The Problem with Warp Drive

[@RiiDii]

Scotty: "What if we make a warp bubble inside a warp bubble?" Admiral: "How did you find out about our secret transwarp technology?!" Scotty: "I probably invented it, and will do so again."

[@rockspoon6528]

OK, but you'd just warp to the end of the first warp bubble... which isn't very far.

[@DrVictorVasconcelos]

@@rockspoon6528 That depends on where you are on the warp bubble. If you are near one of the extremeties, oriented the same way, your warp bubble would disappear as one of its ends would meet and merge with the outer warp bubble, strengthening it. The other end will either push/pull you towards the center or the end of the outer bubble, depending on where it is and whether it's positive or negative gravity. If your warp bubble is oriented in reverse compared with the outer bubble, then, either your warp bubble would disappear, as one of its ends will either weaken or destroy the bigger warp bubble. If that happened, then the other end of your warp bubble would, again, push or pull you towards the center or the end of the outer bubble or at least where the outer bubble used to be, depending on where that end is and whether it's positive or negative gravity. Alternatively, if its strength was bigger than that of the outer bubble, it would, after destroying that bubble, remain, and your position would change based on how much one end weakened. Basically, it's all about the interference between the gravity fields on the fabric of spacetime, whether it's constructive or destructive, etc.

[@polarknight5376]

@@rockspoon6528 transwarp highways? Make a very long warp bubble between two planets and then warp down those bubbles?

[@peterkwolek2265]

The Borg had either created or at least had control of a highway like that, but the show described it as a “corridor” not a bubble iirc

[@spookyninja4098]

The Warp nessels configuration do not make any sense if they are controlling a Gravity amplifier to create a Gravity distortion in front of a star ship. Bob Lazar explains this principle in more detail. But I am Fascinated as to how much Gene Roddenberry actual got correct and still does.

[@Moonbeam143]

I figured out how fast Warp really is. It's as fast as the plot needs it to be.

[@brodriguez11000]

Oddly plot armor follows the same form.

[@BoisegangGaming]

@@brodriguez11000 And Plot Shields. And Plot Weapons. The power of the Plot is all

[@teemusid]

Plot velocity?

[@stvdagger8074]

@@BoisegangGaming Don't forget "plot communications" In "Balance of Terror", it takes a very long time for the receipt of a message to and from Star Fleet to authorize Kirk to pursue the Romulans, yet in many other occasions, real-time conversations can be conduct from Earth to the furthest limits of the federation.

[@bensmith1689]

Noticeable in the DS9 episode Little Green Men. Quark takes a shuttle from DS9 to Earth; a journey that would take the Enterprise D ~6 years at Warp 9.6. Either Ferengi shuttles are mad fast or someone didn't do the math!

[@nobodyyouknow1065]

I don’t see Ludicrous Speed on that chart, let alone Plaid.

[@BennyLlama39]

"No more beaming! *This* time, I'm gonna *walk!"*

[@roy1701d]

Or Lint Speed, for that matter. 😆

[@jolan_tru]

Snotty Beamed me twice last night. ... It was *wonderful*

[@demo3456]

Nice call back

[@zeroninehundred]

I was just thinking these need to be in the chart, and here you beat me to it. GET OUT OF MY HEAD. But one big issue is that with Plaid, they can’t just stop. They have to slow down first.

[@timurkotulic3948]

Number 1 rule of Warp: we do not speak about Threshold

[@amazedsatsuma]

No, rule number 10 is to never mention Threshold The number 1 for warp is to always have a copy of Magic Carpet Ride by Steppenwolf on you :P

[@DMSProduktions]

Rule number 2:learn HOW to spell it!

[@schachsommer12]

I thought that the 1st warp rule was as straight as possible and not to the left or right. Rule 2: go on impulse for every course correction

[@LordGalenYT]

Nah, Threshold is fine. Shame it was only a 20 minutes episode though. Maybe one day we'll find out why they never pursued that technology. Probably some really cool sci-fi reason and not anything dumb like lizards.

[@AMPMASTER10]

@@LordGalenYT Agree to disagree. Even if there was a problem with repeat "thresholdings", that would only rule out Tom and Janeway. Also Tom "went into plaid" twice and the magic cure still worked on him, so that's out. If it was a matter of the cure only working on humans, most of the crew were human. They could have used the shuttle craft to "plot hole breaking speed" over to over to Earth with letters, records, and most importantly a working prototype for Starfleet to hammer out. Plus how many Voyager episodes could be solved by "oh were out of the thing, Harry can you pick up the thing from Earth?" Plus most super advanced aliens in the show were using the "outdated" Warp goes past 10 thing. So is the Highly advanced aliens wrong or just the Federation.

[@ClarinoI]

I have often thought that the idiotic "Warp 10" should have been named something like "Warp Max" or "Warp Ω" And make the scale for Warp numbers logarithmic, so Warp 2 is ten times as fast as Warp 1 and Warp 3 is ten times as fast as Warp 2. In this way not only do you not run out of numbers, and have to decimalise to infinity you also make the advancement slower as technology increases the warp speed achievable.

[@MaddRamm]

But warp is initially speed of light. By the time you go logarithmic at warp 9, you’re already starting to go across the universe and not explore planets in this galaxy.

[@johncochran8497]

@@MaddRamm true enough. But why use base 10 logarithms? That's a rather parochial attitude. Natural logarithms would be a more ... natural ... choice since it doesn't assume some arbitrary base based up the physical construction of a specific species. It would also allow for larger numbers. But not that large, your warp 9 would be approximately warp 21. Warp 18 could cross the Milky Way in less than a day. Warp 22 could cross our local group in about a day.

[@MaddRamm]

@@johncochran8497 10x is the number the original poster used, that’s why I used that as reference. Going logarithmic with any base whether it be 10 or 2 or 100 is going to quickly go toward insanely higher numbers than simply a more linear approach. In the Trek universe, Warp is never logarithmic except when the “Traveler” uses “thought” to out the Enterprise on the other side of the visible universe Billions of light years. Otherwise, Warp tend to be presented as a simple linear multiplier of C and no where near logarithmic.

[@Jimbo8012]

I think Denise and Michael Okuda beat you to it by 30 years. Apart from in Where No One Has Gone Before in Season 1 TNG, Warp 10 is infinity in TNG and so you arrive at anywhere in the universe instantaneously. Exactly like the Speed of Light in that it feels instantaneous but different because it's instantaneous rather than taking you millions of years to get there. The warp scale in TNG is vertically asymptotic. It gets much, much faster the closer you get to Warp 10. For example: Warp 9 = 1,516 X the speed of light. Warp 9.9 = 6,555 X the speed of light. Warp 9.99 = 21,451 X the speed of light. Warp 9.999 = 68,096 X the speed of light. Warp 9.9999 = 215,431 X the speed of light. Warp 9.99999 = 681,288 X the speed of light.... Warp 9.9999999999999 = 6,830,841,584 X the speed of light. Warp 10 = Infinite speed. You get the idea. It's very similar to Lorentz scale/time dilation concerning near light speeds where time variable for travel diminishes, like its a vertical asymptote. For example: Travelling 1,000 light years is diliated for people in the space ship (not on Earth) to the following: 99% of the speed of light = 141 years. 99.9% of the speed of light = 44.7 years. 99.99% of the speed of light = 14.1 years. 99.999% of the speed of light = 4.47 years. 99.9999% of the speed of light = 1.41 years. 99.99999% of the speed of light = 0.447 years.... 99.99999999999% of the speed of light = 0.000447 years or 2.35099099 minutes. 100% speed of light = 0 time.

[@MaddRamm]

@@Jimbo8012 great summary, thanks!

[@rdgk1se3019]

If you create a "Transwarp" scale, then you will also need a "Slipstream" scale.

[@The_Lucent_Archangel]

They could probably be interchangeable or at least have a bit of overlap. Seven even stated that the Slipstream Drive was very similar to Borg Transwarp.

[@Marcus51090]

@@The_Lucent_Archangel it might even be exactly the same thing just different names.

[@Corbomite_Meatballs]

STO sort of does this as factors of the various drives themselves.

[@ashtiboy]

basically how it goes splipsteam speed is scaled by transwarp speeds! also transwarp one is like warp 14! transwarp 10 is like warp 20! transawarp 12 is warp 24! so basically high transwarp is like double to triple the speed bescue the slipstream drive allows the warp core drive to go alot faster without straining the warp core feld and ships structure by marking the feld far more warp subspace dynamic efficiency! like how a supersonic aircraft can go faster than a subsonic aircraft but with warp fields! but the slipstream warp core addon devise tends to be limited by how much the warp core can handle massive power output before it needs to cool back down! aslo slipstream is also similar to transwarp in being double to triple the usual warp speed but the only difference is transwarp can be a lot faster than slipstream with the the needed infrastructure! but slipstream can go anywhere without needing to make transwarp gates and what not! but the beta canon of the scale of transwarp and slipstream use the same transwarp speed measurements according the beta canon star trek online lore! so that's your answer or looking for splisteam just uses transwarp scale in star trek beta canon in star trek online! so starfleet just uses the transwarp speed scale to measure how fast your going with the slipstream drive to make thing a bit easy to understand!

[@dustinherk8124]

@@Marcus51090 no sorry slip stream travel is still slower than say a borg transwarp conduit. slip stream also seems hamstringed by the profile of the ship, where transwarp does not. Most of the evidence lies in Voyager, when they talk about using a borg transwarp coil, the slip stream episodes, (either the future harry kim one, or the alien revenge episode using slip stream) in both cases, slip stream travel didnt yield as high of a travel speed as the borg transwarp conduits, or using the lesser (and stolen) transwarp coil for travel beyond warp speed. in both cases, the outcome was greater than slip stream travel.

[@midniteoyl8913]

The deflector shield being needed for warp speeds seems off, even if writers and what not say different. At warp, the ship is in a warp bubble and space is moving around that bubble. The ship is in effect stationary. There is no need to 'deflect' particles anymore. Now, at 25% the speed of light while in impulse on the other hand...

[@marvelboy74]

And if the deflector beams extend outside the bubble, there is a whole other problem there.

[@adamlytle2615]

Yeah, exactly. Maybe there's some small but non-zero chance of objects somehow slipping through the folded space into the warp bubble, at which point it could still be travelling at some high velocity relative to the ship.

[@Helbore]

Its probable that the warp field only bends spacetime and does not react the same to incoming matter or energy. If it did, then ships at warp would be invulnerable to attack. We've also seen the Enterprise-D separate its saucer at warp and the saucer can escape the bubble and drop to sublight. Trying to think about it from a theoretical perspective, it may be because any object with mass (even a dust particle) warps spacetime. So the warp drive is quite happy warping a vacuum around it, but as soon as an object with mass intersects the warp field and you are in for a shitstorm of problems!

[@janreznak881]

This. The deflector is used to push stuff out of the way while travelling at sublight speeds, ie "in normal space". In warp, by the every nature of the bubble, NOTHING gets in - not even light. It's one of the problems of IRL warp drive is you can't see where you're going. ST "solves" this with the use of subspace sensors. PS Whilst your warp bubble might be impervious to space dust, running into a planet or star at warp will give you a very bad day.

[@WobblesandBean]

Well not really, we don't know if that's true because we don't have warp drive. So for all you know, it is very much needed.

[@aerodroo]

Ric deserves an honorary degree in squiffy physics.

[@johnbockelie3899]

As long as there's dilithium, there will be warp drive.

[@billphillips5821]

Quantum squiffy physics.

[@goldenknight578]

I think Picard said it best when he was talking to his tailor: "Make it sew."

[@A._is_for]

And timey whimey stuff

[@mistermaumau]

Would dilithium help with my dipolar disorder?

[@THATGuy5654]

This whole "name New warp factors after milestone speeds and warp 9.999... thing just has me imagining the Romulans or someone telling the Federation, "Are you still using the space Imperial system? Why are you the only people not using space metric?"

[@curtisconley9665]

metrics suck and are innaccurate as compared to traditional measurements.

[@cmelton6796]

@@curtisconley9665 Hold my kellicams

[@deusexaethera]

@@curtisconley9665: You cannot possibly be that stupid. Metric units only "suck" when measuring things that were constructed using English units.

[@deusexaethera]

We already have a perfectly serviceable "warp" scale -- it's called "multiples of _c"._ It's what Star Trek and other space sci-fi should've been using all along.

[@dustinherk8124]

@@deusexaethera the tos era of warp scaling was (x)^3 then TNG came and the warp scaling was changed too (x)^(10/3) still using a base 10 numerical system. Warp 5 in TOS was 125c, in TNG it is 213.75c. the next step would be to shift to a hexedecimal numerical system, that incorporates "0" and goes to "15" but still maintain an infinite velocity threshold cap as we approach warp 15. (this would also explain how Captain Crusher ordered her ship to retreat at warp 13 in the series finale of TNG)

[@The_Lucent_Archangel]

For all its flaws, let's bear in mind that despite Paris' assertion that turning while at warp is not advisable engagements occurred at warp speeds pretty routinely in the TOS era. From a military standpoint, that is an enormous advantage if you're engaging an enemy without the same capability to strafe and fire weapons while moving above light speed. It's also a real testament to how advanced Starfleet/Klingon/Romulan targeting computers are to be able to track and lock a firing solution at superluminal velocities and the extreme ranges seen in the older programs. From the more military standpoint, this is actually something that has gone unsung since the Original Series.

[@DrewLSsix]

Yet it's also canon that you can't shoot something if you can't see it with your eyes..... in Balance of Terror the Enterprise can track the enemy, it knows the enemies position speed and headding well enough to mimic its flight perfectly and appear as a sensor shadow. All this implies the ability to place a torpedo or a pair of phaser beams in the space the enemy currently occupies, but they can't do it... because it's invisible to human eyes.

[@The_Lucent_Archangel]

@@DrewLSsix That was far more for narrative reasons than anything else, since that episode was meant to be an adaptation of "The Enemy Below". Submarine combat is very much like that, which is why there are so few examples of an actual exchange of fire resulting in one sub sinking another. That episode also had the phasers acting very inconsistently to how they did before or since, behaving more like depth charges than particle beams or bolts. Kind of a bad example all around to use that episode as a guide to how space combat takes place in Trek. Especially when in Star Trek VI (with the film era being at most a decade and a half to two after TOS), the Enterprise-A was able to blast a prototype Bird of Prey out of her cloak by locking onto its engine emissions. Around a century after that, the Enterprise-E was able to triangulate shield impacts from randomly fired weapon discharges to strike the Scimitar even though her cloak was "perfect". In the intervening years, Starfleet devised more powerful sensors and methods for detecting cloaked ships. I used to say when it came to "Balance of Terror" that the Federation was not aware of cloaking technology and that my head canon was that as such, their targeting sensors weren't refined and attuned to hit such a target without visual tracking. Or that the cloak had a refractory effect of some kind that screwed with getting a solid lock. Then Enterprise came along with Archer and co. running into the Suliban with their cloaks and even having a Romulan ship decloak in front of them in that minefield. And the less is said about Discovery with their "radical Klingons had cloak even before that TOS episode where the Klingons and Romulans apparently exchanged tech" and the ridiculous "sonar in space" nonsense, the better. Point being, it never made sense even in the TOS era that they couldn't accurately hit the Romulans given all the data they had from a technical standpoint. Considering that they demonstrated time and again the ability to engage targets at warp and from distances in space where visual tracking would be utterly useless, the cat-and-mouse dynamic of that episode was 100% plot convenience.

[@BoisegangGaming]

It could also just be that combat in Star trek is written by people who don't really know (or seem to care, which is totally fine) what types of space combat would be applicable in Star trek. Combat in sci-fi is rarely consistent, and Star Trek even more so; its episodic nature and requirement to make deadlines doesn't exactly mean there's enough time to get stuff into a defined style beyond visual. Also, most Hollywood battles have consisted of the two fleets or armies or whatever just charging at each other because it looks more impressive, because that's what matters most to a casual audience. Compare space combat from the Expanse, which has consistent guidelines and is very small-scale to stuff from DS9 or other trek battles where the VFX house just did whatever they wanted to because they had to get it done on time.

[@markfergerson2145]

@@BoisegangGaming Compare also against BSG2 in which the shakeycam would have to sweep across he battle space to see both the Battlestar and Basestar involved. That's more realistic... okay, less unrealistic... than most space battles depicted on any size screen in which all combatants are easily visible- in other words, too damned close to each other.

[@markfergerson2145]

@@The_Lucent_Archangel That was later redacted to being able to hit another ship (with torpedoes and phasers/disruptors) while at the same warp factor.

[@luminaire4946]

in ToS warp factor was easily quantified. The speed (c) was equal to warp factor cubed. SO warp 14.1 (the fastest the enterprise achieved in tos) was equal to 2803c

[@kenwshmt]

make the elite dangerous proxima centauri run and respond. ill wait, and you will too.

[@stevebruns1833]

That was never official in the TOS era...but should have been adopted for TNG. Which sounds more impressive: Warp 9.997 or Warp 25?

[@luminaire4946]

@@stevebruns1833 Actually I believe there was an interview with Gene where he stated that was the scale they used. Can't get much more official than that.

[@Afterburner215]

@@kenwshmt maximum supercruise speed in elite dangerous is equivalent to around Warp 9.65, so I think in Star Trek they're probably not arbitrarily limited to warping directly to the host star and only the host star.

[@stephendkissel5722]

When the WARP Speed Chart started I remembered the old chart in the Star Trek book I have/had - it showed WARP speed was cubed of the warp number times the speed of light. GOOD CALL Luminaire!!!

[@sarahscott5305]

Warp drive speeds are so darn inconsistent. Voyager can fly at 22,000c Enterprise D can fly at 9,000c Enterprise A can fly at 1,200,000c They're as blindingly fast and cripplingly slow as the plot demands.

[@svenmartin840]

No wonder it takes the Federation Ships to 34 years to travel from Earth to the other side of Milky Way. While the Space Battleship Yamato and Andromeda of Earth Defense Forces. Use the wave motion engine. That makes Star Wars and Trek look tame. If the Enterprise and Starfleet was equipped with the wave motion engine. Travel would be much faster. And the wave motion gun. Would deadlier for the Klingons and Romulans and Borg.

[@milliondollarmistake]

That's because Star Trek's Subspace is actually just the Warp from 40k

[@billphillips5821]

Take it from Mrs. Scott (or do they call you "Scotty")😁🖖🏼

[@sarahscott5305]

@@billphillips5821 my nickname at work is Monty (after Mr Scott 😆)

[@jacara1981]

@@svenmartin840 One of the fastest nonfolding or instant space drives is the Daedalus Hyperdrive from Star Gate. It goes from the Milkyway to Pegasus (a distance of 3 million light years) in 18 days.

[@shinyagumon7015]

If you're a sufficiently advanced society then the Laws of Physics become more of a suggestion.

[@yimingwang8037]

oh no XD

[@DoctorWhom]

Lisa! in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!

[@sleepycritical6950]

It's more like guidelines anyway...wait wrong series sorry...

[@johnfoltz8183]

And you better test drive your rebuilt warp drive beforehand so you won't accidentally create an artificial, shortlived wormhole!

[@yimingwang8037]

@@johnfoltz8183 oh no

[@theodoremccarthy4438]

Don't forget that as of the TNG technical manual Warp factor integers represented optimal points in a power utilization curve, so maintaining a drive at Warp 4 was less energy intensive than maintaining it at warp 3.9. This implies that Tom Paris' Warp 10 flight simply achieved new energy threshold. He was not actually moving at infinite speed. This explains why his shuttle was simply a good distance ahead of Voyager when it dropped out of warp, instead of coming to a halt at a random point in the universe. From this we can conclude the TNG Warp scale was based on flawed theories, with the posited infinite velocity of Warp 10 being a math error. Of course, we already knew that Star Fleet's understanding of Warp was incomplete based on the Traveler's effects in the TNG episode "Where No One Has Gone Before". All of which implies that another revision to the Warp scale, introducing factors above Warp 10, would not be out of line. However, having just re-watched VOY:Threshold when Paris' returned from his first flight his shuttle was described as "emerging from subspace". This implies that, at least using the technology in question, a subspace field at Warp factor 10 pushes a ship out of normal space-time entirely. (In addition to turning the crew into Salamanders. FTR: "Here lies Tom Paris, Beloved Mutant" is one of the funniest lines in Trek)

[@jackeisenhauer]

I still have that book

[@banshee6k]

And I thought I was a nerd.

[@theodoremccarthy4438]

@@banshee6k there are many levels of nerddom 😁

[@pepe6666]

good info. cheers

[@sailordolly]

I read the Warp 10 barrier thing as being analogous to the Warp 1 barrier in that it lies on the far side of an apparent energy asymptote--simply trying to accelerate past it via conventional means will result in consuming ever-more energy as you get closer, so you have to find a way to bypass it with a new type of warp field. Going by the TNG technical manual explanation, with the energy required to reach each "warp plateau" being higher than the energy needed to maintain it, the energy requirement for reaching the 11th plateau (i.e. exceeding Warp 10.0) via normal warp drive designs is unreachably high (i.e. would cost more antimatter fuel than a ship could plausibly carry, or would need some even more potent power source). Basically, it may as well be infinite unless you are a Q or can put a literal supernova into your warp core.

[@mistermaumau]

Subspace isn't a linear progression of point A to point B. It's more a wibbly wobbly ball of quasi-spacetime lower dimensional, stuff.

[@ozelhassan8576]

Nice one. I Love Doctor Who too.

[@treasurehunter3744]

That sentence got away from you there.

[@robbrandhoff3]

I could be wrong but the table used to show how long what distance would take to cover at what speed seems to have a mistake in it. If "across federation" at warp one would be 100,000 years, that would be the entire galaxy.

[@schachsommer12]

4:44 The distance earth - moon or generally within a planetary system, solar system or star system makes no sense at warp speeds, unless I want to destroy the system. o_O

[@robertstoneking7916]

@@schachsommer12 I remember something about a starship using warp close to a planet wrecking the drive and the ship.

[@deusexaethera]

@@schachsommer12: You can still describe the amount of time required to traverse an equivalent distance. Saying "earth-to-moon" is more intuitive for people than saying "400,000km".

[@schachsommer12]

@@robertstoneking7916 I remember in DS9 a Klingon spaceship that used its warp drive near a sun and destroyed two other ships; if this had been done in the vicinity of an earth-like planet, at least its atmosphere would have been destroyed. ^^

[@schachsommer12]

@@deusexaethera Use warp drive because of a Earth-Moon distance? It takes longer to start up than the entire flight. XD

[@mastasolo]

If you truly are bending the space around you, there is no need for a deflector dish during warp as said debris would follow the bubble's curve.

[@DoremiFasolatido1979]

No it wouldn't. It would spiral in the same way as it would falling into a singularity. Upon crossing the boundary of the field, it would be reduced to subatomic particles and stream into the interior of the warp bubble at relativistic speeds, fatally irradiating the crew. Bits of dust and whatnot wouldn't survive passage intact, and therefore not actually physically hit the ship, but the resulting radiation from even a little dust and gas would be deadly.

[@jacara1981]

The deflector is for for sublight speed movement. So a ship traveling at warp isn't actually moving faster than light, space is, the ship itself is traveling some high % of light speed. When a spec of dust enters the warp field it is still traveling at whatever speeds it had before but the fabric of space has compressed. So the ship would impact the dust at what speed it was traveling, lets say 50% light speed. At that speed the dust would do a massive amount of damage, so the deflector moves the dust (or even asteroids) away from the ships path. This movement of the dust appearing to quickly speed toward the ship and then around and away is what we see streaking by the ship while at warp, they aren't starts flying by as when you travel at warp you can't see any light from anything outside the warpfield due to relativity.

[@DrewLSsix]

@@DoremiFasolatido1979 you are literally making shit up.... these things don't exist so you can't say how they work.

[@bdpickett]

@@DrewLSsix I mean, that's generally what one does with wholly fictional things, isn't it? Invent a logic by which it may or may not work to build investment in the idea.

[@JDWonders]

@@jacara1981 I wonder if it would be possible for ST ships to make "space shotguns" by flying around asteroid fields and scooping up a bunch of miniature asteroids using the tractor beam. Then they could place those miniature asteroids in front of the ship and run at them with both the impulse engines and deflector dish at full power. Probably useless aganst any ship with shields, but it could be disastrous if used against a space station or planet with insufficient shielding.

[@christopherg2347]

Your idea of "Transwarp Level" reminds me of the Flightlevel. After a certain height (cutoff varries by country), pilots stop giving heigh in feet and start giving it in "flightlevel" - which is really just the first two digits of the height in feet. I guess later on they kinda ignore the whole "Warp 10 = infinite speed". In "These are the Voyages" future timeline they had grown tired of saying "9.999" and started just talking about Warp 13.

[@kaitlyn__L]

I’ve had ideas that they gave up on the infinity thing and just redefined warp 9.9 to 10, 9.99 to 11, 9.999 to 12, etc. Every extra decimal 9 is one whole step up, and therefore 9.1 is.. 9.1. 9.91 would be 10.1, 9.991 to 11.1, and so forth. 9.95 becomes 10.5. Etc.

[@Helbore]

I take it you mean "All Good Things..." and not "These are the Voyages," as that's the only place I remember them referring to a warp 13 in the TNG+ era. It does make sense that they would redefine the scale when warp speeds got too high. Who wants to remember the difference between warp 9.999 and 9.9999 when saying warp 11 or warp 12 is easier!

[@AMPMASTER10]

Or they just retgone threshold.

[@christopherg2347]

@@kaitlyn__L That was my idea as well. Every decimal 9 is another 11+ level.

[@christopherg2347]

@@Helbore Oh yeah, all good things.

[@amazedsatsuma]

0:09 My vote goes to walking as the next form of travel in Trek you cover:P

[@4rq775]

Instead of warp propultion, ships will grapple and launch themselves off planets!1!!

[@2490debrick]

The Iconians did - Must have stolen the idea from The Ancients ;-)

[@jm823]

Just like the Doctor has a PhD in timey-wimey theory, so Ric has a PhD in squiffy physics. LLAP 🖖

[@jimschuler8830]

1:55 What a strange pronunciation of "Amazing Stories:" "The force created in the immediate vicinity of the ship a warp in space - a moving warp, which could with fair accuracy be called a ripple in the fabric of space. The ship rode this moving warp or ripple as a surf board rides the moving crest of a wave. The intensity of the force controlled the speed of the warp up to a certain limit." - The Flight of the Starling, 1948

[@neilprice513]

Heard a theory about Warp 10 that makes a lot of sense to me. The closer to warp 10 you get the more unstable space/time around and inside the ship becomes. Most of the time at high warp a ships crew wont be effected, but when you get closer to true warp 10 reality for the crew breaks down. This is what happened to Tom Paris. So basically it's impossible to go to warp 10 without some way to stabilise it's reality warping effects. The Borg found a workaround though at took normal space time out of the picture for Transwarp and can get far closer to true Warp 10 this way, but still can't break it.

[@user-vn7ce5ig1z]

Tom didn't end up a lizard because of reality breaking down, he essentially time-traveled and ended up super-evolving to what the show thinks humans will eventually become after a million years. (It's sort-of like _Futurama's_ series finale, but Tom was affected by the passage of time.)

[@werebison]

I'm sure there is something that could be done with engineering notation to simplify those 9.999999s.... like, 9e-10 or something, as a sort of hand wavey way of saying that you have 10 decimal places before you run out of 9s? Then you could just declare that the transwarp number was the absolute value of the second numeral. "Oh ya, we get up to T10. Or, warp 9.9999999999 if you're nasty."

[@deusexaethera]

Or just measure warp speeds in multiples of _c_ like a sane person would do.

[@RikkiCattermole]

Or use negatives, so warp factor negative 1 is the second-fastest speed the ship can handle.

[@chasduran4160]

Let's not forget that in the Star Trek book "Federation" the epilogue mentions the quest for exploration leaving our home galaxy for another at sidewarp 55.

[@rvaughan74]

Then they slowed down to Transwarp, and then barely crawled along at Warp to interact with a probe that might allow them to explore other universes.

[@hadorstapa]

As JMS said of speeds in Babylon 5: vessels travel at the speed of plot. There’s a nice little in-universe insight in the alternate future of TNG’s finale All Good Things. Here, the future Riker talks of ‘warp 13’ which must indicate a re-scaling of warp factors. There’s also an entry in the TNG technical manual that states the progression of warp factors in that era is a consistent logarithmic scale.

[@Cybrspidr]

Figuring warp speed (aside from whatever the plot needs it to be) is absurdly simple. It's the warp number cubed. Ie: wf 1 = 1x1x1=1 wf 2 = 2x2x2=8 wf 3 = 3x3x3=27 And so on. This was explained to me by a panel of experts at a Star Trek convention back in the '70s, and also appears in the Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph. 😊

[@igorivanov299]

The Warp core on Enterprise D was my personal favorite.

[@ftx453]

Voyager

For warp factors above 9.9, I found about 15 years ago a warp formula that works pretty well. warp speed = warp factor ^ exponent; exponent = (n² + n + 33) / 10 n = number of digit 9 in the decimal places of the decimal number directly after the decimal point. Mathematically, n can be calculated with n = -log (10 - warp factor) eg: 10 - 9.99 = 0.01 -> log (0.01) = - 2 -> n = 2 Warp factor 9.9 -> n = 1 -> exponent = 3.5 -> 9.9^3.5 ~ 3053c Warp factor 9.99 -> n = 2 -> exponent = 3.9 -> 9.99^3.9 ~ 7912c Warp factor 9.999 -> n = 3 -> exponent = 4.5 -> 9.999^4.5 ~ 31609c Warp factor 9.9999 -> n = 4 -> exponent = 5.3 -> 9.9999^5.3 ~ 199516c The intermediate values then only have to be interpolated using the upper and lower limit. For example, the maximum speed of the USS Voyager (warp factor 9.975) is about 6500 times the speed of light.

[@chrissonofpear1384]

Or, as I've seen it stated on assorted forums and supposed writer quotes, at 6669 times the speed of light, for the last figure, @ Markus Göpfert . But otherwise, pretty darn close.

[@deianj]

in a perfect world, the Star Trek writers would have the math skills of Simpsons writers.

[@thorin1045]

Elementary school level math would be perfectly enough to make most of the shows biggest stupidity to disappear. Quite likely they either failed even at that level, or strongly believed their audience would fail at that level, and so they could not use it.

[@Orion40000]

@@thorin1045 It's just a handwave for narrative purposes. If you're going to suspend belief for long enough to watch the show, you're probably going to have to suspend your knowledge of maths, non-Newtonian physics and biology as well. I just like it for what it is. I feel like this post hasn't been sufficiently contraversial, so I'll just add that Voyager was my favourite series.

[@thorin1045]

@@Orion40000 Soon most of the ST (before STD), yet still annoying every time, that the story needs complete disregard of any scientific knowledge. Voyager is probably the best of the later ones, but cannot compete with TOS, there the cringe turned into positive.

[@thewizzard3150]

in next generation they did.

[@undefined7141]

Nothing wrong with it since it is fiction.

[@mitthrawnuruodo7517]

The deflector is just for impulse, because a vessel doesn't move during warp.

[@rytramprophet843]

yes, and no. space moves around the ship. but it DOES move through space. imagind a tube of toothpaste. you squeeze behind the paste thus forcing it out. this is the basic principle of warp drive. the paste still moves, just like the ship does.

[@joda7697]

Well it doesn't move relative to the warp bubble, but the bubble moves relative to the rest of spacetime.

[@emilescurel]

Wow this is such a fantastic video, good job job Rick this was really interesting. Keep it up man!

[@GaryGoRound-to7ld]

that episode of Voyager with Warp 10 is so STTTUUPPIIIDDDDD

[@KenoshiAkai]

Back in TOS the warp speed scale was wildly inconsistent. Yes, they gave an "official" formula of Warp Factor Cubed multiplied by the speed of light to give the ship's speed, but that way a ship moving at Warp Ten would be only moving at a thousand times the speed of light. And there were episodes in which the Enterprise was clearly traveling faster than that. In fan communities this was explained by having a variable factor called "psi" by which the speed was multiplied, reflecting localized bending of spacetime by stellar bodies, gas, and the like. So they could easily write around having a hard number associated with a warp factor. So in that case Warp Factors were less of a hard measurement of velocity than a sort of shifting of gears of the stardrive to use its energy more efficiently. Then Roddenberry came along in TNG and decided that warp travel had to be slow since he wanted the Federation to only have explored a small percentage of the galaxy, so the scale was limited to Warp 10 and suddenly it took decades to cross the galaxy. Really a short-sighted solution for wanting to still have a frontier to explore, given that just because you can cross the galaxy in a few weeks doesn't mean that you aren't rushing past billions of unexplored star systems in the process. Then they had to write around that restriction by having all of these silly variant drives that the Federation could never adopt because they didn't have enough of the unobtanium of the week. And that's not even getting into that whole stupid business about warp travel damaging subspace because a writer wanted to write a ham-fisted issue-of-the-week allegory about global warming. That idea was pretty quickly dropped for a reason. Really, they should have kept Transwarp as a concept introduced in Star Trek III and allowed starships to zap around the galaxy or between other galaxies but had restrictions of just where exactly you could enter or leave that state.

[@raven4k998]

how fast is warp 9.999999?🤣

[@KenoshiAkai]

@@raven4k998 Really friggin' fast?

[@raven4k998]

@@KenoshiAkai yeah but how fast is that lol that is why it should have kept going each warp factor is double the previous not stopping at 10 cause otherwise it gets crazy with so many 9's to make your head spin

[@KenoshiAkai]

@@raven4k998 I'm sure someone has a chart somewhere to calculate such things. I have no idea. The revised TNG warp scale is weird.

[@NotMyRealName6]

Warp drives move at the speed of plot. Just, with a little more technobabble than your typical FTL system as to how fast that is.

[@raven4k998]

Yeppers that is so true

[@tzor]

The whole "TOS" warp scale (which I think is better described as the Franz Joseph warp scale because the first details came out with the technical manual PG TO:02:06:20) and the Rodenberry "Let's not go beyond 10" TNG scale in one sense mimics the difference between a "progressive" scale system and a "limiting" scale system. I find the evolution of "warp drive" fascinating, especially the attempts to retrofit later changes to earlier canon. The first evolution is the "warp core." If you look at TOS the crystals were just a thing that was inserted to a device in main engineering. The vertical warp core was an invention of the movie. Likewise the nacelles were tubes (except for Klingons) until TMP where they started to look like flat Klingon designs and then became anything but tubes in the TNG+ era (the DNG era having nacelles that looked a lot like "Devil Dogs"). I have always insisted that the "trans warp" (let's face it, that literally means "beyond warp") was an absolute success and one of the reasons why the TNG scale was designed. (Fun fact no one really thinks of, "trans" technically means "across" which may mean that the system allowed for any warp speed and not just "optimal" integer warp numbers. Honestly even with the cubic speeds, it doesn't take much of a factor above an integer to overtake a warp of exactly an integer. 8 cubed, for example is 512, 8.5 cubed is 614 or 20% faster.)

[@xavariusquest4603]

There is a lot of confusion here. Alcubierre first made public his proposal (positing) of a working "warp drive" in 1994...the same year that TNG finished. So, nothing of Alcubierres' proposed design was ever incorporated into ST. TNG fleshed out canon warp drive on its own. Based upon that, Alcubierre incorporated the ST concept into a postulated design. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive

[@CertifiablyIngame]

I mean to say that Star Trek continued after 1994 though, and now borrows from new scientific theories in order to stay relevant.

[@xavariusquest4603]

@@CertifiablyIngame I love your channel. You put a lot of heart and soul into it. You have been at least willing to broach topics regarding how "interestingly" the IPs story has become given that the contractual mandate to do so is still in effect. But...and you knew there would be a but...the physics side of these shows has been thrown out the window. Of all the reasons available, I can pick the two that make scientists go completely nuts; the Mycelial Network, and The Burn. Neither has any reasonable rationale, neither is even vaguely supportable by physics, neither is consistent with the "advanced" understanding of science as portrayed by any previous canon, nor is their supposed underlying science consistently applied within the shows. As one simple example, the first human warp flight was that of the Phoenix. The Phoenix did not have access to dilithium as dilithium is not found on Earth. Dilithium acts to modulate the energy flow from the matter-antimatter reactors. Fine. In the Phoenix, it was not necessary because the ship, by comparison to anything to follow, is very low power warp 1 vessel. Fine. It is sort of like saying you need to have computer controls for your gas powered vehicle to modulate the energy flow to increase fuel efficiency. But you're not going to do that for your gas powered push mower or snow blower. You turn the key, start it up, rev that engine to max and head on out. Fine. We make distinctions between sophisticated and simple applications of a basic tech, But that's the problem with this story arc. 900 years before The Burn, there existed a warp capable vessel that did not require dilithium. So, what's the problem? They couldn't create a new car from the lawnmower? Really? I won't get into the contractual madness that led to the mycelial network.

[@Warwolf1]

Hey. Longtime viewer, first time poster. I just want to point out that prior to that episode of Voyager, there's also the TNG series finale "All Good Things" which has a latter day Enterprise (listed as the Enterprise D 2 on the hull in the comic adaptation) that has three nacelles, and could reach at /least/ Warp THIRTEEN, as ordered by then-ADMIRAL Riker, to whom the ship appears to have been assigned to. This seems to be indicating that either the scale had changed again, or else something happened that enabled them to hit and beat the Warp 10 barrier in a different way without creating effective teleportation in that timeline. I was wondering why you didn't happen to bring that episode up in this video. Is it something you had planned for another video or was its nature as a one-off thing just too little of a thing to be dealt with seeing as that timeline is apparently no longer a thing?

[@megatronjenkins2473]

I've just added the word 'squiffy' to my lexicon and upvoted you for it, sir!

[@roy1701d]

I've always assumed that interplanetary or interstellar particulates are pushed around a warp bubble, meaning that deflectors are primarily associated with impulse speeds. 🙂🖖

[@christopherg2347]

In the "best of both worlds, part 2" the Enterprise D could not go to warp, due to burning out the Navigational deflector. Pretty sure there were other instances as well.

[@kamenriderblade2099]

The Navigational Deflectors are there for both IMO FTL & STL travel. Particles traveling at significant fraction speed of light are very dangerous and highly energetic. I wouldn't want my hull to be touching those particles.

[@goldenknight578]

They are also supposed to be "sliding" into some part of sub-space, and look at how many things they've discovered there.

[@DrewLSsix]

@@christopherg2347 you can't always trust dialog, the D had a backup deflector also, as well as Voyager. While other ships had no visible deflector at all.

[@jacara1981]

The deflector is for for sublight speed movement. So a ship traveling at warp isn't actually moving faster than light, space is, the ship itself is traveling some high % of light speed. When a spec of dust enters the warp field it is still traveling at whatever speeds it had before but the fabric of space has compressed. So the ship would impact the dust at what speed it was traveling, lets say 50% light speed. At that speed the dust would do a massive amount of damage, so the deflector moves the dust (or even asteroids) away from the ships path. This movement of the dust appearing to quickly speed toward the ship and then around and away is what we see streaking by the ship while at warp, they aren't starts flying by as when you travel at warp you can't see any light from anything outside the warpfield due to relativity.

[@FriendlyNeighborhoodNitpicker]

I can’t believe you got through this whole video without any reference to negative mass. Negative mass is one of the coolest things ever that doesn’t actually exist, but would be required for any of the real world warp theories to work. It is literally the largest factor that’s keeping us from doing it.

[@kairon156]

they should have called it warp factor X like Planet X being a vague out there limit or thing we don't yet know about. One thing I don't get about the damage to subspace by warp drives is humans are fairly new so older races like the Klingons should have their space ruined by it... Or was it somehow Starfleet's design causing damage?

[@jonathonchristopher5554]

I think it's the higher speeds themselves, which is why they impose a speed limit rather than an outright ban on unnecessary warp travel. I'm guessing that the scientific cooperation of the Federation's best and brightest pushed warp speed faster by far than some of the older civilizations had achieved even with a big head start. I'm sure there are counter examples, but the federation has a /ton/ of warp travel going on, so they might be doing way more damage than a single speedy culture.

[@TiberiusX]

The civilization that had the subspace damage was outside or on the edge of federation space, I believe. Humans haven't detected subspace damage in our region, yet.

[@kairon156]

@tiberius & @jonathon Christopher Maybe sense that region was near a heavily used transport area multiple kinds of warp engines is what was causing damage as well as the fast speeds?

[@francisdhomer5910]

Ahead warp X Mr Sulu seta course for planet X and I want to arrive there at X o clock and no speeding past comet X otherwise the Alien X will shoot us with their X blombs when we pass their X belt. Sounds silly but have you paid attention to some of the writing in TVshows?

[@kairon156]

@@francisdhomer5910 haha, Not too closely but I am picking up what your putting down.

[@patricktilton5377]

When they published STAR TREK MAPS back in 1980, they included a booklet titled INTRODUCTION TO NAVIGATION, in which they had to make sense of only the information in TOS, TAS, and the 1st movie. To do so, they adjusted the standard warp equation of V = WF^3 x c (where V = the velocity of the starship, WF is the Warp Factor, ^3 represents "to the 3rd power" i.e. CUBED, and 'c' is the speed of light in a vacuum) in order to make sense of onscreen details, and this involved adding what they called the "Cochrane factor" represented by the Greek letter chi [χ] : the Cochrane factor is a number that fluctuates depending on the density of the interstellar medium -- i.e. how much Mass per unit Volume -- and its value reduces to '1' in a pure vacuum, yet can climb as high as 1,292.7238 in the average parts of the Galaxy between the Core and the surrounding Galactic Barrier. In the denser regions of the Core, χ is even higher than 1,292.7238 (though we aren't told exactly how much higher that may be), and in the intergalactic medium between the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy, the average value of χ is about 3. This can be calculated based on the distance between the two galaxies (i.e. 2.537 million lightyears), the Warp Factor 14 that the Kelvans were able to boost the Enterprise's engines to achieve, and the expected travel-time of about 300 years: 14 cubed is 2,744; 2,537,000 LY divided by 2,744 equals 924.5626822, and dividing that by 300 gives us χ = 3.081875607. If the intergalactic medium between the two galaxies were the same density as the average inside the navigable parts of the Milky Way -- where χ = 1.292.7238 -- then it would only have taken the Enterprise, going at Warp Factor 14, 0.715205121 years to get to Andromeda, or 261 days 5 hours 21 minutes 33.7 seconds. In the TAS episode "The Counter-Clock Incident" an alien vessel is clocked at the speed of Warp Factor 36, which would be 46,656 times the speed of light times χ = 60,313,321.61 x c -- over 60 million times the speed of light. Evidently, those aliens have warp tech that's better than that of the Kelvans, not to mention Star Fleet. At WF 36, it would take those aliens about 2.27 seconds to zip from our Solar System to Alpha Centauri, about 4.34 LY away! All this talk about STTNG warp factors having a scale that is limited to a top (instantaneous) speed of WF 10 becomes confused when it is remembered that a velocity of WF 13 is mentioned in the final episode of TNG, "All Good Things..." -- and it should be mentioned that when they wrote the 'bible' writer's guide for the show, they had changed the original equation (minus the Cochrane factor χ) so that it was lightspeed times the Warp Factor to the 5th power, rather than the 3rd power. Thus, writers for TNG using that 'bible' writer's guide would have figured Warp 13 to have been 13^5 x c = 371,293 x c. If they were to add the Cochrane factor (which averages to 1,292.7238 within the Galaxy outside the Core regions), then it would increase to 479,979,297.9 x c, almost 480 million times lightspeed. It's too bad they didn't just stick to the equation developed by the writers of STAR TREK MAPS and its booklet, which worked for all the TOS and TAS information well enough. If they needed their galaxy Class vessels to be able to go faster than Kirk-era starships, all they had to do was give 'em a higher Warp Factor number. That alien vessel in TAS could go Warp 36, so you'd think Enterprise-D could've been given the ability to go as fast as, say, Warp 25 or so = 15,625 x c x χ = 20,198,809.38 x c = just over 20 million times lightspeed, about 11.775 parsecs per minute within the galaxy. Assuming the Galaxy has a diameter of 100,000 LY, and a circumference of 96,320.6 parsecs, then at that speed they could fly around the Galaxy's circumferential circle in 8,180 minutes, or 136.3348887 hours or 5.68 days! Needless to say, a Picard-era starship shouldn't have any problems getting back to the UFP from the other side of the Galaxy -- as the show STAR TREK VOYAGER would have us believe, since the Enterprise made it to the galactic Core in the TAS episode "The Magicks of Megas-Tu" -- as well as in the movie "STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER" -- and that was about 78 years earlier, in the Kirk-era.

[@Tallacus]

You didn't mention those inertia dampeners that keeps FTL travel so smooth and wouldn't turn to the crew into liquid. Thanks to shows like the Expanse I take that into account

[@mb2000]

I’m so glad you didn’t mention the folding nacelles of the Intrepid-class in relation to the damage to subspace thing! If only because in “Force of Nature”, the episode that establishes the subspace damage and the warp speed limit, Geordi is competing with the engineer of the USS Intrepid in warp efficiency. Given this is 2370 (one year before Voyager is launched) we can assume that this Intrepid is the Intrepid-class prototype. Therefore Starfleet had already built and launched the Intrepid before the subspace damage issue was discovered. So whatever the Voyager writers/producers might say, the folding nacelles can’t be a response to what happened in that episode and a way around the warp speed limit. Fortunately, no canon reason was ever given for the folding nacelles. And on the warp scale, I would think that there would be another recalibration of the scale in the late 24th century, hence the Warp 13 we saw in “All Good Things”, (yes it was a Q creation, but it was meant to be realistic) and as obviously happened by the end of the 23rd century too. Not so much that they’re going faster than the previous Warp 10, but they’ve expanded the scale to get more numbers in so they’re not going silly with the Warp 9.999999s.

[@lucky-segfault]

my head cannon to resolve the voyager contradiction is that before subspace was understood to take "damage", they knew it could have turbulence, and the moving nacelles were to help get higher speeds despite the turbulence. Then, once implemented, they noticed that the moving nacelles did less damage to subspace at high speeds, which the head engineer of the intrepid class ships promptly took credit for inventing a solution to the damage problem. later star ships were able to replicate the effect of the joints without actually having the joints by using more technobabble

[@kaitlyn__L]

With regard to no reason for the nacelles moving: in the episode with “take the cheese to sickbay” they mention disengaging the nacelle , uh, pivoters, in order to do their stationary warp burst superheating thing. So it’s not textual WHY they do it, but it is textual that it’s somehow necessary to actually go to warp on this design. My headcanon is just that that’s what gives the nacelles their line of sight to each other. When they’re up they poke above the shuttlebay just enough to match the Defiant, the Danube, Nebula, and all the shuttlecraft’s partially-obscured nacelles.

[@That80sGuy1972]

The problem with Warp Drive is not a problem with FTL itself but with scaling. In every fiction I inspired and sci-fi game I ran, I eventually introduced many aspects of FTL travel that the characters (both player and NPC) eventually abandoned the old scale to embrace were these. My warp factor scale. Lightspeed is Warp 0. 10x LS is Warp 1. Each warp factor is 10x above the previous. The Star Trek warp scale has yet to even reach Warp 9 on my scale. Stargates. Ever since Buck Rogers, I had stargates. Those space travel places almost instantly transport anything going through them to any place instantly, a true space fold. Space-Warp. Akin to Stargates but created by the ship's FTL drive. Spend the energy to get there, the fuel, and you get there pretty much instantly. Dive into Subspace/Hyperspace. Your ship creates a space rift and falls into it. It's locked into that spot for a certain amount of time and falls back into the place you were at when the time expires... unless you expend energy to displace where you fall back into space in a different location. This is also the low-key cloaking device of one of the empires of that universe, making it an inefficient version of that travel that can also use related technology to view connected space on the way in a slower way. I came up with that as a pre-teen speculating about the Romulans and how they fought the Enterprise in their first TOS connections. My teenage self sci-fi brained it into a "working" science fiction reality via the spirit of that episode was supposed to be about ship vs. submarine combat and how to make that a reality. I could go on, but you get the idea.

[@ezrazonable4992]

Star Trek has inspired so much real scientific innovation, it's really quite amazing 👏

[@Nimmy82MD]

5:00 Your warp table states that federation is 100.000 light years across. Why? That's the diameter of the entire milky way galaxy.

[@MarsStarcruiser]

LOL, maybe the federation will eventually become galactic😅

[@thhseeking]

The issue that I have with that "deflector dish" is that it has to deal with more than just "dust"... there are rogue planets and black holes out there. I always figured that in Warp you weren't in "this" Universe anyway, so objects in your path wouldn't matter. You also wouldn't be able to detect, say, a Romulan Warbird while in Warp. You'd be outrunning any sensor emissions from your own sensors.

[@qdllc]

I didn’t know the warp drive real world theory predated Star Trek.

[@daveh7720]

Alcubierre's theory was introduced in 1994, but Star Trek's use of "warp drive" began with the original series in the 1960s. (Although it wasn't a space warp theory at the time. In the episode "The Cage" Captain Pike is shown ordering the Enterprise to travel at "time warp factor seven.") Since then a number of science fiction universes have retconned Alcubierre's theory into their own FTL technology.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@daveh7720 although the writers called it time warp early on, Matt Jeffries has material from back then where he was briefed as the ship bending space somehow. And he said: well, it’s probably got a lot of power. Maybe atomic or something. It probably has radiation. So I’ll put the engine pods far away from the crew on these big sticks to protect them from whatever is capable of bending space. (Then keeping the warp core in the belly of the ship kind of threw that away.. but whatever that’s how fiction goes!)

[@barbedwire83]

Thank you for the awesome breakdown of our understanding (fictional or literal) of Warp Drive.

[@BennyLlama39]

Rick: "...The most common form of travel in the Star Trek universe. Aside from impulse... and walking, probably." Me: And shuttlecraft. : )

[@Timberwolf69]

Shuttlecraft is not exactly what I would call a velocity... 🤔

[@atomic_wait]

And horsecarts on the racistly Irish planet :p

[@MistedMind]

And Shuttle-craft move with which drives? Impulse or warp.

[@rvaughan74]

No Transporter?

[@mchrzestek]

Definately something is inconsitent in warp speeds. How can Starfleet effectively defend Federation space if it takes years to move from one edge of Federation space to another?

[@SkylerLinux]

The Warp 10 limit was one of the dumbest change the writers made. As that introduced the .99999999999999999999999 to make your new ship look and sound better.

[@Jimbo8012]

It's not dumb. It's designed to follow real science and very closely approximates the Lorentz scale/time dilation concerning near light speeds where time variable for travel diminishes, like its a vertical asymptote. For example: Travelling 1,000 light years is diliated for people within the space ship to the following but it still takes 1,000 years from everyone else's perspective: 99% of the speed of light = 141 years. 99.9% of the speed of light = 44.7 years. 99.99% of the speed of light = 14.1 years. 99.999% of the speed of light = 4.47 years. 99.9999% of the speed of light = 1.41 years. 99.99999% of the speed of light = 0.447 years.... 99.99999999999% of the speed of light = 0.000447 years or 2.35099099 minutes. 100% speed of light = 0 time.

[@bafumat]

I like that at the end he acknowledged the fact that sometimes, for narrative reasons... The vagueness of the writers is a good thing.

[@ogaduby]

5:25 Milky Way is 100,000 ly in diameter, no? so it would take light (warp 1) 100,000 years to cross it... how come it takes 100,000 years to cross Federation space at warp 1? Does Federation span through entire galaxy? Or is that 100,000 to visit/flyby every planet in the UFP? EDIT: or is it a typo? as in, you meant to put galaxy, not federation...

[@francisdhomer5910]

Dam speed traps

[@Skull-in-the-house]

Your idea of the Trans warp scale is good Now we can finally get that new series going :)

[@jamesevarts3]

didn't the ST TNG finale have the future enterprise going at warp 13?

[@kamenriderblade2099]

They updated the Warp Scale for that possible future timeline

[@dodecahedron1]

alternate timeline, they had a different warp scale

[@DrewLSsix]

@@dodecahedron1 or.... completely fictional timeline? Q was involved after all.

[@adamlytle2615]

I've thought that must have been a shorthand for the new type of scale rick was talking about in the video. So like a secondary scale that is more just short hand for various increments past 9.99,

[@chrissonofpear1384]

@@adamlytle2615 that is how ST: Online treats it, I believe...

[@nunyabisnass1141]

At 5:27, the chart puts warp 9.9 as taking 33 years to cross what i assume is federation territory. Even with communication far exceeding warp speeds, the time to travel that distance is already insanely prohibitive to establishing and maintaining meaningful relations, let alone being able to defend and manage. Kinda like if there was a house fire in a fire departments jurisdiction, it wouldnt make sense to claim and respomd to an area that takes weeks to travel to. Any fire in that region would destroy the house essentially before the brigade could even get out of the station.

[@dexterdextrow7248]

"Imposed a speed limit" and people followed the regulations? Well that's not realistic.

[@리주민]

No galactic troopers with flashy lights 🚔🚓🚔🚓🚔🚔🚔🚓🚔

[@robh7445]

I agree: "Warp is... as fast as the plot needs it to be." In Star Trek: Voyager, their journey home was supposedly 70 years over 70,000 light years, so their average speed 1,000 times the speed of light. This is far slower that the speeds shown in this video. If we go by the oft touted (warp factor)^4 calculation, Voyager would only have to maintain an average warp factor of only 6. If we fall back on (warp factor)^3, it would be warp 10-- which is beyond maximum warp. Warp (9.975)^3 = 992.6 x the speed of light, and seems much more plausible. But, then again the plot overrides math. lol.

[@Mercilessonion]

Spore Drive looks nice but is way less practical than warp drive or even wormhole travel imo

[@DrewLSsix]

....... how? It's instantaneous, can travel vast distances, can be used rapidly for dozens of small jumps making a ship almost impossible to hit. Most importantly it can be used in conjunction with other forms of propulsion.

[@Firepup740]

@@DrewLSsix remember what you need to use the damn thing though. Either a giant space tardigrade, or a genetically altered person, due to the fact that no computer no matter how advanced, could make the necessary calculations to navigate the mycelial network. One's dangerous, and one's illegal under Federation law.

[@lucky-segfault]

@@Firepup740 there's also the issue of that not making any sense whatsoever. holodecks canonically can make and destroy synthetic beings which have human equivalent intelligence, so just have a holo-person be the pilot i hope spore drives are effectively killed off in later serieses as they just break so much lore in exchange for something that takes away the ability to tell stories involving getting somewhere in a hurry also gene editing being not allowed in the federation sure does seem impossible to enforce. modern lab tech can already make custom dna strands in a few hours automatically, surely it has only gotten easier in the future. plus you could probably just transporter the edits into your cells so anyone with a ship can do whatever to themselves and just undo it when the feds are arround

[@TheSuperRatt]

@@lucky-segfault One problem with having a holo-person be the pilot: they'd have to be sapient, and now you've just made slavery an integral part of the drive's operation. Which to be fair, it already was with the tardigrade.

[@lucky-segfault]

@@TheSuperRatt true, but since you're creating them, you can set up their motivations to want to be a sporedrive pilot, which makes it technically not slavery. The federation continuing to use holodecks implys they are fine with doing stuff like this, as multiple times sapient holodecks peoples are destroyed and everyone's just like "ah bummer, our wish fulfilment fantasy broke". Like with voyagers crew and the whole town of Scottish people they made

[@castleanthrax1833]

Finally a completely credible and totally scientific video on KZbin.

[@sgt_s4und3r54]

OH BOY! YOu just used STD as the basis for how the crystals work. When in every episode it isn't how it worked nor the mechanics of it. The coils were always the point by which space/time was manipulated. The crystals were used to focus the energy into the system. I get that STD was the only show that really said anything deep about the crystals but in TOS they did state they were actually able to temporarily make the ship go to warp for a very short run using the fusion reactors meaning the crystals had no impact on subspace because they destroyed or missing. SO more proof that STD spreads it's tendrils of not following canon again. This is why the show is hated and why you can't reliably use it for source material.

[@TentaclePentacle]

exactly STD writers have no idea what they are talking about. But then again most trek fans don't know this little detail about dilithium crystals. In TNG ep: Peak Performance, they briefly touched upon how the dilithium crystal is used. it's a control crystal to regulate matter antimatter reactions. You don't really need it, but the matter antimatter reaction chamber is designed around using the crystal.

[@kamenriderblade2099]

Fusion can get you to Warp, but the amount of energy Fusion Reactors makes are several orders of magnitude below the power of a comparable sized Matter/Anti-Matter reactor. Ergo, it's more fuel efficient to use Matter/Anti-Matter reactors to generate Electro Plasma to power the Warp Coils inside the Warp Nacelles along with powering the rest of the vessel.

[@jacara1981]

@@TentaclePentacle Thats correct, the crystalls don't react with Antimatter due to the Subspace properties. In a normal matter/antimatter reaction the energy spreads in every direction in form of a increasing wave. The crystals allow it to be focused into a beam, and from there into the EPS system to feed power to systems including the necells. Without the crystals the efficiency plummets and you are limited to how much reaction you can do before it breaches the reaction chamber. With the crystals the limit isn't the chamber itself, its how much energy you can funnel through the crystals before they destabilize.

[@someotherwag]

In an old Star Trek technical manual for The Original Series, they said that warp speed is the warp factor number squared times the speed of light. Warp factor two is four times the speed of light, warp factor three is nine times, etc. The newer shows aren't going by this, but I like the idea. Some said that the trans warp drive that they mentioned in one of the films went warp factor cubed times the speed of light.

[@jeffreyclement2726]

In 1967 in Cookville TN Someone had no problem using warp speed to stop right over that town to a dead stop.3 giant Deathstar size objects that is. Absolute power!

[@billyheaning]

The best way I could describe warp drive to someone would be the "fly in a car" effect. The fly may be at rest on the back of a seat, but it is actually travelling at 55 mph. It's all frame of reference. The fly is the starship, the car is the warp bubble. So the fly is completely stationary relative to its frame of reference; but in fact it's inside the car, which is travelling at 55 mph.

[@scdoty777]

To understand “warp” I’ve always thought of an analogy of O’Brians Jack Aubrey sailing novels. To “warp-out” a ship means to anchor a rope at some far point away from a dock or anchorage and the crew in the ship will PULL the rope to move the ship forward until they have sufficient clearance and wind. Kinda of like a warp bubble described in the video: expanding space in back and using energy forward to “compress” the distance.

[@raw6668]

I kind of theorized Warp Speeds is sort of like Mach Speeds but in reverse. Where Mach Speed is determined by environmental (atmosphere and temperature) and how fast a craft is going, Warp Speed is what a spacecraft can reach and its speeds it determined how long it can keep the Warp Speed up and the environmental properties of space they are traveling. It certainly explains how they can travel so quickly across Federation space despite being over 8000 light-years, or when Voyager upgrades sensors, get a map or create stellar cartography that can better interpret data to map the stars, it takes years off their journey. For they found the ideal roots to make the ship go really fast.

[@mityace]

The Star Fleet Technical Manual, which was also the basis of the Star Fleet Battles series of games, defined that the speed for a given warp factor was the cube of that value times the speed of light. Warp 1 = 1c, Warp 2 = 8c, Warp 3 = 27c, Warp 4 = 64c, etc.

[@Corbomite_Meatballs]

This was revised for TNG on since it was too slow, even for Plot Speed.

[@chrissonofpear1384]

@@Corbomite_Meatballs and even then, it's usually too slow, anyway. Plus the wild inconsistencies of range, distance and time taken. As usually shown, though, in TNG reference material: Warp 5 is 214.2 times C; warp 6 is 392.5 C, warp 8 is 1024 C, warp 9 is 1516.4 C, and warp 9.6 is 1909 times C. Higher up velocities tend to be less pinned down, though, but may top out at 9.975 (at 6669 times C) (Apologies for the full on nerd angle)

[@ericlanglois9194]

Your thought about the Excelsior program possibly working and causing the warp scale modification is one I've heard before as a plausible reason for the change between the old scale and the new scale. The idea is that all Federation starships in the 24th century are using what the 23rd century had termed "Transwarp drives" but due to the scale change, they just call it Warp drive at that point. It would be a fun little addition if ever confirmed in canon sources.

[@DrewLSsix]

The same way you call the thing in your pocket a phone, at this point in time calling it a cellular telephone with vast data streaming and computational power is just a mouthful.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Indeed, I think I’ve been saying it for 10 or 11 years myself. “Transwarp” is a moving target, just like “true AI” is IRL. Expert systems, fuzzy logic, neural networks… they were all called AI and hyped up but now people say “ah that’s not Really AI though, that’s just (pattern optimisation, threshold rules, what have you)”. Similarly, how can it be trans- anything if they’re using it in their ships to warp space all the time? So it’s just warp once it’s integrated into the fleet. And then new ideas like slipstream drive or that tetryon slingshot take up the mantle of “transwarp technology”.

[@JasonBodine]

The Warp 10 limit was a retcon in Voyager. In the finale of TNG, "All Good Things," ships could travel at Warp 13!

[@andrewdyne9939]

I am pleased someone mentioned Warp 13. Warp 13 doesn't make sense. Perhaps warp 13 is an equivalent of Trans-Warp 3? A better Warp scale at the far end would be similar to the datacentre reliability scale we use today. When it comes to datacenters, we don't normally say 99.999% reliable, but say 5 9s' instead. Therefore warp 9.9999 would be warp 5 9's. Adding a point for a finer detail might be done. Warp 9.99995 would be 5 9s' point 5, etc.

[@spadesofpaintstudios1719]

I’m bewildered on how it doesn’t even take 8 million years to get to andromeda, but now only 10… that’s just i don’t even know. To a certain point Star Trek speeds are just ridiculous.

[@isntyournamebacon]

The way i always figured it is when the characters mention time to travel and are fine with it, but we might think its wrong due to another episode having a different number is there IS a reason they all know about but was off screen. Star Fleet spend a lot of time cataloging anomalies and other strange stuff. Its totally their jam. So if it takes a specific amount of time to travel say, 8 light years from star A to star B and a different amount of time to travel 8 light years from star B to star C. I just figure the characters know something i dont. Anomalies for example. Its like if i want to get to walmart on the other side of my town. If i pick up and fly there at 30mph it would take like 2 min. If i get in my car and drive the zig zag winding pattern of streets it would take 30 min. Its in my mind why they have to "plot a course" and not just point the ship and hit engage. Its like how Captain Sulu plotting gaseous anomalies near the Romulan neutral zone can make the trip to Kitomer(Klingon space?) in mins and the enterprise E and get to earth so fast. Sulu found some strange stuff going on they just never mention. Or what happened to Sisco in DS9 episode when he hit a subspace river or whatever between Bajor and Cardasia. (I dont feel like looking up the spelling for these places..)

[@kaitlyn__L]

In Trek it’s also mentioned in episodes a number of times that they found regions with anomalous spatial curvature. Current physics understands that our space is widely/globally/universally (other connotations of each word make them a bit confusing here) flat, at least within the degree that we can measure (which is quite a lot). Although current physics does allow for local curvature disruptions (such as, well, a gravity well). So in Trek they’ve found many local regions of interstellar space with positive or negative curvature, and you could easily imagine them to be akin to headwinds and tailwinds when it comes to warp factor, external apparent speed, and subsequent journey time.

[@francisdhomer5910]

Is the episode you are thinking of where Sisco and his son take a solar sail ship and end up in Cardasea (Spelling way off?). I think it may have been some type of tychon stream. I too would have to go back and rewatch. A true Sci Fic show. (I always get killed for saying this but Star Trek is Sci Fantasies. We still love it through.) I enjoyed that episode

[@Wortheins]

The Navigational deflector or "Main Deflector" is for sub-light travel, as the Warp Field literally moves the debris around the ship, This is the reason phasers are not used in warp combat, since the particles would be disrupted. Torpedoes are equipped with warp field stabilizer that would allow them to maintain the warp field at which it was launched for a short time, however they could not generate their own.

[@JoannaHammond]

I always found the deflector strange, if you are traveling in a warp bubble space/time would be so curved that any matter would flow around that bubble (or accumulate on the boundry.) At near C sublight speeds then a deflector made sense.

[@jeremymaxwell7251]

I once owned a tng rpg that explained that 'waep factor's from the original series was the static scale,tng 'warp' was redefined as ultrawarp and has a multiple of three to the original static scaleeg.ultra warp one is warp one in tos.transwarp was just completely reconned,and all the point nines were ad infinitum with ten(30) being unachievable.thanks for the video.👍 You got a better handle on this subject then I did.

[@stkygrnz]

I'll always remember the final episode of TNG, All Good Things..., in which Riker arrives in the newest version of Enterprise from the future to save the USS Pasteur from the Klingon attack. After the battle, Riker tells the crew to set a course back to Federation space, Warp 13. They spent seven seasons telling the fans that Warp 10 was the absolute speed limit and then break all the rules in the final episode of the show. That one line from the show has always bothered me.

[@Luthiart]

But... but... it had a THIRD nacelle! More nacelles mean more go! Any Pakled knows that... (BTW, it wasn't actually a new ship, it was a refit of the Enterprise D).

[@OneMarsyBoi]

Finally someone explained how warp nacells work As I didn't understand untill he compares it to an electromagnet thank u rick

[@radaro.9682]

Your humor is wonderful! The dust spec wouldn't fare better!!!!!

[@Janovus]

It had been all but settled canon that warp factors are cubed. In other words, warp factor 1 is the speed of light, warp factor 2 is 2*2*2 or 8 times the speed of light, warp factor 3 is 3*3*3 or 27 times the speed of light, etc…

[@chrissonofpear1384]

Would that it remained that consistent, beyond the writer's bible, of course - but it did not.

[@Lunas2525]

The way it works is the warp field displaces the mass of the ship and phases the ship partially out of normal space and the light speed limit is not the same in subspace

[@Thaumh]

It's astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness, takes its toll.

[@worldbestt-shirtshoodie-go6184]

Dilithium crystal is the only one capable of allowing both matter and antimatter to pass through it at special high frequencies and thus allowing flow control, since normally on NCC 1701-D ratio is 1:10 of antimatter to matter for Warp 1, then 2:10 Warp 2 till 1:1 for Warp 9 and simultaneous rising both amount till almost Warp 10, that is 9.9998 etc Also each peak before each next warp factor means border between two subspace layers. The warp peak chart shows the energy vs effort to overcome subspace barrier.

[@marcusmanchester7095]

I want to point out something that I realized with the Burn. The method used to power warp drive (that being Matter/Antimatter Reaction moderated by Dilithium) is only actually shown on Federation and Klingon ships. And then we have examples of species using something else to power warp, such as the Romulans and their Artificial Quantum Singularities. Because of this, we are only ASSUMING that everyone else uses this same method of powering warp travel. In TNG and Voyager, we see tons of species experimenting with other technologies, so it's not like M/AM is the ONLY method of powering warp drive.

[@kamenriderblade2099]

The CareTaker and it's species uses Tetryon Reactors, another form of Power Generation.

[@DrewLSsix]

We don't know that A: the romulans only used singularities, or B: the singularity drives don't also use dilithium. There's also the issue that small singularities as described by real world physics are not sources of energy. They don't generate anything, they are effectively hyper efficient batteries. Basically the black holes need to be manufactured, using vast amounts of energy and some matter. Their "charge" is determined by how much matter you out in them above and beyond the creation of the singularity its self. So the romulans must have places inside their empire where they make these things and given the universe they live in the most likely way to so that is with conventional warp corse style reactors. This means these ships even if they don't rely on dilithium them selves have a limited operational time before they need to be recharged, and when one of these things reaches the point where they are exhausted the result is a huge explosion. My personal rationale for why the Empire chose this particular technology is that it keeps these ships tied permanently to the home systems. They are vastly powerful ships, but they can't just turn against the Empire because they can't just refuel anywhere. For a seclusionist society it makes sense.

[@Corbomite_Meatballs]

Which is why the "Burn" makes less sense the more you examine it. There's also the Soliton wave tech, slipstream, subspace corridors, that trajector thing from Voyager, etc.

[@kaitlyn__L]

@@DrewLSsix we can theoretically extract power from a black hole’s rotational momentum, by adding in extra mass at a careful angle. Some of it gets eaten and some of it gets spat back out. The black hole gains mass but loses some spin. We get back less mass but the mass we do get back has a lot more momentum. That momentum can then be used to do useful work. Of course, that’s more about using a big black hole out in space to get power from. There’s a problem that small black holes, anything with less mass than.. (whatever the magic number of solar masses are, which determines whether a collapse results in a white dwarf or a black hole. It’s like 6 or 10 solar masses or something like that) are not stable and will in fact just explode. So this leaves us with a few possibilities: maybe they can just use forcefields to contain the black hole and the explosion thing isn’t an issue to them. Maybe they’d even like it as a fail-dangerous device to prevent ships from getting into enemy hands by having an “auto self destruct” in the event of power loss. Maybe they just keep feeding it to keep it right on the line for stability. Obviously a 10 solar mass black hole is far smaller than a star with 10 solar masses would be. This of course requires constant matter consumption, but also ensures they can refuel by just throwing in basically anything they mine up in space. No deuterium refineries, no tritium breeder reactors. Plus since they’re throwing that mass into the black hole anyway in this theory, they have a huge amount of available power at all times. When it’s not going into the cloak, they can either vent it or use it. Maybe their “singularity core” is unlike modern understandings of black holes at all. Maybe it’s a singularity of energy and not mass. Or something else entirely. Trek has many designated types of singularities, far beyond our modern “spinning or stationary?” binary. That one TNG episode _did_ say that species that gestates in black holes didn’t like the Romulan’s core. Of course, if they’re providing all of the mass to start a new black hole at will rather than going out and harvesting them and growing them, then I can understand more about why you call it a big battery. Though it’s nowhere near as good at being a battery as antimatter is, because there will be lots of energy inaccessible to the ship with a black hole generator scenario. Unless they were willing to capture the explosive Hawking Radiation, but that kinda takes us back to my “they just handle it with forcefields” scenario. And it would seem to have a number of disadvantages compared to Federation antimatter production facilities if they couldn’t feed it on the go.

[@marcusmanchester7095]

@@DrewLSsix To answer your first conjecture that's assuming that Dilithium must be used in all forms of warp drive, the warp core is just a power source capable of producing adequate energy, it doesn't itself create the warping effect. Anything capable of producing adequate energy could power a warp drive. Related to your second conjecture regarding the Romulans, in M/AM, Dilithium is important because it moderates the reaction between the two. That isn't happening in an AQS, so even if dilithium is a component in an AQS, you're making a second assumption that it's equally important in any and all applications. In real world physics, black holes decay and that decay produces Hawking radiation. The smaller the black hole, the faster it decays, the more radiation it produces. That being said, even a microscopic black hole would contain enough mass to last a significant period of time. The fictional technology of artificial gravity could theoretically make a whole host of other technologies possible, including the creation of miniature black holes. Similarly to traveling faster than light, in the real world, this would take near infinite energy, and yet it functions on starships without main power and at a dead stop.

[@LucasAndrowick]

Unless they've since reneged, there was an official book of star charts released in 2002 by Geoffrey Mandel that had detailed maps including scale included.

[@RobKMusic]

Somewhere along the line, I thought FTL travel was achieved by the "warp field" reducing the apparent mass of the ship inside to a point where the impulse drive could push it beyond light speed. The stronger the warp field, the lower the apparent mass of the ship inside, resulting in higher and higher achievable speeds. I think it's actually in one of the Technical Manuals, I'll have to look around my collection. Additionally this notion was bolstered by the TNG episode Deja Q, where the Enterprise extends its warp field around an errant moon in order to reduce its apparent mass enough that can be moved with a simple tractor beam. Not making any assertions, just my thoughts. I know Trek often changes things and hopes nobody notices.

[@eldorfthe_wise129]

Close. The warp field acts like a bubble in water. The ship is in the middle of that bubble, If you "bend" it in one direction, it goes that way and the ship follows along, inside the bubble, always below the speed of light. It's the bubble that "cheats" its way through normal space.

[@spacewarpphotography1667]

Wow, I have no serious nit picks. Well done!

[@jyralnadreth4442]

Turning at Warp speed I always thought was a gentle affair - in that you could make small limited degree course corrections but that to pull a hard 180 you would need to drop out of warp and turn around. Vulcan Ring Nacelles designs were notorious for their inability to turn to the degree of Twin Nacelle designs. Three nacelle designs could achieve greater results with 1 centreline main nacelle for propulsion and 2 outer nacelles to perform course changes

[@aholland20132]

I figured that warp speed was actually variable, which explains both the inconsistencies of time and distance as well as the vagueness in the series. So depending on local subspace structure, nearby masses, and other factors (which vary over time) different distances could be covered in the same time at the same warp factor. In other words, an hour at warp eight on Monday doesn't have to equal an hour at warp eight on Thursday. It keeps my head from hurting too much, anyway!

[@CertifiablyIngame]

This is kind of how Hyperspace lanes work in Star Wars, for the same reason of sugar-coating plot convenience. More frequently used "lanes" ferry ships at a faster rate than just pointing off in a direction and hitting go, even if the ship puts in the same amount of power.

[@VHVDRAGON]

The STNG technical manual, describes the warp as a 2 layer bubble, the inner is static. And the other rolls from front to rear. The rolling of the outer warp field is what moves it thru space. What you described is the alcubier drive. Not the same.

[@kaitlyn__L]

However, one of the papers cited (the final one, “physical warp drives”) achieves the Alcubierre effect by means of having a rotating outer surface (albeit physical instead of energy). So those two descriptions are not incompatible, rather they are two ways of describing the same thing (your one describes it from the ship’s reference frame, the other describes it from an external observer’s point of view).

[@Juan-ll6sf]

Interesting science fiction technology. I would like to see a video explaining the making of artificial gravity in space and starships. Thanks.

[@glenwhite4443]

Wow... Mind-blowing stuff... If only we can make it so...

[@ZontarDow]

My father was always under the impression warp went up by having the number be the cube of the number which makes a hell of a lot more sense then the scale used in the show that no one would ever propose, let alone be implemented.

[@kregadeth5562]

I think this is my favorite channel.

[@sunny-sq6ci]

in reality, such a space- time bubble, would have far more consequences to everyone outside of the bubble then those inside it. in theory, the amount of energy required to generate it, would create a area in front of the bubble that starts to store/ accumulate this energy. if you were to suddenly stop at say a planetary system, the energy in front would cascade and move like a tsunami that in theory have enough energy to destroy the entire system. the whole ftl ramming scene in star wars would be the equivalent of a supernova explosion.

[@francisdhomer5910]

We are now arriving at Ormycorn 4. Standby while we shift out of........ never mind. Moving on we are heading towards the Alderon system

[@MCNarret]

To avoid confusion with using different types of warp drives, it should be something like high warp, or hyperwarp, etc. So it would go High Warp 1 for Warp 9.9, High Warp 2 for Warp 9.99 etc. Or something that could roll off the tongue better would be Warp 9+1 for 9.9, Warp 9+2 for 9.99 etc. Funny thing with the last suggestion though, Warp 9-1 (said nine minus one, as with the others being nine plus one, etc) would technically be Warp 0. If we go off the last suggestion further, because we put a math operator as the divider, we can use higher orders to express higher orders of warp. Like Warp 9 x 1 (Warp nine "ex" one) could be 9.999999999, shorthand for warp 9+9, and Warp 9 x 2 would be warp 9.999999999999999999 and so on. And for even higher orders we can have Warp 9 ^ 1 (warp nine power one), which would be warp 9.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999, and Warp 9 ^ 2 (warp nine power two) would be warp 9.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 etc. (aka Warp 9 x 18, or Warp 9 + 162)

[@anakinsolo719]

I don't know if it's a typo or a miscalculation, but at 5:30 there is a graphic that indicates that TOS Warp 11 is roughly TNG Warp 9.6. This is incorrect, it is TNG Warp 8.6.

[@mix-up9003]

could it be that the new warp scale was just a way to make the mesuring unit that all the major powers had agreed to at some point?

[@francisdhomer5910]

Or to confuse us. Or to shut us up because to many were saying it took them to long/short to travel that far. Of course look how fast the turbolift moved to go one deck

[@AbuMaia01]

I had always understood warp drive as not so much altering space, but altering the mass of the ship itself so that the impulse engines would be able to propel the ship at FTL speeds. This is supported by the episode where Q becomes human, when he gives Geordi the idea to use the warp engines to project a warp bubble around a moon to lower its mass so they could push it with the tractor beam.

[@chrisc1140]

Coming in a year later but hi! That's effectively what's used for FTL in the Lensman book series. They have tech that reduces all inertia in a given volume to 0 (usually NEAR 0 so you can still like, move around inside the ship semi-normally), so their FTL is limited by the FRICTION FROM THE RANDOM PARTICLES IN SPACE. It gets very fast, and means all their ships are very "aerodynamic." But I don't think it's needed for Trek - even though it would explain the increasingly sleek ships we've been seeing. Extending the warp field around the moon would then not affect the *actual* mass inside the warp field, but since small movements at warp translate to bigger movements from a 3rd party observer you used the same energy to move the moon a greater distance, meaning a lower *measured* mass.

[@TheGreatSeraphim]

They did rescale the warp scale in one of the movies/future episodes (can't remember which one). A newer model of Enterprise is engaged at warp 13.