How is that calculated? I saw a chart from the TNG Tech Manual and the numbers it gave were very low. A high warp factor would only have you going 2 or 3 light years a day. On the show they travel between starsystems in just hours.
Warpfactor
- Thread starter broberfett
- Start date
Basically, warp speeds are calculated by multiplying whatever arbitrary number the writer comes up with by the speed of plot. Trying to find any deeper significance through careful empirical observation of films or episodes will just give you a headache.
That said, the usual line is that TOS-era warp factors follow the 'warp factor cubed x the speed of light' formula, while TNG era speeds were 'warp factor to the 10/3 power x the speed of light' up through warp 9 (after warp 9 the curve rose arbitrarily towards infinite velocity at warp 10). Inconsistencies between these formulae and observed on-screen performance are sometimes rationalized by fans as being due to external factors like the presence of interstellar matter and its effect on the curvature of spacetime.
(I always liked this idea, as it introduced another wrinkle into the idea of interstellar navigation... a skilled navigator could use regions of differing density in the interstellar medium to his advantage to make a faster journey just as ship's masters in the age of sail could use ocean currents and prevailing winds. Another element in Trek's sea/space metaphor...)
That said, the usual line is that TOS-era warp factors follow the 'warp factor cubed x the speed of light' formula, while TNG era speeds were 'warp factor to the 10/3 power x the speed of light' up through warp 9 (after warp 9 the curve rose arbitrarily towards infinite velocity at warp 10). Inconsistencies between these formulae and observed on-screen performance are sometimes rationalized by fans as being due to external factors like the presence of interstellar matter and its effect on the curvature of spacetime.
(I always liked this idea, as it introduced another wrinkle into the idea of interstellar navigation... a skilled navigator could use regions of differing density in the interstellar medium to his advantage to make a faster journey just as ship's masters in the age of sail could use ocean currents and prevailing winds. Another element in Trek's sea/space metaphor...)
To be in better keeping with the show and how they zip between star systems, the warp factor should be used as the exponent. So warp 5 would be to the 5th power=3125 times the speed of light. Divide that by 365=8.56 light years a day or .356 light years an hour.
Warp 9 would be 387,420,489 times the speed of light. That would be 1,061,425.997 light years a day, 44,226.08 light years an hour or 737.101 light years a minute or 12.285 light years a second.
Warp 1=The speed of light or c
Warp 2=4c
Warp 3=27c
Warp 4=256c
Warp 5=3,125c or 8.56 Light years a day.
Warp 6=46,656c or 127.82LY a day or 5.32 per hour
Warp 7=823,543c or 94 LY/hour
Warp 8=16,777,216c or 31.9 LY/minute
Warp 9=387,420,489c or 12.28 LY/second
Warp 10=10,000,000,000c or 317 LY/second
It would be more in keeping with what we see in the show where they travel to multiple systems in less than a day. The Voyager wouldn't have taken that long to get home unless they were crippled to a lower speed, which they should have been after all that damage.
Warp 9 would be 387,420,489 times the speed of light. That would be 1,061,425.997 light years a day, 44,226.08 light years an hour or 737.101 light years a minute or 12.285 light years a second.
Warp 1=The speed of light or c
Warp 2=4c
Warp 3=27c
Warp 4=256c
Warp 5=3,125c or 8.56 Light years a day.
Warp 6=46,656c or 127.82LY a day or 5.32 per hour
Warp 7=823,543c or 94 LY/hour
Warp 8=16,777,216c or 31.9 LY/minute
Warp 9=387,420,489c or 12.28 LY/second
Warp 10=10,000,000,000c or 317 LY/second
It would be more in keeping with what we see in the show where they travel to multiple systems in less than a day. The Voyager wouldn't have taken that long to get home unless they were crippled to a lower speed, which they should have been after all that damage.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
^ Those warp factors are bonkers!!!! where the hell did you get them from!!!!
If it was taking Voyager 75 years to traverse 75,000 lightyears from the Delta quadrant then they were travelling only 1,000 times the speed of light and that is likely at warp 7. Even travelling at 18,750 times the speed of light which is below YOUR warp 6 (which they cant) would have got them home in 4 years!! and Voyagers maximum sustainable speed was warp 9.975 so they'd have got home even quicker than 4 years according to your warp table, according to your warp 9 factor they'd have got home in 2 minutes flat.
If it was taking Voyager 75 years to traverse 75,000 lightyears from the Delta quadrant then they were travelling only 1,000 times the speed of light and that is likely at warp 7. Even travelling at 18,750 times the speed of light which is below YOUR warp 6 (which they cant) would have got them home in 4 years!! and Voyagers maximum sustainable speed was warp 9.975 so they'd have got home even quicker than 4 years according to your warp table, according to your warp 9 factor they'd have got home in 2 minutes flat.
That is just more in keeping with the standard warp use in an episode. They go more in terms of Light Years per hour or minute than the measure they usually talk about with the warp factor cubed. Those numbers are just from taking whatever the warp factor is and using it as an exponent. So Warp factor 2 squared, Warp factor 3 cubed, Warp factor 4 to the 4th power.
If you use the cube of whatever the Warp factor is, you wouldn't get anywhere until you were going Warp 9 and then that would still take along time to get anywhere. Even travel to the next star Proxima Centuri would take more than a day at warp 9. Clearly in a standard episode they travel between multiple star systems and it doesn't take weeks. Remember First Contact when they go from the Neutral Zone to Earth before the Borg Battle ends. Unless the Zone is within a light year or something that wouldn't happen. There are no stars that close.
Voyager would have had to take place in another Galaxy, but also the efficiency of the speeds could be a factor. Something like spacial density reducing effectiveness of the drive at high warp. So maybe at Warp 9 the engines are only at about 2 or 3 percent efficiency and using a tremendous amount of power while getting a smaller and smaller return. So 2 or 3 percent of whatever the number is as the actual speed as opposed to the theoretical speed.
If you use the cube of whatever the Warp factor is, you wouldn't get anywhere until you were going Warp 9 and then that would still take along time to get anywhere. Even travel to the next star Proxima Centuri would take more than a day at warp 9. Clearly in a standard episode they travel between multiple star systems and it doesn't take weeks. Remember First Contact when they go from the Neutral Zone to Earth before the Borg Battle ends. Unless the Zone is within a light year or something that wouldn't happen. There are no stars that close.
Voyager would have had to take place in another Galaxy, but also the efficiency of the speeds could be a factor. Something like spacial density reducing effectiveness of the drive at high warp. So maybe at Warp 9 the engines are only at about 2 or 3 percent efficiency and using a tremendous amount of power while getting a smaller and smaller return. So 2 or 3 percent of whatever the number is as the actual speed as opposed to the theoretical speed.
I dunno. Interesting idea, but I think the good ol' 'Cochrane factor'/density of the interstellar medium/subspace current what-have-you explanation works better.
Consider "Broken Bow". They give some figures early on ('Neptune and back in [however much time trip said]' and so forth) that jibed pretty well with the old warp-factor-cubed-times-lightspeed formula, and yet made the trip to Qo'noS in just a couple days. But then there was the matter of the 'Vulcan star charts'. Reading between the lines, it seems to me like a carefully-plotted route to the Klingon homeworld was more crucial to making a fast passage than the NX-01's vaunted Warp Five Engine (though that helped, too).
I think there was a missed opportunity in ENT in regards to exploring this issue. It could have been a nice wrinkle to Travis' character... being a space boomer, he could have picked up on intricacies of interstellar navigation that most officers lacked.
Admittedly, this preference of mine is largely based on my love of age-of-sail naval fiction like Forester's Hornblower, O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin, and such. Letting Trek's spacers 'sail' along on the vagaries of interstellar matter, gravity, and subspace the way sea officers used wind and tide just makes Trek that much more like 'Hornblower in space' to me.
Consider "Broken Bow". They give some figures early on ('Neptune and back in [however much time trip said]' and so forth) that jibed pretty well with the old warp-factor-cubed-times-lightspeed formula, and yet made the trip to Qo'noS in just a couple days. But then there was the matter of the 'Vulcan star charts'. Reading between the lines, it seems to me like a carefully-plotted route to the Klingon homeworld was more crucial to making a fast passage than the NX-01's vaunted Warp Five Engine (though that helped, too).
I think there was a missed opportunity in ENT in regards to exploring this issue. It could have been a nice wrinkle to Travis' character... being a space boomer, he could have picked up on intricacies of interstellar navigation that most officers lacked.
Admittedly, this preference of mine is largely based on my love of age-of-sail naval fiction like Forester's Hornblower, O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin, and such. Letting Trek's spacers 'sail' along on the vagaries of interstellar matter, gravity, and subspace the way sea officers used wind and tide just makes Trek that much more like 'Hornblower in space' to me.
I like to disregard Enterprise in its Entirety. For the Warp 5 Enterprise to reach the Klingon homeworld in such a short time they would have needed some sort of Hyperspace tunnel. Warp 5 would be 125 times the speed of light by the old way. It would take 2.92 days per light year. Proxima Centauri is 4.22 light years away and that is the closest star to our sun, so it would take 12.32 days just to get there. The Klingons would have to be really, really close.
Info on Proxima Centauri:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri
Info on Proxima Centauri:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri
Better to use the spatially varying Cochrane factor.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
the Cochrane factor table or whatever it is that broberfett posted still doesnt work, if it was correct then the entire Galaxy would have been studied by starfleet during Kirks time and the Bajoran wormhole wouldnt be that much use because you could get to the Gamma Quadrant within 2 minutes anyway at warp 9.
It can be made to work given that the factor is spatially and time varying.
Not at all true. You're right that the speed chart posted is total bullshit, but still...
Example. You have a car. You can drive from Los Angeles to New York in several days. But not if you stop to look at everything in-between. And you ONLY see what's close by the highway in any case.
Can you say that, if you've driven (or flown) from LA to NY, you've "seen the entire country?"
Not really, huh?
Now, to the thread topic:
I put this together a while back. It's a comparison of three different "warp scales." One is the classic TOS-style "WF^3 * c" scale. One is the original concept for Transwarp, where the scale was "TWF^5 * c," and one is the TNG "recalibrated warp scale."
The thing to notice is that TWFs are actually FASTER until you get to that silly "sudden upspike" in the TNG-era scale.
Anyway, the true answer to the question posed in this topic is, accurately, that "the speed is driven by plot more than by science." But if you want to try to make the science WORK, I'd hope that this might help.
Interesting read... that's one complicated equation (not in terms of real-world math, but in terms of "scriptwriters with calculators" purposes). 
Warp 9 has become meaningless on the TNG era shows. They travel at warp 9 and above constantly. Two minutes at Warp 9 on my chart would be 1,473.6 Light Years(12.28 LY/sec x 120 seconds). They shouldn't be able to run at maximum speed for sustained periods anyway. Scotty used to complain that they were gonna explode starting at warp 7. Then on TNG and on stuff they were going Warp 9.6 all the time.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Actually the average speed they always travelled at in TNG and DS9 was warp 7, only time you ever hear them say a larger speed is usually when they're in a hurry or there's an emergency.
Regarding speeds and stopping off to view sights, that really doesnt have anything to do with Tuvoks calculation of 75 years, theres no way to know how many times Voyager would be stopping off or how far off path they might travel on the way home so the 75 year calculation must have been 'logically' for a straight none stop run to the Alpha Quadrant proabably at an 'average sustainable' speed of warp 7, obviously they wouldnt be capable of travelling at warp 9.975 for long periods of time but the fact is using the above warp factor table they would only need to sustain warp 9.975 for '2 minutes' which isnt very long, plus according to the above factors even travelling at warp 7 would have got them home decades earlier than 75 years.
I'm sorry to say it but Voyager is pretty much the strongest canon we have when it comes to the speed of Fed Starships and it cant be ignored or twisted to fit something else.
The Warp table here seems more reasonable but even then I personally consider warp 7 as 1000 times the speed of light.
Even at 1000 times the speed of light, they would only travel 2.73 Light Years per day. Most stars are going to be 4 or more light years apart. They never take that long to travel between star systems. I wonder if the new movie reboot will keep it vague and if they don't, will they have numbers that make sense with what we see on screen?
Sure Tuvok's calculation was based on 1000 light years per year, but that is not what happens in your average episode with them taking just hours or minutes between systems. Did they have to travel 75,000 or 70,000 light years on Voyager? I don't remember.
Sure Tuvok's calculation was based on 1000 light years per year, but that is not what happens in your average episode with them taking just hours or minutes between systems. Did they have to travel 75,000 or 70,000 light years on Voyager? I don't remember.
Well, that's not NECESSARILY the case.
Think of a movie or TV show set in contemporary times. And, going back to my "driving from NYC to LA" analogy once again. If the character is driving that distance, they show you the beginning and the end of the trip, but not all the tedious stuff in the middle.
In a lot of Trek, you see much the same thing. You see the captain order them to set course... you see the ship start its trip... and then you see the ship end its trip.
But you don't REALLY know how many days, or even WEEKS, may have passed in-between in the overwhelming majority of cases, do you?
So I would be careful about making the assumption you seem to be making. Just because we don't see the boring bits doesn't mean that they didn't happen, after all. We also never see the characters going to the bathroom, but it's a safe bet that they do at some point.
