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I was watching an episode of trek last night. I forget the name, but its hte episode where the ferengi make Picard think he has a son.

At one point it is mentioned that they are 80 billion KM from a ship, and that at warp 9 it would take them approx 20 minutes to travel that distance.

Thus the approx speed of warp 9 would be around 240 billion KPH. How does that figure stack up to other calculations on warp speed?

I'm clearly buzzed. I did that in my head and it came out as ~12c.

Problem is this is somewhat meaningless. Trek can't really keep Warp speeds consistent. They have varried widely. Furthermore such slow speeds are rather odd when you consider how massive the Federation is and how frequently the E-D moved about.

There is the warp highways theory. These are either natural or created. I suspect they are created and this explains why ships can move about their own territory quickly but move relatively slowly in other territory.

Admiral_K wrote:I was watching an episode of trek last night. I forget the name, but its the episode where the ferengi make Picard think he has a son.

At one point it is mentioned that they are 80 billion KM from a ship, and that at warp 9 it would take them approx 20 minutes to travel that distance.

Thus the approx speed of warp 9 would be around 240 billion KPH. How does that figure stack up to other calculations on warp speed?

Edit:
That works out to about 222.22c, which is far less than the value for warp 9 under the basic TOS formula WfN = N^3c. The resulting figure is closer to warp 6.1 on that scale. It is even more miniscule according to TNG's bizarre formulations, which places a value for warp 9 somewhere around 1516c.

I thought that the way the warp scale had been retooled from the TOS era to the TNG era was that instead of measuring actual speed, they measured engine output.... which could account for the vast difference in actual speed. Just because the engines are at full power does not mean that the ship is moving as fast as it possibly can, think of a car going uphill.
I don't remember where I got that notion from maybe ditl.org but I am not for sure...

Death from the Sea wrote:I thought that the way the warp scale had been retooled from the TOS era to the TNG era was that instead of measuring actual speed, they measured engine output.... which could account for the vast difference in actual speed. Just because the engines are at full power does not mean that the ship is moving as fast as it possibly can, think of a car going uphill.
I don't remember where I got that notion from maybe ditl.org but I am not for sure...

Meaning that reference to warp factor 9 translates to the reactor running at 90%, for example. While this would have made a bit of sense, the fact is that the idiots decided to tie a speed measurement to the power measurement in an almost direct correlation.

You don't even want to know about some of the bizarre formulae worked out in various attempts to "clarify" the warp scale.

Death from the Sea wrote:I thought that the way the warp scale had been retooled from the TOS era to the TNG era was that instead of measuring actual speed, they measured engine output.... which could account for the vast difference in actual speed. Just because the engines are at full power does not mean that the ship is moving as fast as it possibly can, think of a car going uphill.
I don't remember where I got that notion from maybe ditl.org but I am not for sure...

That doesn't work I'm afraid since Warp 10 is supposedly impossible and is infinite velocity (ref. ST: Voyager).

Yeah, well in the TOS era they went what.. Warp 15 once?

The warp scale was "retooled" in TNG, so that they couldn't go faster than warp 9.whatever.

I'd rather measure FTL in multiples of c. Quick, simple, and it works..

EDIT: Where'd that stop bit after c go? *fixes it*

Go download Ted C's spreadsheet. he did alot of good work rationalizing and calculating warp speeds to come up with a consistent curve.

Kurgan wrote:Yeah, well in the TOS era they went what.. Warp 15 once?

The warp scale was "retooled" in TNG, so that they couldn't go faster than warp 9.whatever.

Yeah, but in that Episode ("That Which Survives" I believe) they also covered 990.7 light-years in the space of a day and a half tops. Even with the boost from going to Warp 13-14 for a few minutes, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense since Spock seemed sure that even at their normal speed they could make it back in a reasonable timeframe.

The Kernel wrote:

Kurgan wrote:Yeah, well in the TOS era they went what.. Warp 15 once?

The warp scale was "retooled" in TNG, so that they couldn't go faster than warp 9.whatever.

Yeah, but in that Episode ("That Which Survives" I believe) they also covered 990.7 light-years in the space of a day and a half tops. Even with the boost from going to Warp 13-14 for a few minutes, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense since Spock seemed sure that even at their normal speed they could make it back in a reasonable timeframe.

Spock's estimate was for a travel time of 11.735 hours at warp 8.4. The boost caused by the Kalandan sabotage to the matter/antimatter regulators would have cut that by a considerable margin; only 15-20 minutes seperated Losira's appearance aboard the Enterprise and the ship's arrival in time to rescue Kirk, McCoy, and Sulu from the planet's computer.

Patrick Degan wrote: Spock's estimate was for a travel time of 11.735 hours at warp 8.4. The boost caused by the Kalandan sabotage to the matter/antimatter regulators would have cut that by a considerable margin; only 15-20 minutes seperated Losira's appearance aboard the Enterprise and the ship's arrival in time to rescue Kirk, McCoy, and Sulu from the planet's computer.

So we accept the fact that it isn't the warp scale that is incomparable between TNG and TOS, but the entire propulsion technology right? I mean it would have taken Voyager a year to cross 1000 light years and the Enterprise-nil can do it in 12 hours?

As for the speed boost, we aren't entirely sure the time that seperated Spock making his ETA and Losira's sabotage of the Enterprise (yes, yes, I know that it was done in the first place, but obviously she needed to come onboard to trigger something) so we don't know how much space had already been covered. More to the point, Kirk and party were on the planet for at least several hours (a day tops assuming Earth normal rotation).