Warp Maneuverability

[CoveTom]

I may be missing something here, but it seems to me that in TOS we not only saw the Enterprise maneuvering at warp speeds, but it was suggested many times that warp speed was the -standard- for maneuvering in battle, and that impulse power was definitely less than ideal.

And, come to think of it, wasn't Picard using warp drive in his war games with Riker in "Peak Performance"?

I think the idea of battle maneuvers happening at impulse power came along sometime later...

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Battle at warp speed necessarily required battle at relativistic distances on the order of 100,000 to 1 million kilometers. While appealing on some level, it quickly became clear that VFX artists had no idea how to properly render this kind of action, nor did the writers really understand how to represent this in a way that the artists would be able to represent. It was far easier to simply have two ships in the same frame pound the crap out of each other until one of them gave up and moved away.

CGI battles picked up on the model-element battles and turned them into fast-turning, relatively low-velocity fights, but didn't turn it back into warp drive battles. Now we have STXI where warp speed has very weird visual effects, plus the fact that fractional warp speeds (warp point five, point eight, etc) are rarely reached even in TNG times, so we're forced to retcon that any speed below warp one is "standstill" and lower velocities are not possible or not controllable; ergo, warp speed is two fast for anything but strategic maneuvering into and out of a specific battle zone while impulse engines only are used for combat.

 

[Timo]

And, come to think of it, wasn't Picard using warp drive in his war games with Riker in "Peak Performance"?

Well, Riker's ship was warp-incapable (or so everybody thought), and Picard didn't engage him at warp at any point, either. Rather, Picard disengaged, by escaping to warp three for a while.

But this was at least suggested if not quite stated to be a special handicap for the exercise, perhaps comparable to the limiting of weapons to laser love pats. Riker's team initially deemed their situation "hopeless" without warp. We might thus want to believe that Picard and Riker would normally prefer to fight at warp.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Klaitu]

I'm of the mind that a ship can change course while in warp. Perhaps not as deftly as at impulse, but it's demonstrated hundreds of times in trek, and it's even on screen a bunch of times.

Even in the new movie they change course in warp, though perhaps this is not the best example.

 

[Davros]

Can a starship actually change course while still travelling at warp speed? Let's say they wanted to turn about 180 degrees, would they have to drop out of warp first and do that or not?

I know Voyager had that whole "'Faster than light, no left or right" thing, but it also seemed to contradict other episodes.

On the original show, ships manuvered at warp speed with no trouble. They even fought at warp speeds.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I remember it mentioned in one Star Trek Episode or something that ships without warp engines essentially wallowed around like how a ship would maneuver well in space, sliding all over the place. With warp-drive though it could maneuver like a plane in air.

 

[Timo]

At least "Elaan of Troyius" has this bit:

Kirk (after finding out warp drive has been sabotaged): "Give us every ounce of power you can from the impulse drive, and find a solution to the bomb. Kirk out. Mister Sulu, stand by to make your manoeuvres smartly. She'll be sluggish on response."

And later on

Kirk: "They're trying to force a fight. Scotty, what's our energy status?"
Scott: "Ninety three percent of impulse power, sir."
Spock: "We can still manoeuvre."
Scott: "Manoeuvre? Aye. We can wallow like a garbage scow against a warp-driven starship."

And yet later:

Kirk: "Hard over, Sulu. Bring her around. He's going for our flank. Sulu!"
Sulu: "Sorry, Captain. She won't respond fast enough on impulse."

So it seems that a battle where the opponent is at warp but you are not is a hopeless one. It doesn't tell whether a battle where both sides would be at impulse only would be an uncommon or undesirable one, though. But it does suggest that such a fight would only take place if both sides were forced to stay at impulse, possibly through sabotage or combat damage, or then by a rare spatial anomaly.

The latter exchange also seems to confirm that the ship can turn faster at warp than at impulse. That is, at full impulse power, the rate of turn is still inferior to what could be attained at warp.

The episode also features direct support for the idea that one can and should maneuver at warp in combat:

Kirk: "As he passes, I want to cut in warp drive. We'll pivot at warp two and bring all tubes to bear."

That is, they will apparently turn on a dime while at warp two, and perhaps fly sideways at warp two for a while. That's a capacity that has been rarely demonstrated by Starfleet ships, but has not really been contradicted, either. Borg Cubes often pivot at warp...

Pivoting while maintaining a flight path is probably different from sharply altering a flight path, though. Which would allow for "Fury" just fine.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Well, as it would appear, it almost seems that the Warp-Drive is essential for being able to accelerate fast enough as shown in the series when at impulse and able to perform a variety of sublight maneuvers in the manner shown (like a plane in the air).

They still wouldn't be banking much, though

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ But we never saw this again after Elaan of Troyus. It was a very good use of a logical warp drive system for fighting at relativistic velocities... but you'll notice that even the speeds mentioned here are inconsistent with the warp factors. Enterprise is strafed by a Klingon ship at "better than warp seven" and yet Sulu is calling off distances at a rate that the Klingon ship would have to be traveling at something like .25C (which is supposed to be full impulse anyway according to some sources).

If this is to be taken literally and not retconned away, it means that "warp factor" is a unit of acceleration and not a unit of speed, and that impulse engines and warp engines take longer to achieve the same velocities (which would explain alot of TOS-related inconsistencies). But "pivot at warp two" also directly implies some relatively slow warp-speed maneuvers that would later be taken over by impulse engines, which is just plain problematic for this discussion.

Annoyingly, Trek ships keep getting slower and slower as the years go by, while warp drive keeps staying the same. It seems like we'd be forced to retcon the Elaan of Troyus scene so that Sulu says "kilometers" instead of "thousand kilometers" and the Klingon bird of prey actually strafes them at speeds around 40km/s. If the sabotage affects the mass-reducing field produced by the warp engines, that works as an explanation why the ship is sluggish.

 

[Timo]

If the sabotage affects the mass-reducing field produced by the warp engines, that works as an explanation why the ship is sluggish.

That sounds like a good combination of old dialogue and new technobabble. In "Elaan", the thing that the ship has trouble with is turning, not accelerating. And inertia-countering magic should be of significance in pivoting a massive starship, that's for sure.

As for the distances Sulu reads in "Elaan", the first pass is easy enough to wiggle out of. Sure, the Klingons appear at "better than warp six" initially, but they would have every reason to slow down to a crawl because their purpose is to goad Kirk into taking a shot.

The first half of the second pass has no speed tag attached. Quite possibly impulse again, because the Klingons wouldn't yet know for sure that Kirk had discovered the sabotage.

Then Spock goes and says "better than warp seven". But OTOH, Sulu ceases to give distance readings. So still no problems...

Then our heroes discover the dilithium necklace, and go warp-capable. Klingons close in, and Sulu resumes giving readings - but once again, there's no speed stamp.So we are actually home free!

...All thanks to the ambiguous TOS warp visuals. (Is the TOS-R version more difficult?)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Mytran]

Just another reason to love those episodes in their original form. Who wants streaking stars?!!!

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Why do people still keep talking about mass-reduction fields?

I think the Alcubierre/Bias Drive model are better models for a warp-drive and could explain the maneuvering characteristics possessed by vessels in Star Trek

 

[Timo]

Yet mass reduction is an established property of subspace fields. And gravity and inertia in the Trek universe can obviously be controlled at will easily enough - it's one of the most trivial technologies in that universe, a common consumer product. Why bother with "realistic" (if the word applies on Alcubierre, even in quotation marks) impulse or warp drives, when the above elements must in any case be included, and by themselves nicely explain away impulse and warp?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

If the sabotage affects the mass-reducing field produced by the warp engines, that works as an explanation why the ship is sluggish.

That sounds like a good combination of old dialogue and new technobabble. In "Elaan", the thing that the ship has trouble with is turning, not accelerating. And inertia-countering magic should be of significance in pivoting a massive starship, that's for sure.

As for the distances Sulu reads in "Elaan", the first pass is easy enough to wiggle out of. Sure, the Klingons appear at "better than warp six" initially, but they would have every reason to slow down to a crawl because their purpose is to goad Kirk into taking a shot.

There's no indication they did anything of the kind, though. The plan is to force Enterprise to cut in warp drive; slowing to impulse would remove the need to do so, hence Scotty's line "We can wallow like a garbage scow against a warp driven starship."

Yeah, I mean, it's something you could wiggle out of by playing fast and loose with the obvious implications of that scene, but as with the "proximity blast phasers" in Balance of Terror (retcon to "photon torpedo") it makes more sense to just mentally retcon the speed calls to "warp point seven" or something, which is a unit of subspace distortion relevant to the reduced mass of the ship (explicable since they don't know what "full impulse power" of a Klingon warship is, Spock gives an exact field distortion instead. Enterprise's full impulse power might well by warp point five).

Is the TOS-R version more difficult?)

Yes and no. They don't add your imagined "going to warp and suddenly slowing down just before Sulu starts reading distance" part, the Klingon ship does a neat little power slide--apparently at warp speed--to scoot behind Enterprise and nail it in the ass with disruptor blasts.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Why do people still keep talking about mass-reduction fields?

I think the Alcubierre/Bias Drive model are better models for a warp-drive and could explain the maneuvering characteristics possessed by vessels in Star Trek

All well and good, except the Alcubierre/Bias Drive would be capable of any velocity from zero through light speed and throttleable all the way; either of them would render impulse engines utterly redundant.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Newtype Alpha,

True, but you could use impulse engines in combination with the Alcubierre/Bias drive.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

How? The Alcubierre Metric works just fine as a standalone model; an impulse engine would be superfluous, and possibly a bit dangerous. It would only need to be used for orbit changes and never mentioned again by anyone for any other reason... but this is problematic since we have heard impulse power being mentioned for combat situations for the last thirty years at least.

I shall once again gall you by suggesting that starships really DO fight at relatively close ranges (a few hundred kilometers or so) and at relatively slow speeds (a few dozen km/s), while using warp engines ONLY to get into and out of firing positions without the tedium of having to cover that distance at orbital velocities. Impulse engines can theoretically accelerate to high relativistic speeds given enough time (two or three days of constant acceleration, let's say) and the use of subspace fields to reduce the ship's mass is a usually implicit "fudge factor" that makes the engines more powerful than they realistically should be.

Beyond that, warp drives are just a strategic maneuvering engine. You might think of a starship as analogous to a modern day naval vessel that happens to have a set of turboramjet engines and the capability of becoming airborne; at a certain engine output, the thing literally jumps out of the water and flies where it needs to go, but it can't do much while it's airborne because it's designed to do most of its fighting while bobbing around under propeller power.

 

[Timo]

Yet fighting at warp is a definite option in chase situations. A warp chase can ensue if the pursuing vessel is faster than the fleeing vessel, and can hang on and control the situation. Yet if maneuvering at warp is difficult, the fleeing vessel should be able to shake pursuit relatively easily, by making the difficult maneuver in a direction that the pursuer cannot predict, and cannot follow except through similar difficulty. Nothing of the sort is ever shown attempted in warp chases, so either maneuvering is flat out impossible (which we know isn't true, because course changes never are said to require a speed change let alone dropping out of warp), or then it is relatively easy for both parties.

Whether warp chase battles and warp dogfights of "Ultimate Computer" type are compatible with each other is a matter of quantitative debate. Supersonic jets can still attempt to maneuver to the enemy's six for a firing advantage, even if their duel will look a lot more graceful and sedate than that of subsonic dogfighters. If starships at warp are like those supersonic jets, then "Ultimate Computer" would still be possible. If they are more like hypersonic planes intended to cross oceans and then fight at lower speeds, then TOS is incompatible with TNG.

But if we pursue the first option, it's not that difficult to explain why we don't see "Ultimate Computer" style fights much in TNG. The fight in the TOS episode was in open space, with multiple ships trying to corner a single one. Most TNG era fights were one-on-one chases, or then fights about a fixed point target that the defender could not abandon by warping to battle.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

^ one thing to consider, though, is that even supersonic fighter planes never DOGFIGHT at supersonic speeds. Combat velocities are typically much lower, since the optimum airspeed for most of these craft is between 200 and 500 knots. Simple speed isn't usually good enough, in fact, the aircraft that can turn the sharpest at a lower velocity typically has the advantage (as has been explained to me by several of my navy friends that, in a stand up fight, even a Mig-17 could mop the floor with the original non-Super hornets; those things maneuver like stoned elephants below 400 knots).

 

[Timo]

This narrows down our range of applicable analogies. We never really see a dogfight of starships, which is understandable because dogfights are the result of having all your weapons pointing forward; starship weapons (or those of a waterborne gunboat) don't point forward, so the only point of maneuvering is to increase or decrease range, or to dodge. And dogfighting is anathema to range changes, since its very idea is to stay close to the enemy, within his turn radius (another thing starships don't have - they can turn on a dime, except when somebody sabotages their warp engines). The last rationale for dogfighting, that of dodging, seems null and void in one-on-one engagements because starship weapons can track too well. It may have some validity in more complex engagements, though.

So we're probably better off ignoring the subsonic fighter analogy and combining supersonic BVR stuff with classic sailing ship battles. Your jet-propelled ship is a good model, as long as it is a sailing vessel...

The rationale I cannot think up yet is the one that explains why there are few or no BVR engagements - ones where the attacker fires very long range weapons from a distance. Torpedoes should be capable of this, even if phasers are more comparable to 17th century cannon, and the tactics should be useful against slow or stationary targets. We see high speed strafing runs in TOS, and an attack against a stationary target in DS9, but the weapons are fired at point blank ranges. Why? Elsewhere, we assuredly see torps and comparable probes moving at warp and crossing great distances.

Timo Saloniemi