Information AboutWarp Drive |
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The concept of using spatial warping as a means of propulsion has been the subject of theoretical treatment by some physicists (such as Miguel Alcubierre , see Alcubierre Drive ), although no concrete technological approach has ever been proposed, nor is there any known way of inducing the effect described by Alcubierre. FICTIONAL WARP HISTORY On '' suggests that warp drive may have been first used earlier, there is no direct evidence of such). According to the latest ''Star Trek'' series, ''Enterprise'', many other civilizations had warp drive before humans, notably the Vulcan s, who had more advanced warp drive technology than humans even in the 22nd Century . In the ''Star Trek'' Pilot Episode " The Cage ", warp was mentioned with the term "time warp". The episode revealed that the "time barrier" had recently been broken, but since this was given as news to a group of shipwrecked interstellar travelers, it could not refer to the breaking of the light barrier, as has been suggested. (The pilot episode featured a number of things inconsistent with the rest of the series.) The speed of warp travel is usually given only in warp factors. It is generally assumed that warp 1 is the speed of light, and that at higher factors speed increases Exponentially . Several episodes of the original series placed the ''Enterprise'' in peril by having it go at high warp factors, once as high as warp 14.6 (" That Which Survives "). However, the actual speed of any given warp factor is never explicity and canonically stated on screen. Furthermore, within each series travel times and interstellar distances are not presented with rigorous (or even loose) continuity. Realising that this was a problem and wanting to remove this plot element, the creators of '''' episode " Threshold " agreed with this, in that the characters said attaining the velocity of Warp 10 was impossible — but then they achieved it anyway, with the side effect that they hyper- Evolved (reversibly) into Anthropomorphic Newt s (although many fans, production staff, and even the writer and producer of the episode Brannon Braga generally ignore the events of that episode due to various contradictions and SEVERE scientific and logical flaws). It is generally accepted that a ship travelling at warp speed will not experience any form of Time Dilation , since there is no information exchanged between a warp ship and the universe at large. (If a ship is using its Impulse Drive , for slower-than-light velocities, it will experience time dilation, since an impulse-driven ship is still travelling in the normal space-time continuum. For this reason, most ships limit their impulse velocities to approximately 1/4 lightspeed.) Transwarp drive The term "transwarp" has been used a number of times, referring to an advanced form of warp drive most commonly used by the ''. Just as the generation of a warp field around a starship is required to enter warp speed without using infinite amounts of energy, thereby breaking the light barrier (a theoretically impossible event in our universe), so is a transwarp field required to reach very high FTL speeds (making a ship capable of crossing galactic distances in a very short time). Federation experiments The , the Excelsior (under command of Captain Sulu) had been fitted with standard warp drive, so it is assumed that the transwarp tests were unsuccessful. In 2374, the crew of the USS ''Defiant'' was sent on a mission to study a rare Subspace compression phenomenon in Federation space. It was hoped that further study of the anomaly would lead to the creation of working transwarp drives. Unfortunately the mission was interrupted by a Jem'Hadar attack but the ship was successfully retaken by Lt.Commander Jadzia Dax , Chief Miles O'Brien , Dr. Julian Bashir and Lt.Commander Worf . The Borg and other aliens The Borg (in the ''Star Trek: The Next Generation'' two-part episode "Descent" and in the ''Star Trek: Voyager'' final episode "Endgame") have discovered anomalies called "transwarp conduits" — regions in subspace that facilitate transwarp travel at up to 20 times faster than conventional warp drives. Borg transwarp conduits are activated by an encoded Tachyon pulse. When a Borg vessel enters a transwarp conduit, it is subject to extreme gravimetric shear. To compensate, the Borg project a structural integrity field ahead of the vessel. Artificial conduits are linked together with transwarp hubs. Six hubs were known to exist, but one was destroyed in the ''Voyager'' episode "Endgame", and possibly the entire borg collective due to the neurolytic pathogen which Admiral Janeway infected herself with. This has yet to be clarified, but since the Borg are all connected, it may be that every Borg in existence was destroyed. Borg transwarp technology is similar to the Quantum Slipstream Technology used by Arturis ' people. WARP VELOCITIES in warp.]] In the ''Original Series'', according to Gene Roddenberry and his Trek episode writer's guide, warp factors were supposedly converted to multiples of light speed with the Cubic Function . (There is an unsubstantiated story that Roddenberry originally meant the warp numbers to simply be multiples of the speed of light, with Warp 9 being 9c, and that a group of early fans cornered him in a hotel and explained that this wouldn't work.) With that being said, that means the table for the ''Original Series'' warp speed is as follows: However, this cannot possibly be the whole story, as it would make the Enterprise far too slow for the voyages depicted in the television series. These speeds do not even correlate with solid facts and figures in some of the episodes, for example in That Which Survives the Enterprise travels at warp 8.4 for 11.33 hours and traverses 990.7 Light Year s (as indicated in Spock's dialogue), which makes the speed more than 600,000 times the speed of light, which is two Orders Of Magnitude larger than even warp 15. There is also the fact that the Enterprise could quite easily travel to and from the edge of the galaxy at will (Is There in Truth No Beauty and By Any Other Name ), a journey which should take years at the typical warp 8, if warp 8 is merely a cube of the warp factor. This discrepancy between the behavior of warp speeds in the show and the simple formula of the warp factor cubed was picked up by fans in the 1970's and 80's who published books like Star Trek Maps (all published material is considered non-canon, even if it is by Paramount-approved Pocket Books) where the idea of an additional factor, referred to as the Chi factor or the Cochrane factor, was used in the warp calculations. The idea was that since warp drive pulls in space, you get higher speeds in areas where there is high density of mass, and lower speeds in areas of low density. If we take a warp factor and cube it, we take that product and multiply it by the number 1292.7238 (the Chi or Cochrane factor), to get the actual speed that the ship travels at (this is the number that was factored out of the factoids from That Which Survives ). The Cochrane factor represents an "average" density of space in the UFP. Other areas of space will have different values for it. This is one way to explain the relationship between stated warp factors and actual calculable speeds as given in the dialogue in the episodes. Although it is not actually canon, it at least explains how the ships behaved as they did, without having to find higher exponents to factor the warp base numbers by, as ''Star Trek'' artist Michael Okuda did later for TNG (which nobody on the show ended up paying attention to anyway). For the later series, Okuda devised a formula based on the older one but with important differences. For warp 1–9, if ''w'' is the warp factor, ''s'' is the speed in Km per Second , and ''c'' is the Speed Of Light , then . In the Half-open Interval from warp 9 to warp 10, the exponent of ''w'' increases toward infinity. Thus, in the Okuda scale, warp speeds approach warp 10 Asymptotically . There is no exact formula for this interval because the quoted speeds are based on a hand-drawn curve. Here is a table with new-style warp factors and their approximate values in kilometers per second and multiples of ''c'': Here is a table of the times it would take to cover a number of distances. Since warp 1 is ''c'', the distances for warp 1 (in years) is the light year distance. Earth's Solar System is approximately 1.2x1010 km wide, measured as the diameter of the Oort Cloud . The later series were better at keeping to these speeds than the original; however, they were still far from perfect. Later episodes of '''', though its premise was generally based on the Okuda scale, had several notable instances, such as in the episode "Parallax" or "The 37's", where the stated warp velocities varied wildly from the Okuda standard. In general, the farther away a ''Star Trek'' show is in production date from the publish date of the ''Star Trek Technical Manual'', the more likely a ship would be to travel at the "speed of plot". For example, in the '''' pilot episode they give a time and speed to Neptune that accords with the original series' formula, but then they estimate a trip to the Klingon Homeworld at warp 5 as a four-day journey, placing it just one Light-year away from Earth —far closer than the nearest stellar system, Alpha Centauri . This plot hole has later been wrapped up by various sources that suggest that there is a spatial rift that allowed the Enterprise to arrive at the Klingon homeworld in such a short length of time, and that it was the Vulcans who provided Enterprise with the whereabouts of this shortcut. It should be noted, however that such a high speed for warp 5 is consistent with the extremely high speed given for warp 8.4 in That Which Survives , which has the speed at over 600,000 times lightspeed (therefore warp 5 would be 161,500 times lightspeed). In those terms, four days travel at warp 5 places the Klingon homeworld at 1,772 light years (or 536 parsecs) away from Earth. WARP THEORY AND TECHNOLOGY For a more in-depth discussion of warp propulsion systems, refer to the '''' by Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda . Chapter 5, "Warp Propulsion Systems", discusses the following topics:
However, it should be noted that the shows often contradicted both the TNG and DS9 technical manuals. The essence to continuum distortion propulsion lies in the generation of a warp field around the ship. This field is created when the subspace coils of the warp nacelles are energised with energetic plasma produced from the matter/antimatter reaction. The key to overcoming the limit imposed by Einstein's Theory is that the subspace field reduces the Gravitational Constant of the object it surrounds. If the gravitational constant can be reduced to zero with a field of influence - in this case, the subspace field - then conventional relativity does not apply, since the mass component has been nullified. The ship achieves propulsive force through asymptotic Peristaltic field manipulation. This is where the subspace field is energised in a forward-to-aft configuration, thus moving space around the ship, hence the name, ''continuum distortion propulsion''. One warp field will give a velocity of warp one, which is, ironically enough, not quite the speed of light. Objects travelling at this velocity, indeed light itself, alternate between two velocity states while remaining at neither for no longer than Planck Time . The key to achieving higher warp factors lies in nesting multiple warp fields in each other and modulating the coupling and decoupling rate of the warp fields. In higher warp velocities it is the coupling and decoupling effect that gives rise to greater propulsive force. As the warp factor graph above indicates, the energy required to reach high warp factors grows at an increasing rate, making it seemingly impossible to reach warp 10. The field coupling and decoupling rate would exceed Planck time, as would the energy requirements exceed the capacity of a Warp Core . Since the warp fields are aligned and generated in a forward-to-aft configuration, it raises the question as to what happens when the fields are out of alignment. Presumably, this would have a catastrophic effect on the ship's structural integrity - one part of the ship would be travelling faster than the other and it would be ripped apart. The Slingshot Effect A side effect of Warp travel which has been shown throughout Star Trek is "the Slingshot effect". First discovered by accident in ". WARP AND THE ENVIRONMENT In the Season 7 ''Next Generation'' episode " Force Of Nature ", it was revealed that warp drive travel can be detrimental to subspace, and in some areas it can cause subspace fissures along heavily traveled routes. Travel faster than warp 5 was banned in the aforementioned episode, but there is argument among fans as to whether the ban exists only in the affected areas of space, or in all areas. If it is a universal limit, it is widely ignored and rarely even mentioned in later episodes and series. However, there was a case, in an episode of TNG, of Picard ordering faster than warp 5 travel and someone reminding him of the ban. A technological solution was found, involving the warp engines on the USS ''Voyager'' . This has been confirmed by the www.startrek.com library, explaining that Voyager was designed to go faster than warp 5 without causing subspace damage such as fissuring of space. The Sovereign Class Enterprise-E also featured advanced Warp Drive engines that allow travel at very high warp velocities without damaging the fabric of space. IS A NONFICTIONAL WARP DRIVE POSSIBLE? As many ''Star Trek'' fans know, many of the futuristic technologies featured on ''Star Trek'' have actually been created (such as the Hypospray ) or are currently being researched (''e.g.,'' the VISOR ). In 1996 , NASA established the Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program , which sponsored some speculative work on warp drives. This program was discontinued in 2002. While Thought Experiment s on the wilder shores of theoretical physics continue, no scheme that may allow "warp speed" travel has yet been devised that has been accepted by mainstream science. Some physicists have proposed a model of FTL travel, formulated in the context of Lorentzian Manifolds , which are used in General Relativity to construct Spacetime models. However, contrary to a common misunderstanding, these models are in no sense solutions to the Einstein Field Equation , and they give absolutely no hint of how to actually make a ''warp bubble''. These models do however show that while it is indeed impossible to go faster than the speed of light, in principle it might be possible to circumvent the problem by suitably "warping" spacetime itself. The best known such, known as the Alcubierre Drive , has the amusing feature that its terminology is in accord with ''Trek'' jargon: "warp factors" measure the warping of space (or rather spacetime), not actual speed. ''Unknown'' Recently, the 's biography wikipedia web page. SEE ALSO
EXTERNAL LINKS
Here is a small selection of speculative articles from the physics literature:
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