Why don't they crash?

[Relayer1]

If these spaceships are going faster than the speed of light, then presumably they're moving faster than it would take them to see upcoming stars.

So how come they never run into one?

Warp speed is supposed to be like ftl right?

The chances of colliding are very low. Space is huge, stars are rare and tiny.

Besides, magic sensors aside, they already know where the stars are and they know where they are and they know where they are headed at what speed - the computer does the rest.

The viewscreens are not a window or camera view, they are a computer simulation.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

The viewscreens are not a window or camera view, they are a computer simulation.

*Ring,Ring*
"Yes?... Yes, he is here. just a moment, please."

Relayer1, phone call for you. A Mr JJ Abrams would like a word with you.

 

[Relayer1]

I prefer to believe that the JJprise has a window equipped with state of the art computer assisted overlay.

Let's call it a smartwindow...

 

[rhubarbodendron]

I'm not quite sure what the newest theories are but there used to be one in the 70s that said that warp drive is quite literally that. You warp space, build a tunnel - an artificial wormhole, basically - and fly through it at a lower speed than light. The result will appear to be hyper-light speed. (So, basically you cheat and just take a shortcut from A to B instead of actually flying faster)

Such a wormhole would automatically avoid all stars (else it'd get plugged and collapse before it is fully established).

 

[Bisz]

Magic!

You mean sufficiently enough technology, right?

 

[Lieut. Arex]

<Navigators

 

[publiusr]

Let's hope it is both:
http://www.technologyreview.com/vie...could-be-tested-at-the-large-hadron-collider/

 

[GalaxyX]

If we go by this calculator:

http://www.anycalculator.com/warpcalculator.htm

which is based on warp speeds mentioned in several sources:

Going from Earth to Alpha Centauri at warp 9 would take a full day. At the Enterprise's top speed of warp 9.6, it's still taking 12 hours to get there.

If we use Voyager's top speed of warp 9.975, It still takes 2 hours to get there.

Meaning even the fastest ships in the Federation have absolutely zero chance of bumping into any stars at all if they plot a course towards a particular star. Even these insane speeds are not enough to get the odd start here and there to pass them by every few hours or so.

The star fields and stretch effects might be due to relativistic visual distortions?

As a note, holy shit Voyager is fast! At top speed they could have made the trip back to Earth in 3.5 years! Why was it going to take them 70 years? They couldn't keep up the top speed?

 

[sojourner]

Yeah, they couldn't maintain that speed. It would burn out the engines. It would be like driving a car engine at max rpm. You would greatly decrease the operational life.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

With all this talk about warp drives and such, since this is the science forum, I thought I'd get some actual science here:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSpueUqvcs[/yt]​

 

[DarthTom]

Technobabble explanation: Subspace sensors.
Real world aside: Paradoxes like this are basically the reason FTL is believed to be impossible.

Proposed solution. An artificially created wormhole.

 

[Australis]

Place a basketball in L.A. Place another basketball in NYC, then one in Berlin, Shanghai, and Capetown. Now, yank the Earth away and you have a nice scale model of a local cluster of stars (where the LA to NYC one is Earth to Alpha Centauri). Now, take a microscopic sand grain and shoot it in some random trajectory through that. The chances of it hitting one of the basketballs is about the same as the odds of ship hitting a star: effectively zero.

Good answer, better than what I( was going to say

Remember that question someone asked in here – does gravity work at the speed of light, or instantaneously? Well, you can't ever directly measure the answer unless the sun disappeared by magic.

Actually, it has been measured. Astronomer Tom Van Flandern measured the "aberration" (angle) between the Sun's light and its gravity. I made a few animations for him to explain astronomical concepts, and one of the animations was aberration. Another was an animated version of "what if the Sun magically disappeared?"

I'll be dumped on by all the Professional Physicists™ for saying this (they can't abide dissent), but we don't know what gravity is. In fact, we're no further ahead than Newton who did not explain gravity, he merely quantified it. And that's all we can do today. (Yeah, yeah, I know. Einstein and warped space, but all that does is shift the question of gravity, it does not explain it.) The answer is that gravity—whatever it is—is faster than light.

The chances of it hitting one of the basketballs is about the same as the odds of ship hitting a star: effectively zero.

And if we look at the flip-side of that analogy, how do the starships so unerringly find the destination stars over such vast distances?

That's why they say, plot a course. Also, it's that big flamey thing over there. Addtional: in Australia we have a lot of Dutch shipwreckls off the coast of West Australia, simply because they didn't know it was there... until too late, obvously, the ships hitting reefs in the night, trying to keep the favourable trade winds as along as possible. Once they understood a bit more about navigation, they avoided it.

And if we look at the flip-side of that analogy, how do the starships so unerringly find the destination stars over such vast distances?

Oh, that's easy. Just point the ship at the little dot and say, "Engage!"

When Captain Kirk said, "Second star to the right and straight on till morning", he wasn't quoting anything; he was giving specific course instructions.

They say "Course: 1765 Mark 5! Engage!" this will take you straight to Vulcan. Everyone knows that! And they can do it from memory at any relative position in space without consulting any kind of starcharts first.

This. Thiugh I woulld add I think real star charts would have to be 3D. In the Lensman series they had somethng called 'the Tank' which was used for navigation as well as plotting battle tactics.

 

[Silvercrest]

Um. I'm trying to decide if you're missing the sarcasm or playing along with it.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

If these spaceships are going faster than the speed of light, then presumably they're moving faster than it would take them to see upcoming stars.

So how come they never run into one?

Warp speed is supposed to be like ftl right?

Light emitted from the stars in times past does NOT have to catch up with the ship. The photons are already there, traveling between the stars.
STL or FTL, the ship will have no problems seeing them.

 

[GalaxyX]

If these spaceships are going faster than the speed of light, then presumably they're moving faster than it would take them to see upcoming stars.

So how come they never run into one?

Warp speed is supposed to be like ftl right?

Light emitted from the stars in times past does NOT have to catch up with the ship. The photons are already there, traveling between the stars.
STL or FTL, the ship will have no problems seeing them.

Hmm, got caught up on the whole actual speed and what it would be like (where even at maximum warp you still technically wouldn't see the stars streak by. They would look as static as they do now, perhaps moving a slight tad, the way the moon might move as we cruise along a hwy in a car)

This is a good point though. Assuming that the stars in front of you would get blueshifted, and the ones behind you redshifted, does that mean that at FTL travel, the stars in front would blueshift beyond the visible spectrum? And the ones behind redshift out of visual wavelength range as well?

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Light is blue/redshifted by 2 factors:
-the conventional speed of the ship - meaning blue-shifted before of the ship, red-shifted behind the ship.
-gravitational/antigravitational fields (the space-time bending which creates the warp field) - gravity bueshifts infalling light, antigravity redshifts infalling light.

 

[Zaku]

Warp speed is supposed to be like ftl right?

Uhmm, a ship at warp can interact with objects not at warp?

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Zaku

Whomever you're quoting, it's not me.

As to your unclarities:
Warp - and every other way of travelling FTL - is, by definition, FTL.
And a ship at warp, within the warp 'bubble', flies STL and interacts just fine with STL objects.

 

[Zaku]

Zaku

Whomever you're quoting, it's not me.

Ops! Sorry....

 

[T'Girl]

It's not until a ship drops OUT of warp that it becomes part of normal space again.

At which point it runs into a group of other starships over Vulcan.

Where are those scanners when you really need them?