Has there ever been a mention of a ship experiencing a wormhole effect (the warp drive malfunction) anywhere besides ST: The Motion Picture?
Wormhole effect
- Thread starter EmperorKalan
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^DC used it before then. In their opening 2-part, a Klingon space station was actually hidden in "wormhole space." Though it was really kind of an alternate dimension or something, bearing little resemblance to what we know as a wormhole. (The concept wasn't well-known back then; it was pretty obscure both in SF and theoretical physics until Carl Sagan asked physicist Kip Thorne to devise a plausible FTL drive for his novel Contact. Thorne revisited the underexplored wormhole idea and discovered a lot of new possibilities, and the novel popularized the concept, leading to its subsequent use in TNG, DS9, Farscape, Stargate, and countless other things.)
^ Although in that case the Klingons used the space station to keep their wormholes open rather than making them by accident.
I checked now, Wolf at the Door uses it, Kirk has Scotty make an imbalance, but he has a bit of trouble because Starfleet installed a failsafe program to stop the wormhole thing happening again. But they get there in then end, fewth!
I checked now, Wolf at the Door uses it, Kirk has Scotty make an imbalance, but he has a bit of trouble because Starfleet installed a failsafe program to stop the wormhole thing happening again. But they get there in then end, fewth!
Thanks 8of5 and Christopher.
So it's been used a few times in comics as a sort of negative-zone/phantom-zone. And hasn't been used at all since the concept was clarified and used in TNG, DS9, VOY, etc.
So we actually haven't seen it re-used as a form of warp-drive malfunction, with the intermix imbalance causing something wonky with the warp field (and likely given a misnomer due to superficial appearance), and something not related to:
"real" wormholes
transwarp tunnels
quantum slipstream tunnels
interspatial flexures (VOY: Counterpoint)
subspace corridors (VOY: Dragon's Teeth)
geodesic folds (VOY: Inside Man)
subspace tunnels (Caeliar-created)
and any other tube-like subspace phenomena I may have missed
(or perhaps there is a relation to some of these?).
I'd had some vauge hopes this kind of malfunction would have been seen again in Enterprise, with its lower level of technology, but that didn't happen on screen. And since this is the wrong forum to speculate further, I'll just float the notion that "wormhole effect" is still on the list of "things that can go wrong on a starship" and is ripe for revisiting in the lower tech of the ENT books or in the resource-stretched post-Destiny setting.
So it's been used a few times in comics as a sort of negative-zone/phantom-zone. And hasn't been used at all since the concept was clarified and used in TNG, DS9, VOY, etc.
So we actually haven't seen it re-used as a form of warp-drive malfunction, with the intermix imbalance causing something wonky with the warp field (and likely given a misnomer due to superficial appearance), and something not related to:
"real" wormholes
transwarp tunnels
quantum slipstream tunnels
interspatial flexures (VOY: Counterpoint)
subspace corridors (VOY: Dragon's Teeth)
geodesic folds (VOY: Inside Man)
subspace tunnels (Caeliar-created)
and any other tube-like subspace phenomena I may have missed
(or perhaps there is a relation to some of these?).
I'd had some vauge hopes this kind of malfunction would have been seen again in Enterprise, with its lower level of technology, but that didn't happen on screen. And since this is the wrong forum to speculate further, I'll just float the notion that "wormhole effect" is still on the list of "things that can go wrong on a starship" and is ripe for revisiting in the lower tech of the ENT books or in the resource-stretched post-Destiny setting.
I think there has to be a relation, since most or all of those, along with warp drive and gravitational fields in general, are simply variations on the same principle: alterations in the topology of spacetime. Sometimes the difference is simply one of terminology (like the alien using "interspatial flexure" to mean "wormhole").
Point taken, though I'll also note that none of those phenomena exhibited the "time stretching" effect the malfunction displayed. Some were hazardous due to lethal radiation, but otherwise ships didn't appear to suffer ill effects or odd phenomena just in the act of passing through them.
Perhaps they are all related in a hypothetical Grand Unified Subspace Theory, but the malfunction, apparently a malformed, hyper-distended warp field instead of a stable bubble, (1) doesn't let you travel great distances and (2) if not shut down is actively hazardous to the ship, which seaparates it from the others, if only in its function as a plot device.
Space and time are inseparably linked. Every gravity well causes time dilation to some extent. It's just a matter of degree, a function of the specific configuration.
(1) How do you know? The Enterprise had to recompute its intercept course to V'Ger after the wormhole effect. That could very well be because it was transported some distance across space. As for "great" distances, there's no minimum limit on the distance allowed by wormhole travel. TNG: "Clues" established that Starfleet has experience with micro-wormholes resulting in travel distances of fractions of a parsec (since they saw nothing anomalous about the alleged wormhole there sending them a mere 0.54 parsecs).
(2) Several of the other things you cited are hazardous as well (see "Timeless" for a case of slipstream drive's hazards serving as a plot device). Lots of things that are safe in one configuration are hazardous in another. Take a 500-meter-long tunnel through a mountain. Positioned horizontally, it's a convenience. Positioned vertically, it's a deathtrap. Yet you would hardly say that a horizontal hole in a mountain and a vertical hole in a mountain are two fundamentally unrelated phenomena.
Ultimately, they're all spacetime metrics. A wormhole is the same kind of thing as the gravity well created by the Earth -- it's an alteration in the geometry of the fabric of space. A planet's gravity well is just a "dip" in the fabric. Strech that "dip" down very far and you get a long, deep cylinder, a black hole. Angle that long cylinder so that it intersects with the fabric of space somewhere else and it becomes a wormhole. And so on. They're all variations on the exact same principle. Their only differences are geometry and terminology.
On this topic: the May entry for the Ship of the Line 2010 calendar is "Imperfect Warp Bubble" by Daren Dochterman.
I don't know, that's just my take on it, since no one seemed to think that the ship's captain needed an update on their position. The recalculation is easily accounted for by the need to factor in additional time spent at impulse rather than at warp, with V'Ger all the while still approaching Earth.
Actually, the hazard in "Timeless" was being thrown out of the slipstream in an uncontrolled manner thanks to phase variance "bumps" in the ride. It wasn't a case of experiencing an effect merely by being in the tunnel.
Look, all I really want to do here is remind authors that this malfunction exists, and take it out of "used once then never seen again" oblivion.
Could be. But as I said, there's no requirement that a wormhole's entry and exit points be a great distance away from one another in space. And you can't definitively say it didn't move the ship some distance, which was my point.
Yes, of course, but that minor distinction doesn't mean they had to be fundamentally unrelated phenomena. As I've been trying to explain, everything that involves an alteration of spacetime geometry is part of the same basic physics, no matter how different their details might be. The hazards posed by falling into a black hole are superficially quite different from the hazards posed by falling into an open manhole, but both phenomena are manifestations of the exact same principles of gravitation and spacetime topography, differing only by degree. And those same physical principles also underlie warp drives, wormholes, space folds, and every other kind of space warp. That's how physics works. Everything is interconnected.
Oh, I'm well aware of its existence...
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