With me it's warp speed.
They really fucked that up.
It was all well and good at the time of TOS, where the ship moved at the speed of plot. But the Franz Joseph Tech Manual had a throwaway about a cubic relationship. Warp 1 = Speed of Light, Warp 2- 8c, Warp 5 = 125 c, Warp 10 = 1000c and so on.
It didn't mean much to the show, but it did raise a couple of issues in terms of speed, range and distance. Pre dilithium meant warp four, ie voyages of months and years between stars. Post dilithium cut that down to weeks and days, but it made for some intriguing literature.
But the Federation got bigger, and for TNG that scale had to be dispensed with. Hence the exponential warp scale. Basically, at lower ends of the scale, it behaved much like the cubic relationship, and at higher ends, it behaved asymptotically. The closer you got to Warp 10, the faster the ship travelled, and with Warp 10 = infinite speed = unreachable.
This brought back speed of plot, but then the TNG tech manual messed things up again with the 1 yr = 1000 light years relationship. Basically a starship can travel 1000 light years in terms of engine wear, fuel consumption, supplies and so on. But then we are presented with a Federation which is thousands of light years across. But all these starships seem to be within a couple of days of Earth
DS9 was at the edge of the final frontier, but still a quick jaunt away from San Francisco.
The biggest and most notorious over babble came with Enterprise, which appeared to use the cubic relationship for its Warp 5 engine. The 6 minutes to Neptune and back was quite correct.
But the heart of the Klingon empire, 2 days away at warp 5, halfway between Earth and Proxima Centauri was not.
I'd loved to see Warp Speed retconned back to a simple Plot Drive.
I'd also like to see the date of the future erased. No 23rd or 24th Century. I'd just like Trek in some unimaginable future era as it once used to be.
They really fucked that up.
It was all well and good at the time of TOS, where the ship moved at the speed of plot. But the Franz Joseph Tech Manual had a throwaway about a cubic relationship. Warp 1 = Speed of Light, Warp 2- 8c, Warp 5 = 125 c, Warp 10 = 1000c and so on.
It didn't mean much to the show, but it did raise a couple of issues in terms of speed, range and distance. Pre dilithium meant warp four, ie voyages of months and years between stars. Post dilithium cut that down to weeks and days, but it made for some intriguing literature.
But the Federation got bigger, and for TNG that scale had to be dispensed with. Hence the exponential warp scale. Basically, at lower ends of the scale, it behaved much like the cubic relationship, and at higher ends, it behaved asymptotically. The closer you got to Warp 10, the faster the ship travelled, and with Warp 10 = infinite speed = unreachable.
This brought back speed of plot, but then the TNG tech manual messed things up again with the 1 yr = 1000 light years relationship. Basically a starship can travel 1000 light years in terms of engine wear, fuel consumption, supplies and so on. But then we are presented with a Federation which is thousands of light years across. But all these starships seem to be within a couple of days of Earth
DS9 was at the edge of the final frontier, but still a quick jaunt away from San Francisco.
The biggest and most notorious over babble came with Enterprise, which appeared to use the cubic relationship for its Warp 5 engine. The 6 minutes to Neptune and back was quite correct.
But the heart of the Klingon empire, 2 days away at warp 5, halfway between Earth and Proxima Centauri was not.
I'd loved to see Warp Speed retconned back to a simple Plot Drive.
I'd also like to see the date of the future erased. No 23rd or 24th Century. I'd just like Trek in some unimaginable future era as it once used to be.
