Could there ever be a warp ship capable of warp 1,000,000?! With a hella strong hull and warp field? 
Highly illogical.
Highly illogical.
Woah.
- Thread starter NCC-1701-A
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The Warp scale is like a percentage of infinity, where Warp 10 = 100% Infinite speed.
Any episode set in "the future" with the ship going at 'Warp 14' or whatever is where they've re-drawn the Warp Scale, probably to something like Warp 20 is the new 100% of Infinite Speed.
Oh, and yeah... Voyager's episode called "Threshold" IS CANON, regardless of what the writers or fans think, because it aired on TV. So tough.
Any episode set in "the future" with the ship going at 'Warp 14' or whatever is where they've re-drawn the Warp Scale, probably to something like Warp 20 is the new 100% of Infinite Speed.
Oh, and yeah... Voyager's episode called "Threshold" IS CANON, regardless of what the writers or fans think, because it aired on TV. So tough.
I thought it was spelled "whoa."
As opposed to 1% infinite?
Sure it's canon, but it has to be interpreted in a way that makes the screwed-up statements mean something other than what they were supposed to mean.
As opposed to 1% infinite?
Sure it's canon, but it has to be interpreted in a way that makes the screwed-up statements mean something other than what they were supposed to mean.
Well, you know what I mean.All this talk about infinity gave me an idea: Warp Infinity. And what about Transwarp drive?
Yes, it's part of the canon in the literal sense, but it's a common fan misconception that "canon" = "continuity." The canon isn't "what's real," because none of it is real. Every long-running fictional canon reinterprets, retcons, or ignores elements of its past, refining itself as it goes along. Since it is fiction rather than reality, it is intrinsically mutable, and its creators are fully entitled to disregard past elements of it if they like. Brannon Braga himself, who wrote "Threshold," has disowned it, declaring it out of continuity. And I doubt there'd be any other Trek producer who'd choose to dispute that. Besides, later treatments of transwarp in the show directly contradicted "Threshold," confirming that it is out of continuity.
Similarly, "The Alternative Factor" claimed that dilithium powered the ship and that any matter-antimatter interaction would annihilate the universe -- but later TOS episodes and everything else since have consistently stated that matter-antimatter reactions power the ship and dilithium channels that power. It's safe to say that TAF is also out of continuity -- even though it is technically part of the canon. Canon and continuity are not synonymous. The canon is simply the core body of work as opposed to derivative works. But that core body is subject to reinterpretation. Not everything within the filmed canon is regarded as "real" by subsequent creators, or even by the same creators later on.
It is ludicrous to say "It's canon regardless of what the writers think." Some fans seem to have this bizarre notion that canon is some dogma imposed on the show's creators by some higher power, like the studio or God or something. But it isn't. The show's creators decide what the core continuity of the series is assumed to be. If they say that something is out of continuity, there's nobody higher up to overrule them. It's their show. The only people who can overrule the decisions of the showrunners are the people who replace them later on. For instance, Jeri Taylor wanted her novels Mosaic and Pathways to be part of the official Voyager continuity, but as soon as she left and Brannon Braga became showrunner, her novels were ignored. Now, the people in charge of ST are Abrams, Lindelof, Burk, Kurtzman, and Orci, and it's their decision what counts as part of the "real" continuity.
I thought it was spelled "whoa."
As opposed to 1% infinite?
Sure it's canon, but it has to be interpreted in a way that makes the screwed-up statements mean something other than what they were supposed to mean.
Yeah, maybe it is spelled that way...
What are you saying, anyway?
If I might bring this to the issue of TAS, would it now be fair to say that it's a part of the canon, but portions aren't necessarily a part of continuity?
Some of the earlier episodes leaned that way as well, so TAF is even further out of the loop.
In other words, the references are there to use if needed, or ignored if necessary (although in my book, if you're gonna outright contradict a part of the official record, you'd better have a damn good reason; in the case of TAF, the damn good reason is that it was a stupid episode from start to finish).
Or, in this case, make up their own continuity and sidestep the issue altogether.
Not really. The concept of "percent of infinity" makes as much sense as Tom Paris rapidly "evolving" into a reptile for some reason.
Just because infinity doesn't have percentages; 1% of infinity is infinity. 10% of infinity is infinity. 99% of infinity is infinity. For any quantity to be divisible in a percentage it has to be an actual quantity that is divisible by 100 to get a finite number, and you can't do that with infinity.
Which is why the existing warp scale is incomprehensible in itself, since it assumes a kind of strange curve of "faster and increasingly fasterness" up to warp nine, where all of a sudden you're supposed to measure minute distances of speed by six or seven decimal places as being somehow meaningful.
I just assumed that the new warp scale is a consequence of some kind of natural speed barrier, sort of like the sound barrier for piston-engined aircraft. It's just too hard to go that fast unless you've got a new kind of engine, and when you have that, you can go as fast as you want.
This is the Warp scale, from light speed at Warp 1 to infinite speed at Warp 10.
As you can see, it's a circular curve with Warp 10 at the edge where the gradient becomes vertical, hence infinite.
If you imagine the scale along the bottom line being from 1-100, 10 would still be pretty slow, comparatively. 50 would be halfway along the graph, and 99 would be almost right at the edge with a really steep gradient, equal to Warp 9.99975 or whatever...
As you can see, it's a circular curve with Warp 10 at the edge where the gradient becomes vertical, hence infinite.
If you imagine the scale along the bottom line being from 1-100, 10 would still be pretty slow, comparatively. 50 would be halfway along the graph, and 99 would be almost right at the edge with a really steep gradient, equal to Warp 9.99975 or whatever...
But I started this thread to know this: How fast could you traverse the universe at warp 1,000,000?
I would say as fast you want to traverse it -- since we have no basis or idea just how many bazillion times the speed of light the speed implied by 'Warp 1,000,000' is... *shrug*.
Cheers,
-CM-
Cheers,
-CM-
In "Timeless", Voyager achieved a speed of some billion c before it was thrown out of the Transwarp corridor and crashed.
In "Where No One Has Gone Before", the initial burst (Geordi's [in]famous "We're passing Warp 10!" line) propelled them some 2.7 million light years outside of the Milky Way in a matter of seconds. The next burst conceivably took them out of the observable universe (since nobody had observed where they went prior) to the "Outer Rim".
Warp 1,000,000 is probably somewhere equally "out there".
In "Where No One Has Gone Before", the initial burst (Geordi's [in]famous "We're passing Warp 10!" line) propelled them some 2.7 million light years outside of the Milky Way in a matter of seconds. The next burst conceivably took them out of the observable universe (since nobody had observed where they went prior) to the "Outer Rim".
Warp 1,000,000 is probably somewhere equally "out there".
It depends on what Warp number you consider to be "infinity" in an every-point-in-the-Universe-simultaneously way.
No, because the point at which the curve becomes a vertical line is a finite value and is NOT infinite.
Infinity is an asymptote; in an actual curve of the type you describe, the line would NEVER become vertical, it would forever increase along the curve getting closer and closer and closer but never actually REACHING vertical. In the curve you've drawn here--assuming the Y axis is speed and the X axis is warp factor--then warp 11 is the same speed as warp 9, because the curve then begins to reverse itself in an ellipse.
If you want warp 10 to be "infinity" then at an arbitrary point (Gene put it at exactly warp 9) the function for warp factor/velocity changes completely and becomes hyperbolic.
Remember, kids, the description in the Tech Manual is a riff on the description of the Infinite Improbability Drive in "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". In other words, it was a joke that Brannon Braga didn't get.
...But it does make complete sense, in a Newtonian universe. If you moved infinitely fast, you would indeed by definition be everywhere at once.
Depending a bit on the geometry of your exercise, of course. If it were simple Euclidean space, and you steered true, you'd only manage to be on every point of a straight line at once. But if your ship made even the slightest deviations from straight path, it would of course loop around the entire universe infinitely many times in zero time, thus covering every spot in 3D space simultaneously.
It is only by Einsteinian rules that infinite speed and simultaneity become forbidden concepts. But warp engines defy Einstein, so transwarp engines would be expected to, too.
Timo Saloniemi
Depending a bit on the geometry of your exercise, of course. If it were simple Euclidean space, and you steered true, you'd only manage to be on every point of a straight line at once. But if your ship made even the slightest deviations from straight path, it would of course loop around the entire universe infinitely many times in zero time, thus covering every spot in 3D space simultaneously.
It is only by Einsteinian rules that infinite speed and simultaneity become forbidden concepts. But warp engines defy Einstein, so transwarp engines would be expected to, too.
Timo Saloniemi
but even with the IID there would have to be some kind of "nomality" in which to come to. even if you were everywhere in the universe at the same time, what would be your "nomality" and how would it be known where it is? so if "infinate speed" were to be achieved, how would you get out of it?
As the episode described, there would not be any specific place where one existed: one's senses and sensors would get information from all locations simultaneously - which one might assume would result not only in sensory overload but serious overheating as well!
How does one get out of it? Trivial: one shuts down the engine. Where does one get out of it? One would assume the results would be entirely random. But evidently they weren't: Paris got out where he thought he would get out. Which makes little sense at the first sight, but might be a plausible subconscious process. Say, Paris went to infinite speed, then started decelerating - and at some point of the deceleration, his body reacted to the flickering of a familiar sight past his vision, and downramped the drive just right to come to a halt at that point on the next 234,567th pass. Pilot reflexes...
Timo Saloniemi
How does one get out of it? Trivial: one shuts down the engine. Where does one get out of it? One would assume the results would be entirely random. But evidently they weren't: Paris got out where he thought he would get out. Which makes little sense at the first sight, but might be a plausible subconscious process. Say, Paris went to infinite speed, then started decelerating - and at some point of the deceleration, his body reacted to the flickering of a familiar sight past his vision, and downramped the drive just right to come to a halt at that point on the next 234,567th pass. Pilot reflexes...
Timo Saloniemi
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