Warp 8 engine?
- Thread starter Wingsley
- Start date
We also have a rough time and distance in "That Which Survives". It seemed to take a couple days for the Enterprise to travel 990 lightyears which shoots the warp factor cubed times lightspeed scale to hell. 14.1 cubed is about 2803, even if they were going at warp 14.1 the entire distance, it would've taken them four months to go 990 lightyears.
Robert
^^ This is why Cochrane's Formula from "Star Trek Maps" is so valuable.
Cochrane's Formula isn't just cubing the warp factor and multiplying the product by the speed of light. There's also a variable: Cochrane's variable, which takes into account the distortion of space that would accentuate warp speed. When the Enterprise encountered a black hole in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", Cochrane's variable rose dramatically and caused the "slingshot effect".
Apparently, the presence of dark matter and dark energy (such as the galactic barrier) can dramatically impact warp speeds. As modern astronomy now indicates that our Galaxy is being held together by dark matter, here's where the Federation "space lanes" theory comes into play. In "Operation: Annihilate!", Kirk orders the ship to approach the Denevan sun at Warp 8, and it takes a few minutes to catch up with the escaping spaceship. But in "Bread and Circuses", the Enterprise finds debris of the S.S. Beagle one-sixteenth of a parsec away from System 892, and Checkov reports "we should be there in seconds."
The real giveaways about warp speed remain "That Which Survives", "Obsession", (travelling over 2,000 light-years in less than two days) and "The Best of Both Worlds" (travelling from Jouret IV, "one of the Federation's outermost colonies", to Earth at "the very core of the Federation" in less than a week.
This underscores the merit and necessity of "Maps" and Cochrane's Formula.
Cochrane's Formula isn't just cubing the warp factor and multiplying the product by the speed of light. There's also a variable: Cochrane's variable, which takes into account the distortion of space that would accentuate warp speed. When the Enterprise encountered a black hole in "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", Cochrane's variable rose dramatically and caused the "slingshot effect".
Apparently, the presence of dark matter and dark energy (such as the galactic barrier) can dramatically impact warp speeds. As modern astronomy now indicates that our Galaxy is being held together by dark matter, here's where the Federation "space lanes" theory comes into play. In "Operation: Annihilate!", Kirk orders the ship to approach the Denevan sun at Warp 8, and it takes a few minutes to catch up with the escaping spaceship. But in "Bread and Circuses", the Enterprise finds debris of the S.S. Beagle one-sixteenth of a parsec away from System 892, and Checkov reports "we should be there in seconds."
The real giveaways about warp speed remain "That Which Survives", "Obsession", (travelling over 2,000 light-years in less than two days) and "The Best of Both Worlds" (travelling from Jouret IV, "one of the Federation's outermost colonies", to Earth at "the very core of the Federation" in less than a week.
This underscores the merit and necessity of "Maps" and Cochrane's Formula.
The thing about the Cochrane factor is that it makes the warp factor meaningless as an expression of speed. Maybe still an expression of how hard you're pushing the engines though. Warp 2 in one region of space can be faster than warp 8 in another region.
Robert
Robert
And we have multiple examples of our heroes being able to correctly decipher an opponent's speed from his warp factor, implying that the Cochrane factor (if it exists) cannot affect speed by more than a few percent either way.
Granted, the examples need not all be conclusive. When our heroes establish the distance that Kivas Fajo's warp 3 ship could have spanned in the allotted time in "The Most Toys", they might be implicitly assuming that such a slow ship would not leave the local region where the Cochrane factor is a known constant.
Yet at the other end of things, when Janeway and Chakotay are stranded with a warp 4 shuttle in "Resolutions" and Paris (sarcastically) remarks that such a craft would reach Earth in seven centuries, he is clearly speaking of spanning tens of thousands of lightyears of varying, unknown values of chi. He should be saying something like "between three and fifty centuries" if chi truly affected warp speed in any significant manner!
Timo Saloniemi
Granted, the examples need not all be conclusive. When our heroes establish the distance that Kivas Fajo's warp 3 ship could have spanned in the allotted time in "The Most Toys", they might be implicitly assuming that such a slow ship would not leave the local region where the Cochrane factor is a known constant.
Yet at the other end of things, when Janeway and Chakotay are stranded with a warp 4 shuttle in "Resolutions" and Paris (sarcastically) remarks that such a craft would reach Earth in seven centuries, he is clearly speaking of spanning tens of thousands of lightyears of varying, unknown values of chi. He should be saying something like "between three and fifty centuries" if chi truly affected warp speed in any significant manner!
Timo Saloniemi
There's also another consideration that reinforces the necessity of Cochrane's Formula in TREK:
One thing repeatedly mentioned in various treks, particularly DS9's "The Emissary", is the notion of unmanned probes having been sent to the far side of the galaxy, starting in the 22nd century. Since it is obvious that probes were not capable of Warp 6 or higher back in those days, and were likely limited to Warp 4 or less for the long haul, one can assume that some probes benefitted from dark matter and dark energy enhancing Cochrane's Variable while others were lost due to extremes in that same variable. This explains why...
1: probes were able to fan out that far, and...
2: why Earth/Federation probes were unmanned.
One thing repeatedly mentioned in various treks, particularly DS9's "The Emissary", is the notion of unmanned probes having been sent to the far side of the galaxy, starting in the 22nd century. Since it is obvious that probes were not capable of Warp 6 or higher back in those days, and were likely limited to Warp 4 or less for the long haul, one can assume that some probes benefitted from dark matter and dark energy enhancing Cochrane's Variable while others were lost due to extremes in that same variable. This explains why...
1: probes were able to fan out that far, and...
2: why Earth/Federation probes were unmanned.
Or we could assume that an unmanned probe could do higher warp than a manned one by utilizing an engine that kills people. Such a thing has ample precedent in scifi (Niven's ramrobots vs. slowboats) and in the real world (missiles vs. manned aeroplanes). It's not difficult to cook up technobabble about "warp field gradients that are too extreme for human physique", for example...
If local conditions could massively affect warp speed, locating of advantageous routes would have to play a far greater dramatic role in the episodes and movies. The heroes should be dedicating big chunks of dialogue to finding the "warp highway" of the week, while virtually never mentioning the actual warp factors because they would offer no useful indication of the ship's performance that week.
We do get dialogue about local variances in warp speed - but it only accentuates the apparent fact that such variances (wormholes, intergalactic "sleigh rides" at warp 1.5, "subspace sandbars") are extremely unusual phenomena, often entirely without precedent.
Timo Saloniemi
If local conditions could massively affect warp speed, locating of advantageous routes would have to play a far greater dramatic role in the episodes and movies. The heroes should be dedicating big chunks of dialogue to finding the "warp highway" of the week, while virtually never mentioning the actual warp factors because they would offer no useful indication of the ship's performance that week.
We do get dialogue about local variances in warp speed - but it only accentuates the apparent fact that such variances (wormholes, intergalactic "sleigh rides" at warp 1.5, "subspace sandbars") are extremely unusual phenomena, often entirely without precedent.
Timo Saloniemi
Like I said the Cochrane factor makes the warp speed as expressed in Trek nonsensical. When we talk about driving somewhere do we totally ignore the speedometer and only talk about how hard you're pushing your engine? You could be on a smooth highway or on a gravel road and all you talk about is what the rpm is and ignoring your actual speed completely.
Robert
Robert
...And I'd have no problem accepting that TOS warp 11 (as per the episode) could be 8,000 c, and equal to TNG warp 9.94. It would all be quite consistent.
We just have to accept that the TOS scale is the one that doesn't follow the assumed fan/backstage formula. TOS warp 2 must me much higher than 2*2*2 times lightspeed, whereas the TNG values could basically be taken as given in the Encyclopedia. Or perhaps multiplied by a factor of two to five. It's not as huge a problem as people often think.
Timo Saloniemi
We just have to accept that the TOS scale is the one that doesn't follow the assumed fan/backstage formula. TOS warp 2 must me much higher than 2*2*2 times lightspeed, whereas the TNG values could basically be taken as given in the Encyclopedia. Or perhaps multiplied by a factor of two to five. It's not as huge a problem as people often think.
Timo Saloniemi
Both the so-called TOS and TNG scales are really too slow for dramatic purposes, especially when those same scales imply that vessels mainly travel at Warp 6 and can only maintain their top-rated speeds for only twelve hours. Under those restraints, it would take a starship the better part of a week to travel just a few light-years to the nearest system and probably months to travel anywhere that's really out of its way...
Actually I don't see anything wrong if it takes days to go between close-by stars and taking weeks or months to go a lot further. That's the way it used to be in ye olden days when there were still frontiers left.
I'm not picking on anybody personally but it seems in current trek being really "out there" is no further than the nearest corner. A trip that's REALLY out there, that is taking weeks or months seems to be absolutely unthinkable. It's not; people used to do it all the time.
Again, please don't take offense, I'm just stating a humble opinion.
Also, I always took "five year mission" to mean they were really far away, ie months away at least. Exploratory trips in the old days took years because that's how much time and trouble it took to mount them. It's hardly worth it to go on a four month trip, stay a couple weeks and then take four months to get back.
Sorry to keep harpin' on ye olden days. When I was a kid (and still today) I loved stories about the frontier, both land and sea, fictional and non-fictional. It's a big reason why I love Star Trek so much.
Robert
I'm not picking on anybody personally but it seems in current trek being really "out there" is no further than the nearest corner. A trip that's REALLY out there, that is taking weeks or months seems to be absolutely unthinkable. It's not; people used to do it all the time.
Again, please don't take offense, I'm just stating a humble opinion.
Also, I always took "five year mission" to mean they were really far away, ie months away at least. Exploratory trips in the old days took years because that's how much time and trouble it took to mount them. It's hardly worth it to go on a four month trip, stay a couple weeks and then take four months to get back.
Sorry to keep harpin' on ye olden days. When I was a kid (and still today) I loved stories about the frontier, both land and sea, fictional and non-fictional. It's a big reason why I love Star Trek so much.
Robert
I agree. The Galaxy did seem to become a very small place in the 24th-Century.
I think it's easier to do convey a sense of a ship being far from home when stories don't involve Earth. You can't really be "on the frontier" one episode and then back in Earth orbit the next unless your ship is really, really fast (i.e., ludicrous speed) or actually isn't that far from Earth to begin with, IMO.
IIRC, the few times the original Enterprise came back to Earth usually involved some sort of spatial/temporal distortion in which the ship was back home, but a few centuries earlier in time...
TNG still tried to cling on to that. In "Conspiracy", it was a big, big deal that a starship would return to Earth during her scheduled mission of exploration. In "BoBW", circumstances conspired to bring the ship to Earth.
After that, it's not until "The First Duty" that the ship visits the human homeworld, with the excuse of having Picard deliver a speech. And then we get another flimsy excuse right after that for "Time's Arrow"... But IMHO that still doesn't ruin the idea that our heroes would be far away from home, having to make do with starbase visits and holofantasies as a cure for their homesickness.
DS9 is a bit different in spirit - supposedly out at the frontier, yet Earth is never more than a week away. This, IMHO, shrunk the Trek universe. This, not the few Earth visits by the E-D.
Timo Saloniemi
After that, it's not until "The First Duty" that the ship visits the human homeworld, with the excuse of having Picard deliver a speech. And then we get another flimsy excuse right after that for "Time's Arrow"... But IMHO that still doesn't ruin the idea that our heroes would be far away from home, having to make do with starbase visits and holofantasies as a cure for their homesickness.
DS9 is a bit different in spirit - supposedly out at the frontier, yet Earth is never more than a week away. This, IMHO, shrunk the Trek universe. This, not the few Earth visits by the E-D.
Timo Saloniemi
While the original idea may have been that DS9 would indeed be at the farthest point from Earth, I can accept the idea that some regions of the Federation border are significantly closer to Earth than others. DS9 could still be considered at the edge of Federation space, even if it's only a week out from Earth. To me, it's kind of logical that the Federation didn't expand freely in all directions. I think it's definitely plausible that Federation expansion in some sectors was halted by the existence of other governments like the Cardassians, the Klingons, and the Romulans. It's little wonder why there are frequent skirmishes between these governments and the Federation if they're all crammed so closely together within local space (the median between the Alpha and Beta Quadrants most likely, IMO).
To a certain extent, the idea of a varying Federation border distance could also work with TNG. With a few notable exceptions, the Enterprise may have primarily deployed along regions of the Federation border that were relatively close to Earth and other key worlds. The ship could still be said to being along "the outer rim" of Federation space and still be able to return to Earth within a matter of days. Conversely, though, ships that may be operating at other more distant borders (and beyond) may take months--if not years--to reach Earth at maximum warp.
To a certain extent, the idea of a varying Federation border distance could also work with TNG. With a few notable exceptions, the Enterprise may have primarily deployed along regions of the Federation border that were relatively close to Earth and other key worlds. The ship could still be said to being along "the outer rim" of Federation space and still be able to return to Earth within a matter of days. Conversely, though, ships that may be operating at other more distant borders (and beyond) may take months--if not years--to reach Earth at maximum warp.
