Warp Speed, how fast is it?

[Chris OFarrell]

One of the many things that bugs me about voyager is that they sey it will take 70 years to get home yet they stop at every planet and anamoly they come across. Even with all these stops they never seemed to mind the fact that it was adding years to their travel time.

70 years at maxmium warp, Voyager didn't have anything LIKE enough fuel to do that. Nor stary at max warp for more then about 48 hours. So they had to stop for supplies all along the way, given that they are always getting into combat and taking damage. Not to mention it gives chances to gain access to new technology and information.

[HemlockGrey]

Wait, so how come Voyager got home in 7 years? And I distinctly remember someone saying that in the pilot they mentioned that in an alternate timeline it only took 23 years...

Where there timewarps involved?

[Imperial Overlord]

I'm sure there were wormholes and subspaces thingies involved.

[Questor]

I'm sure there were wormholes and subspaces thingies involved.

I believe most of it was in the transwarp conduits.

[Ted C]

One of the many things that bugs me about voyager is that they sey it will take 70 years to get home yet they stop at every planet and anamoly they come across. Even with all these stops they never seemed to mind the fact that it was adding years to their travel time.

I suspect that their travel estimate included multiple stops to refuel and repair the ship, since no Federation starship has ever been designed to travel at Warp 5-6 for 70 years non-stop. They were short on other basic supplies as well, hence the need to ration replicator use.

[Ted C]

I think that both fuel efficiency and total power are the major limiting factors for ships. Some of the slower ships can indeed travel faster if they have more power.

As far as we can tell, you get exponentially greater speeds as you increase warp factor, but you also expend fuel at an exponentially greater rate (and probably lose efficiency in the process). The trade off, for the Federation, seems to be that a speed of Warp 5-6 will get the ship to its destination in a reasonable time without expending an excessive amount of fuel.

Though I have to wonder. The Defiant can’t travel as fast with its design. Actually, with what we know this is very telling. It proves just how much faster ships can travel when they incorporate proper warp mechanics. The Defiant might be good in combat, but it’s a real bitch to get her just to travel at Warp-9. If you have a lot of space to cover quickly, the Defiant class just can’t hack it.

Another trade-off. Federation ships are generally faster than Klingon, Romulan, or Cardassian ships because of the configuration of the warp nacelles, but those exposed nacelles must be a liability in combat; otherwise they wouldn't have enclosed them on a dedicated warship like the Defiant.

So now we have a working theory that both good warp mechanics and fuel capacity or superior power generations devices are the critical components to making Trek ships go fast at warp.

Warp isn’t nearly so slow as we first thought. The single biggest limiting factor on the ships right now is their power generation.

A steady, high-yield power supply is the first step to getting higher speeds, yeah, but there's still the "warp 10 limit" you have to deal with. According to my scale, warp 10 would be about 12,600c, Tom Paris' "4 billion miles per second" comment not withstanding; the Federation hasn't measured distance in miles for centuries, so it's unlikely he could easily convert the units in his head correctly.

Warp 10 apparently represents a barrier that current Federation technology can't crack. You need a transwarp drive to go any faster no matter how much power you can deliver, and the Federation has apparently been working on transwarp for decades without success.

[Darth Wong]

Refueling stops shouldn't be a big factor for Voyager's overall travel time estimate. Even if you assume they take a hundred stops on the way, each of which lasts a week, that would only add a couple of years to their journey. The real trick was finding shortcuts, for which those frequent investigations were apparently worthwhile (since they did find some).

[drachefly]

A steady, high-yield power supply is the first step to getting higher speeds, yeah, but there's still the "warp 10 limit" you have to deal with. According to my scale, warp 10 would be about 12,600c

Well, that's an artificial element of the scale used -- once you get above 9, it's supposed to be that speeds trend such that 10 would be literally infinite speed. This was directly addressed in one stupid Voyager episode in which Tom Paris went warp 10 and evolved into some weird lizard, then abducted and mated with Janeway.

OK, now that you've cleaned out your brains...

So, to get to any arbitrarily large speed does not actually require going warp 10, just closer and closer to it. Warp 9.999 would be much faster than warp 9.99, not a mere factor of (9.999/9.99)^4.1 ~= 1.0037.


One quasi-reasonable expression for warp factor in the upper limits which fulfils this criterion would be V = A ln(10-W), with A a (negative) fitting parameter. Another, simpler, would be V = A/(10-W)^N, with A and N fitting parameters (A positive, N positive and greater than 1), related so that V(W=1) = 1. There is an infinite variety of such curves.

[Darth Wong]

Has anyone ever tried to explain why the Federation would use such a counterintuitive speed rating system in the first place?

[Ted C]

Let's talk about Warp 10 for a moment.

Is there any canon evidence that the warp scale used in TNG is any different from the one used in TOS? Episode name and quotes please, if yes.

Because I distinctly recall speeds exceeding warp 10 being describe in TOS on a couple of occasions ("Journey to Babel", "The Changling", and "By Any Other Name", if memory serves).

[Alyeska]

All I can say is that its fucking STUPID. It might sound cool to the uneducated, but its hard as hell to make logical sense and you can’t get a proper appreciation for scale.

TOS didn’t appear to be set quite the same way. We never get any indication that Warp scales like that. I also think the TNG episode “All Good Things” is an indication that the Federation finally decides to do away with the idiotic system thanks to the Warp-13 comment.

[Gil Hamilton]

Has anyone ever tried to explain why the Federation would use such a counterintuitive speed rating system in the first place?

It could be that Warp Factors are Magnitudes, not units. Like the Richter scale is actually magnitude scale that represents a log10 function

[Ted C]

TOS didn’t appear to be set quite the same way. We never get any indication that Warp scales like that. I also think the TNG episode “All Good Things” is an indication that the Federation finally decides to do away with the idiotic system thanks to the Warp-13 comment.

Thanks, I'd forgotten about the Warp-13 drives in AGT. More evidence that Warp-10 isn't really "infinite speed", just some kind of "break point" that ordinary warp drives can't get past (much like the speed of sound was a barrier for decades of air travel).

As for why? Probably because each warp factor is some kind of "barrier" itself, a threshold requiring higher levels of power, efficiency, or something.

[Darth Wong]

Has anyone ever tried to explain why the Federation would use such a counterintuitive speed rating system in the first place?

It could be that Warp Factors are Magnitudes, not units. Like the Richter scale is actually magnitude scale that represents a log10 function

The Richter scale is not pointlessly asymptotic, and in that case, the use of magnitudes is necessary, because you need exponential increases in power in order to generate what feel like linear increases in destructiveness, due to the exponential drop-off in intensity as you move away from the quake epicenter. What reason is there for using a system that is not only non-linear but also asymptotic when dealing with speed?

[drachefly]

I can think of an in-universe reason and an out-of-universe reason.

in-universe: It has to do with the warp geometry. Different warp geometries would suggest different scales due to differently placed energy thresholds; the TNG geometry suggests the one they use. They clearly used a more advanced geometry in All Good Things, and a different, presumably less-advanced one in the TOS.
It is quite possible that there are simultaneously to TNG ships on which the TOS scale is used because they use that older warp geometry.

out-of-universe: They wanted to sell better to people who couldn't count past 10.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

No, it's because they wanted to avoid something that occured during TOS, where there were ever-increasing warp numbers. Roddenberry wanted a speed limit of sorts.

[Lord Poe]

TOS didn’t appear to be set quite the same way. We never get any indication that Warp scales like that. I also think the TNG episode “All Good Things” is an indication that the Federation finally decides to do away with the idiotic system thanks to the Warp-13 comment.

The E-D also did warp 10 (and faster) thanks to that Traveller guy in season 1.

[Patrick Degan]

No matter what, warp speed will never be as fast as ludicrous speed.

[Batman]

TOS didn’t appear to be set quite the same way. We never get any indication that Warp scales like that. I also think the TNG episode “All Good Things” is an indication that the Federation finally decides to do away with the idiotic system thanks to the Warp-13 comment.

The E-D also did warp 10 (and faster) thanks to that Traveller guy in season 1.

Did she? I know they went ludicrously (:P) fast, but I can't recall them ever giving Warp factors of 10 or more.
Mind you, it's been a while since I saw that episode.

[Darth Wong]

I can think of an in-universe reason and an out-of-universe reason.

in-universe: It has to do with the warp geometry. Different warp geometries would suggest different scales due to differently placed energy thresholds; the TNG geometry suggests the one they use. They clearly used a more advanced geometry in All Good Things, and a different, presumably less-advanced one in the TOS.

It is quite possible that there are simultaneously to TNG ships on which the TOS scale is used because they use that older warp geometry.

This is like replacing a car's speedometer with a meter showing the number of times per second that each sparkplug is firing. Why should a speed rating system be slaved to the nuances of the technology rather than the speed?

out-of-universe: They wanted to sell better to people who couldn't count past 10.

I think it's because of the "confusing/different = superior" mentality often found in bad sci-fi writing.

"We can't use an intelligible scale!"
"Why not?"
"Because that's exactly what they're expecting us to do!"

[Ted C]

I think it's because of the "confusing/different = superior" mentality often found in bad sci-fi writing.

I think that they actually came out and said once that the warp scale is deliberately vague so that writer's don't have to worry about logistics when describing now long it takes the ship to get from place to place during a story.

"How long would it take the Enterprise to get from Earth to Romulus?"
"Who cares? Drop a high warp number into the script and leave the distance undefined. No one will care."

[Batman]

I think it's because of the "confusing/different = superior" mentality often found in bad sci-fi writing.

I think that they actually came out and said once that the warp scale is deliberately vague so that writer's don't have to worry about logistics when describing now long it takes the ship to get from place to place during a story.
"How long would it take the Enterprise to get from Earth to Romulus?"
"Who cares? Drop a high warp number into the script and leave the distance undefined. No one will care."

The same thing would work with a Warp scale that doesn't go infinite at 10 and requires absurdly long Warp 9.9999999... values to make the ships go really fast when they need to. Hell, it worked in TOS, didn't it?

[splinterfl]

The WARP system is exponential just like dB/I is in the audio world. The 94 Omnipedia (The Next Generation Technical Manual CD) was refering to a base 10.
Warp 1= 1c
Wart 2=10c, 3=100c,4=1000c (1kc), 5=10kc, 6=100kc, 7=1000kc (1mc), 8=10mc, 9=100mc....
so a ship doing Warp 9.9 is going 900mc vs Warp 9.5 of 500mc (nearly twice as fast)

And I agree that Fed ships are under powered, but when an object works like a SCM (super conductive magnet), you don't need as much power to move it, just like pushing a person on ice is easier than a sidewalk. Their warp buble seems to separate the ship from the normal friction of space.
-- just my two cents

[Batman]

The WARP system is exponential just like dB/I is in the audio world. The 94 Omnipedia (The Next Generation Technical Manual CD) was refering to a base 10.
Warp 1= 1c
Wart 2=10c, 3=100c,4=1000c (1kc), 5=10kc, 6=100kc, 7=1000kc (1mc), 8=10mc, 9=100mc....
so a ship doing Warp 9.9 is going 900mc vs Warp 9.5 of 500mc (nearly twice as fast)
And I agree that Fed ships are under powered, but when an object works like a SCM (super conductive magnet), you don't need as much power to move it, just like pushing a person on ice is easier than a sidewalk. Their warp buble seems to separate the ship from the normal friction of space.
-- just my two cents

Not only not canonical but also flat out wrong as observes speeds are far slower.

[Drooling Iguana]

"Normal friction of space"? Guh?