Warp speed vs wormholes

[Tribble Threat]

I'm puzzled why Interstellar is used as the example for the wormhole. That wormhole was creepy.

Spoiler

You could get trapped forever trapped behind walls behind your daughter's bedroom, and your only connection to your home universe is peaking in your daughter's bedroom. And you're alone with an obnoxious robot. And you can't even read the books. Also, I don't recall anything about the wormhole being easy to create or destroy.

But regardless of what wormhole you make, I choose warp drive, hands down. With a wormhole, you have to fly a few months just to get to the wormhole, and another few months to get anywhere from there, and hope you don't get trapped in any

Spoiler

horrible timey-wimey relativity stuff

on the way.

 

[Timo]

Wormholes are the way to go when given a choice. It doesn't matter how fast warp drive gets, or transwarp, nothing beats going from one location to another instantaneously. Even though it's a spore drive and not a wormhole, instantaneous travel is what gives Discovery an edge.

That, and not having to go through any of the points in between. Such as kilometer upon kilometer of bedrock when sailing to a cave inside the Klingon homeworld.

Or a rubble field potentially several AUs thick when jumping to (the surface of?) Altamid. But did we ever see wormholes explicitly leading to or from points that were not in empty space? Perhaps there are inherent limitations in one's ability to aim those things, as opposed to the spore drive.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Qonundrum]

Wormholes - usually in the big empty place of space, seeing nothing but blackness and pinpoints of distant stars just induces sleep. Given how often the Enterprise is on the other side of the galaxy or Federation border but is called in to fight the Borg and they arrive seconds later and the battle is still in full swing, they must have wormhole technology in use already... "galaxy hopping" being the Sci-Fi TV trope to explain this sort of thing as I recall...

Now at some point, warp drive would be more fun - to any species that hasn't yet realized how big and boring space is, coupled by all the antics of irritating cliquish crewmembers and their claques. Everyone could go to the bar and while away the time by drinking some Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters...

...Douglas Adams really did nail it in the 1970s:

“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the (pharmacy), but that's just peanuts to space.”

 

[valkyrie013]

Well.. Depends..
Warp is you press a button and your going, say at 3ly a day constantly to your destination. maybe boring, but usually its instant, press a button your going.
Now, Wormholes, these need power to create just like warp, and in most books, movies etc. its not just Oh you open a wormhole whenever you like, there's usually a Capacitor Recharge time of minutes/hours/days where your limited to sublight, or just sitting in space for that time.. going nowhere.
Range of wormholes? sure if you have enough power you could do galaxy hoping, but most books have a limit on the distance of the wormholes ( Dependent on power source) so it may be jump 5 ly, wait 3 days to recharge then jump again. So if you want to go to alpha centauri 4 ly away, yep its quicker, only 1 jump away, but if you want to go 15 ly.. warp is faster.

 

[1001001]

I'm puzzled why Interstellar is used as the example for the wormhole. That wormhole was creepy.

Spoiler

You could get trapped forever trapped behind walls behind your daughter's bedroom, and your only connection to your home universe is peaking in your daughter's bedroom. And you're alone with an obnoxious robot. And you can't even read the books. Also, I don't recall anything about the wormhole being easy to create or destroy.

I don't think you need to spoiler code a 6 year old movie.

Anyway, all that happened in the tesseract, built especially for Cooper.

And the robot wasn't that obnoxious...

 

[Tribble Threat]

OK. But the point stands that people had to sit in the spaceship for a long time to even get to the wormhole, and it was right in our solar system. Now, I'd like the wormholes in Stargate. Nicely set up to get you straight from Earth to some other inhabited planet, and you have hundreds of planets to choose from. More convenient than a warp drive and far, far convenient than the wormhole in Interstellar.

 

[Timo]

Also, the stargates are portable, even if it takes a really big truck, a ship, or a large and capable spacecraft to achieve that.

That they are of the size we see is possibly part of their "idiotproof" or "cavemanproof" design and not something dictated by the technology. The size is ideal for many caveman needs, though - starting with psychology, it allowing the daring adventurer to walk into the unknown with a proper retinue, rather than crawling there alone. But a hula hoop -sized device might perhaps be built as well; it seems the Goa'uld could build at least monkey-see, monkey-do copies, and they were real klutzes.

The thing is, those wormholes, even the big gates, only allow you to carry a limited amount of gear. If you want a proper vehicle around you, for a thousand reasons, you apparently can't use a stargate, or the usual players would bootstrap their ships with that rather than crawl around in flying pyramids...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kamen Rider Blade]

The thing about the Bajoran Worm Hole was that it was stable, ergo you didn't have to consume all that energy to travel the great distances to the Gamma Quadrant, that in itself is a huge advantage.

 

[publiusr]

There is an Italian word for sinkholes that should be of interest: voragine

The plural? Voragini

Just putting that out there.

Both wormholes and hyperdrives allow you to by-pass threats.

You want a wormhole to cross an intergalactic void—so as to deposit a huge star base. Hyperspace/ jump drives for super star destroyer size ships to cross to nearby galaxies... filled with high warp probes and lesser starship for true exploration.

On wormholes:
https://phys.org/news/2024-01-astrophysicists-theoretical-proof-traversable-wormholes.html
https://www.mdpi.com/2218-1997/9/11/465