our space, infinitely compressed. If a ship were partially submerged in this layer using their warp field, it could simply pick any destination, regardless of its distance from their current location, and arrive there instantaneously. This in the star trek universe would make sense but since subspace doesn't actually exist, it would not be possible in the real world.
I just look at as another barrier they're passing, more like giving access to some kind of transwarp field where distance becomes meaningless because they are occupying all points in the universe simultaneously, and that is the infinite speed they are describing, not the speed needed to reach there. That's my interpretation. It's definitely rubbish even for Trek physics.
I've kinda favored the idea in ye old TNG Technical Manual that there was a mechanical limitation involved in reaching Warp 10. That no matter how much energy you poured into the warp nacelles, they can only generate so many warp fields at a time (in this case, it was Planck time). Even if you had infinite energy, it would be a moot point because you're not going to ever reach Warp 10. You would need something greater than God (or in Trek's case, the Q).
I interpreted the manual to mean that was the Federation's technical limit, as there have been plenty of instances of alien craft or technology having the means to travel far faster.
An internal combustion engine and subsonic aerodynamics can only get you so fast before you need better streamlining and jet propulsion. Transwarp should have been the jet engine to warp's internal combustion, but they made it some kind of space fold type of thing.
An internal combustion engine and subsonic aerodynamics can only get you so fast before you need better streamlining and jet propulsion. Transwarp should have been the jet engine to warp's internal combustion, but they made it some kind of space fold type of thing.
In those instances, those were examples of propulsion other than warp drive. But even then, those speeds could be deduced as velocities in the Warp 9.999999999+ range. Even travel through the Bajoran wormwhole or a transwarp conduit/slipstream corridor would be far short of Warp 10.
Assuming that warp 10 actually IS "infinite velocity." That's almost certainly untrue in universe, even if the crew of Voyager (lol) thinks it is.
For what it's worth, Star Trek Online pretty much disregards that theory altogether and various engine mods (slipstream and exotic transwarp drives) give you some really scarily high warp factors (I had a ship that could supercruise at warp 14.1 and hit bursts of warp 23 in slipstream). Voth Transwarp drives are also insanely fast and sticking a gaggle of nines after the decimal point is a silly way to describe what is basically just a really high warp factor anyway.
The less said about VOY's "Threshold" the better. Even its writer, Brannon Braga, thought it was "a terrible episode" in hindsight and referred to it as a "stinker" in the DVD commentary.
Not surprisingly, the whole notion of Warp 10 was never mentioned again in later episodes and movies in lieu of other propulsion systems that didn't involve infinite velocity.
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Pfft. It that were true, how could anyone go "to infinity and beyond"...
Which is, of course, the whole point of that joke.
Especially since the chart in TNG Tech Manual clearly stated that Warp 10 was unachievable because it required infinite POWER, not that it was infinite SPEED. It's a huge difference.
Not necessarily.
Theories can turn out to be incorrect, or at least, incomplete.
The Federation knows a heck of a lot (they really do - but for some reason, not even 1% of that was ever used), however, that does't mean they know everything.
Paris could have simply found a way to achieve Warp 10 with really good breakthrough in technical efficiency...
Plus, the bussard collectors are meant to generate continuous energy as a starship is traveling through space... in this instance, it does stand to reason that travelling so close to the threshold could have generated all the energy a starship needs.. at the very least, Voyager shouldn't have had energy issues they had given how their tech works... all ships in the Federation can easily be self-sufficient (but it was never touched upon because the writers wanted to create more 'drama' - how pitiful).
So, energy generation wouldn't have been the problem.
Plus, no one in the Federation probably traveled so close to the Threshold before.
All that they needed was a push to get them past the excessive subspace forces that would usually tear a ship apart.
Or at the very least, the enhancement of the shuttle could have been used to enhance Voyager's structural integrity to the point where flying at sustainable Warp 9.975 would have been doable again (in which case it would have taken them about a week to get back to the Federation), or at the very least close to that velocity without threatening to tear the ship apart.
Theories can turn out to be incorrect, or at least, incomplete.
The Federation knows a heck of a lot (they really do - but for some reason, not even 1% of that was ever used), however, that does't mean they know everything.
Paris could have simply found a way to achieve Warp 10 with really good breakthrough in technical efficiency...
Plus, the bussard collectors are meant to generate continuous energy as a starship is traveling through space... in this instance, it does stand to reason that travelling so close to the threshold could have generated all the energy a starship needs.. at the very least, Voyager shouldn't have had energy issues they had given how their tech works... all ships in the Federation can easily be self-sufficient (but it was never touched upon because the writers wanted to create more 'drama' - how pitiful).
So, energy generation wouldn't have been the problem.
Plus, no one in the Federation probably traveled so close to the Threshold before.
All that they needed was a push to get them past the excessive subspace forces that would usually tear a ship apart.
Or at the very least, the enhancement of the shuttle could have been used to enhance Voyager's structural integrity to the point where flying at sustainable Warp 9.975 would have been doable again (in which case it would have taken them about a week to get back to the Federation), or at the very least close to that velocity without threatening to tear the ship apart.
The graph shouldn't be taken alone since the text underneath the chart does specify Warp 10 as infinite speed. To quote: "Our solution was to redraw the warp curve so that the exponent of the warp factor increases gradually, then sharply as you approach Warp 10. At Warp 10, the exponent (and the speed) would be infinite, so you could never reach this value."
Also in the in universe text: "Even if were possible to expend the theoretically infinite amount of energy required, an object at Warp 10 would be travelling infinitely fast, occupying all points in the universe simultaneously."
All of that is making the mistake of treating infinity as a number, an achievable quantity that can be reached if you just do more of what you did before. The whole meaning of the word "infinity" is that it isn't achievable. No matter how much more you pile on, you're still infinitely far away from infinity. By definition, you can never get closer to infinity.
The only handwave for "Threshold" that ever made sense to me was based on their throwaway line about "quantum warp theory." I figured that they only way they could achieve infinite speed without needing an infinite amount of time to accelerate there is if they made an instantaneous quantum leap from a finite velocity state to an infinite velocity state. No idea how that would work, though. In general, to physicists, infinities (singularities) are absurd results, evidence that something's wrong with your calculations. Of course, there was plenty wrong with "Threshold."
I've always accepted that the Warp Factors that go beyond 9. (TNG: All Good Things.) It's always made sense to me. The more power you toss at the warp field, the faster you go. The whole infinite velocity thing seemed unachievable. Even if Voyager stumbled upon a new type of dilithium, how would that affect anything? Sure, it could've improved warp core efficiency, but it wouldn't of been able to supply enough power to achieve infinite velocity. Infinite isn't a number, it isn't a destination, it's a word that denotes something without end.
