Warp vs Genesis (TNG 7 x 19) What counts as bad science in Trek? And why nitpick?

[Christopher]

It also reminds me of the second pilot, WNMHGB. The warp drive is knocked out due to trying to cross this galactic barrier, and this is one of the very few times Trek successfully sells the notion of being truly trapped out there and it's palpable. A ship losing its ability to travel faster than light is now stuck and with limited resources and confined in scope to keep the audience focused. A great blend of the fantasy and the reality where nothing trips over each other to pull one out of the story. It's great stuff.

Except they're conveniently within a few days' sublight travel of a habitable planet, which would have to mean they came out in its star system already, and why would there be an Earth refueling station that close to the edge of the galaxy if they'd never been there before? I don't see anything realistic in that situation.


But you're right about the early seasons of TNG being as scientifically grounded as Trek has ever gotten, thanks to Rick Sternbach & Michael Okuda as science consultants. The depiction of a periodic nova star in "Evolution" was so accurate you could use it in a classroom. The time warp in "Yesterday's Enterprise" was caused by "a Kerr loop of superstring material," which, aside from misusing "superstring" to mean "cosmic string," is an actually plausible mechanism for a time warp, certainly more so than chroniton fields or what-have-you. (The word "chroniton," whose only use in TNG was in season 5's "The Next Phase," doesn't even make etymological sense. The proper construction for the name of a time quantum would be “chronon,” but that's already used to refer to the smallest possible interval of time in a quantum system. The Greek root for time is khronos, and the suffix for a subatomic particle is simply -on. If it had been “chronicon,” that would make sense, since khronikos means “of/pertaining to time.” But there’s no inflection or declension of khronos that has an “it” in it as far as I can tell.)

 

[Annorax849]

Warp Drive may exist as a possibility… but what makes the one in Star Trek different is that Subspace exists. We probably won’t be so lucky.

 

[Christopher]

Warp Drive may exist as a possibility… but what makes the one in Star Trek different is that Subspace exists. We probably won’t be so lucky.

The definition of "subspace" has changed over time. TOS used it to refer exclusively to subspace radio. James Blish was the first to apply the term to warp drive in his novelization of "Tomorrow is Yesterday," saying the Enterprise traveled in a "bubble of subspace" outside of normal space, and that it was flung back in time by impact with "that part of the black star's gravitational cocoon that had also begun to extrude into subspace."

Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer, the science adviser to ST:TMP, defined the warp bubble itself as a subspace formed within normal space by the warp field -- a subspace in the sense of a subset of the whole, a small pocket universe of sorts. This is consistent with how Jack Williamson defined it in one of the earliest uses of the term, from 1937: "Yet, swift as was the Silver Bird, plunging through millions of miles in a second, drawn into a tiny subspace of her own by the field warp of the kappa coils, seven years had passed before she approached her destination." Roddenberry's TMP novelization referred to the ship traveling through hyperspace, but I guess that's technically consistent with Puttkamer's model (which anticipated Miguel Alcubierre's by 16 years, only missing the formal math), because the necessary spacetime distortion would require a fourth spatial dimension for it to distort through, and that's the technical definition of a hyperspace (just like a hypercube is the 4-dimensional counterpart of a cube).

The alternate definition of subspace as a hyperspace-like extradimensional realm through which starships traveled also dates from the '30s (see above link), and was used by Blish in 1968, but it wasn't codified in canonical Star Trek until TNG.