How fast is warp speed?

[F. King Daniel]

...as fast as the writers need it to be at the time, of course. Star Trek always has and always will travel at the speed of plot, yet fans repeatedly complain that ships get from X to Y far too quickly because The Making of Star Trek said: Warp factor cubed = multiple of lightspeed. The TNG manuals came up with a slightly different formula with warp 10 as infinity speed (I'm sure we all remember "Threshold" ).

Long story short there is far more evidence, however inconsistant, that warp speed is a lot faster than the old formulas say than there ever was to support it.

The TOS Enterprise reached the galactic rim.

The NX-01 went from Earth to Rigel to Kronos in hours/days.

The Enterprise-A reached the centre of the galaxy in hours/days (ditto TAS)

2009 Enterprise reached Vulcan in minutes/hours.

The list goes on. There's no pattern to it, but warp speed has to be much faster than "warp factor cubed = multiple of lightspeed".

Old news, I know. It just keeps coming up!

 

[Mister_Atoz]

Warped9 came up with a theory that made a lot of sense. He based his theory on rejecting the idea that warp one was equal to the sped of light. He was right in a sense, that this was never explicitly stated to be so. I seem to recall his theory fitting a lot of the instances we've seen on screen.

I did some searching:
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=52231&highlight=Ahead+warp

 

[F. King Daniel]

My damn phone browser refuses to load Warped9's chart . I'll be able to take a look tommorow when I'm on a real computer again.

But I'm sure they called warp one the "lightspeed barrier" in First Contact and Enterprise. I may be wrong.

Some of the more recent Star Trek novels have come up with babble about "subspace topography", suggesting that warp speed operates faster in some areas, and along some routes than others. Hence estimated times of arrival rather than definitive answers during much of TV Trek. It sounds like a neat way to iron out some discrepancies, but it still requires warp to be faster than the old formulas in the first place to really work.

 

[Mister_Atoz]

I don't recall any direct line that says warp one is exactly equal to the speed of light. In First Contact they just say that Cochran broke the light barrier. "Warp factors" could have been a concept established years later once they started turning his design into production model engines.

Warped9's theory would still put warp one as being faster than the speed of light. This actually makes a lot of sense, because we have references to civilian ships covering a lot of ground at relatively low warp speeds. For example, there is Sulu's line "a freighter might travel warp two at best".

 

[CuttingEdge100]

Personally, I think that it would be just best to assume Gene Roddenberry's figure of the ship being capable of a maximum speed of 0.73 LY/HR would be a pretty solid figure to go with.

Considering how the faster you go, disproportionate amounts of energy end up yielding proportionately smaller increases in speed (Since we're in space, we don't need to factor in issues such as hydroplaning, supercavitation, mach-number effects and so on) one could assume that the cruise speed could be somewhat close to the maximum warp-speed (0.55 to 0.60 LY/HR).

I don't object to the Warp-Scale being W^3 as it would be a cubic relationship and objects being 3-dimensional and such. I just think it would be best to ignore the warp-factors and simply focus on the LY/HR figures for the ship's maximum velocity.

With a maximum velocity of 0.73 LY/HR, this would yield a velocity of 6,399.18 times the speed of light, making for a warp factor of approximately 18.5656, with a cruise velocity of 0.55 to 0.60 LY/HR, this would make for a velocity between 4,821.3 to 5,259.6 times the speed of light, making for warp factors ranging from approximately 16.8936 to 17.3907.

BTW: I should note that bussard-collectors based on calculations of velocity vs amount of stellar hydrogen density in space, would be largely useless below Warp 8 (512 c), and at these warp-factors would be easily useable.

 

[Mister_Atoz]

I tend to disregard the "bussard collector" concept all together. I think it just somehow makes more sense to have those glowing red things at the front of every starship should be more integral to the warp drive. Unfortunately, "Insurrection" gets in the away.

 

[Ablative_Oberth]

All that matters is that warp speed is FAR FAR faster than "hyperspace" in Star Wars period the end.

 

[Warped9]

My damn phone browser refuses to load Warped9's chart .

Here ya go:

 

[Rett Mikhal]

All that matters is that warp speed is FAR FAR faster than "hyperspace" in Star Wars period the end.

Actually, hyperspace travel is several million times faster than light. However, travel time can be increased due to avoiding any of the millions of stars and millions of planetary bodies in the system, especially near the core. Travel time can range from hours to a month. Star Trek mostly takes place in the Alpha Quadrant, far away from the core, so everything is nice and empty.

Put them in a head-to-head race and a Star Destroyer leaves the Enteprise in the dust.

 

[Ablative_Oberth]

^oh hush up or take it to Star Destroyer dot net. :P

 

[SicOne]

I was momentarily distracted by Ablative_Oberth's avatar's, er, "Bussard collectors", but my question for today is...how fast is the Vesta-class slipstream drive, then, in terms of Warp 9.999??? equivalent?

 

[Timo]

I tend to disregard the "bussard collector" concept all together. I think it just somehow makes more sense to have those glowing red things at the front of every starship should be more integral to the warp drive. Unfortunately, "Insurrection" gets in the way.

Oh, I dunno. The way the collectors were used there (or in "Samaritan Snare" or "Night Terrors") need not be the way they were designed to be used. After all, we never hear of the navigational deflector being used the way it was intended to be used, and we do hear of it being used in a number of very different ways, but the name is still explicit and suggestive.

Agreed, though, that it's a bit unlikely that the collectors would be in place solely because they help refuel the ship. There should be something more going on there, because every damn warp nacelle seems to have those things even though relatively few starships would probably have a need for the ability to siphon additional fuel from space. And placing the things on warp nacelles is very odd in the first place, since that's not where the fuel would be held, except perhaps in some rather obscure interpretations of TAS "One of Our Planets Is Missing".

Having the collectors work as some sort of a broom that sweeps the path of the ship for faster and safer flight would probably make the best sense. They're just a belt-and-suspenders arrangement for the job on those ships that also have a deflector dish. On certain other ships, though, they're the only broom available, and as such a crucial piece of tech. And yes, they do suck in some useful dirt on the side, justifying their various onscreen "misuses" and the basic terminology.

As for the speed of warp, lightspeed times warp factor cubed has never cut it, but something in the ballpark would still work pretty well. Perhaps just one order of magnitude higher? The "galactic rim" is ill-defined enough to justify all the TOS visits to it. Going from star to neighboring star in a matter of days would be more or less possible if warp five were ten times faster than the cubed formula suggests, too. And both ST5:TFF and TAS "Magicks of Megas-Tu" could be interpreted as featuring travel towards, but not all the way to, the galactic core.

Out of the rules-of-thumb we hear TPTB using, the "1000 ly per year" one for newer Trek seems to work just fine. The "0.73 ly/h TOS max without exceptional hijinks" one works fine, too, even though it probably never really was applied on any TOS writing as such. And the two are in good agreement with each other if we wish for them to be. The cubed formula is the odd man out, but since it does seem to apply to a few datapoints from ENT, perhaps we could think of it as an early theory that was later proven to be valid only for specific special cases? That is, perhaps it works that way close to Sol (and a few other special places), due to us living in a "subspace shallows" of some sort, but warp elsewhere is faster?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

My damn phone browser refuses to load Warped9's chart .

Here ya go:

Thanks. As you say, the chart only covers Trek up to 1979 - it would totally break Voyager's premise (which in itself is entirely contradicted by TOS and STV ).

I think Star Trek should have treated warp speed like Stargate did hyperspace: They're either in hyperspace or not, and ship A has either faster or slower hyperspace than ship B. End of story. Instead we got over-quantified technobabble-filled technical manuals complete with charts that had been entirely contradicted decades earlier.

 

[Penta]

I think that expecting TNG not to contradict TOS on the matter of the speed of warp, while it might make sense and be desirable from a consistency POV, wouldn't be practical. Wasn't then, either - the TOS scale had issues, the same as the scale used by TNG-VOY (and the associated movies) does. (And I dunno what scale Enterprise uses!) They're just different issues; in trying to fix one you inevitably create holes, and so it comes down to "pick your poison".

However, do I wish TOS itself had avoided anything more than "Higher warp is faster, duh" and "warp speed is FTL"?

Yeah. It was TOS (or at least the books surrounding TOS) that tried to associate warp speed with a specific speed.

Should not have been done, IMHO. Should not have been attempted. It's one of many points where Roddenberry didn't put his money where his mouth was on the "you don't need to know how the tech works, any more than you need to know how a gun works for a cop show" thing he had...Something he applied very inconsistently in any case, especially in later years, I believe. It was applied just enough to make things not make sense, which is (to me) a bad thing.

A better approach would have been to say that warp speeds indicate how "deep" in subspace you are - the deeper you are, the faster you go, starting out with warp 1 (which is an unquantified "depth"). David Weber did something similar, if I recall, with his Honor Harrington universe of books.

 

[Mister_Atoz]

warp speed in "JJ-Trek" seems to be more like Hyperspace in other sci-fi. They don't seem to be able to interact with the rest of the universe while they are traveling.

The Enterprise didn't seem to know what was going on around Vulcan until after they dropped out of warp. In earlier incarnations, Mr. Spock would otherwise have used his sensors to know what to expect before they even got there.

Mr. Data on the other hand would have used his TNG-magic sensors to conduct an entire geological survey of the planet Vulcan, a thorough tactical analysis of the Narada and way to stop it before they even dropped out of warp. But that's TNG for you, never settle for actions and suspense when tedious LCARS display tapping can do solve all your problems for you...but I digress...

 

[SWHouston]

And then there's the Warp Speed Calculator at....

http://www.ussdragonstar.com/utilitycore/warpspeeds.asp

 

[Timo]

They don't seem to be able to interact with the rest of the universe while they are traveling.

They did expect to be able to communicate with other starships just fine. Pike wanted to contact the Truman while at warp, establishing that warp-to-warp communications were possible. His comm officer said that the Truman had already arrived at Vulcan, but proceeded with the hails nevertheless, establishing that warp-to-sublight communications were possible.

As for sensors, Data wasn't able to predict the carnage the TNG heroes would face at Wolf 359. Apparently, dead starships aren't particularly visible from a distance (whereas, say, the atmospheric chemistry of a planet is a much easier target, having a diameter ten thousand times larger for starters). And in TOS "Doomsday Machine" and ST2, it was impossible to observe the destruction of entire planets until the starship actually entered the system - and in neither case did the ship arrive at high warp, but made a "routine" or a "careful" system entry. In that sense, STXI is perfectly in line with other Trek.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Warped9]

Warp speed is incredibly fast and only affected by the variables of plot.

 

[Ronald Held]

there is a quote that warp speed is as fast as dictated by the story?

 

[Marten]

there is a quote that warp speed is as fast as dictated by the story?

I do not believe there is anything offical, no.