Warp speed records & the warp scale?

[EliyahuQeoni]

Orion Press has some interesting articles concerning Warp velocities in their Articles section: http://www.fastcopyinc.com/orionpress/articles.htm

They also have this nifty Warp calculator program, which compares the Orion, Warp Cubed and Okuda/TNG scales: http://www.fastcopyinc.com/orionpress/warpcalculator.exe

 

[Timo]

Kirk said it would take "thousands of years" at maximum warp.

True. And if he considered warp 8 "maximum warp", then upping the ante to warp 11 might be sufficient for turning, say, 3,000 years into 300.

Not in cubic terms, of course: to increase speed tenfold from eight-cubed, you'd need seventeen-cubed or so. But we have every reason to think that the speeds shoot up faster than cubed at the high warp factors anyway.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Did Kirk think that would be Warp 8 or higher?

 

[Timo]

In TOS, everything higher than that has been for emergencies only - and everything higher than warp 9 has been an emergency in itself, threatening to tear the ship apart.

Warp 8 was what Kirk accepted as the absolute maximum even when he was monomaniacally chasing the evil cloud in "Obsession". I'm not sure he'd ever willingly order warp 9 (even though Spock did for "The Paradise Syndrome").

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Was that true in the TOS movies?

 

[Timo]

Re: Warp speed records & the warp scale?

Hard to tell. The highest warp factor Kirk ever ordered there was seven, for cruising to V'Ger in ST:TMP. Warp seven could be the new warp six - the new standard cruising speed that doesn't evoke any whining either from the engines or the Chief Engineer. Or then it could still be a tad high for Scotty's tastes, but justified in emergencies.

The little BoP that Kirk commandeered fro ST3-4 could do warp ten in an extreme cinch. But even this need not necessarily mean that Starfleet starships from the same are should be comfortable at warp factors above eight. Still, I'd like to think that Starfleet indeed had added at least one warp factor to standard cruise and dash performance both - or else the massive engine refit of the Enterprise would seem cost-ineffective.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[matthunter]

Re: Warp speed records & the warp scale?

If you want to be that accurate about it, let's remember nobody has ever said warp would be "faster than light". (Nobody except you and me and a couple of thousand other fans, and other people who are not really part of the Star Trek universe, that is.) Starfleet might very well have some fancier term for it - because, at least per ST:TMP, warp drive also allows travel below the speed of light.

To be sure, though, nobody on screen has quite claimed that warp 1 would be exactly lightspeed, either.

You're closer than you know - the TNG Tech Manual suggests that the drive holds the ship at a fluctuating velocity so that it's never actually at the speed of light for longer than Planck time (the smallest theoretical unit of measurable time). So at Warp 1, it's at either very high sublight velocity (for a period of time so small it doesn't matter) or slightly above the speed of light but in subspace (where it also doesn't matter) for a similarly small time period.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Re: Warp speed records & the warp scale?

You're closer than you know - the TNG Tech Manual suggests that the drive holds the ship at a fluctuating velocity so that it's never actually at the speed of light for longer than Planck time (the smallest theoretical unit of measurable time). So at Warp 1, it's at either very high sublight velocity (for a period of time so small it doesn't matter) or slightly above the speed of light but in subspace (where it also doesn't matter) for a similarly small time period.

IIRC, that was used to describe the method of Cochrane's very first warp engine. Later warp engines didn't fluctate the speed-of-light threshold but transitioned a ship directly into subspace.