Favorite Star Drive

[TheDS]

Something elseto keep in mind:

1) Different authors have a different view on what speed is what. For instance, there is at least one episode of NG where the Enterprise travels at Warp 13.something. This author might be using the Warp^4 power, which was the first formula I heard for NG, or maybe he just wanted people to think the ship was a lot faster.

2) The "galactic speed limit" is infinity! Warp 10 is supposed to represent infinite speed, and therefore is unattainable.

I personally like expressing super-c velocities in terms of dBc, that is, decibel multiples of c.

0 dBc is light speed.
10 dBc is 10x
20 dBc is 100x
30 dBc is 1000x (about the speed of Jump 6 and Classic trek Warp 10)
-10 dBc would be 1/10th of light, or about 30,000 kps

This keeps the numbers manageable.

(Note that the Population figure used for UWPs is a Bel curve (one 'l' in Bel). Each increment of 1 is a power of 10. For deciBels, each increment of 10 is a multiple of 10. It's not just for audio measurement.)

At the rip-roaring speed of 90 dBc, I can get to the edge of the universe in about 11-20 years (depending on the size). At the crawly speed of -90 dBc, I travel about 1 foot per second.

One other shortcut: a difference of 3 is a multiple of 2 (1.96 or so). So 3 dBc is 2x the speed of light, 6 dBc is 4x, 9 dBc is 8x.

Using dBc, there aren't many practical velocities that CAN'T be represented with 2 digits and a + or -.

 

[TKalbfus]

2) The "galactic speed limit" is infinity! Warp 10 is supposed to represent infinite speed, and therefore is unattainable.

Infinity is not a limit, the word itself means unbounded. I don't see the use of calling an infinite velocity warp 10, it doesn't do anything and certainly doesn't limit how fast a starship can travel. The Star Trek Warp Scale is confusing, and that confusion is completely unnecessary. It seems to me that the writers of Star Trek The Next Generation are not sure exactly what they want their warp drive to do. To me at least it makes more sense to express velocity in multiple values of c than as some number between 0 and 10. How fast is warp 9.999992 anyway? its not any easier to express than saying warp 10,000. People who want to role play in the Star Trek Universe have to deal with the warpscale legacy, but I see no reason to adopt a warpscale like that for another universe. The Star Trek Warp sounds like a compromise between two factions of Star Trek writers.

One faction says its ridiculous to have warp values greater than 10, and that 10 should be the ultimate limit. (I don't know how they come to that conclusion)

Another faction says what about those superadvanced intelligent alien starships, shouldn't they be able to go faster than a Federation ship?

A compromise was forged and they sort of squared the circle. They eliminated the warp ten limit by relabeling it some other warp value and then set 10 at infinity so that the first faction wouldn't know that they got rid of warp 10 altogether. (I wonder if they were fooled.) Infinity is not a number, but they went ahead and gave it a number anyway.

One way to express an infinite warp scale is this way:

Warp 1 = 9/9 c = 1 c
Warp 2 = 9/8 c = 1.125 c
Warp 3 = 9/7 c = 1.286 c
Warp 4 = 9/6 c = 1.5 c
Warp 5 = 9/5 c = 1.8 c
Warp 6 = 9/4 c = 2.25 c
Warp 7 = 9/3 c = 3 c
Warp 8 = 9/2 c = 4.5 c
Warp 9 = 9/1 c = 9 c
Warp 10 = 9/0 c = infinity

To get more useful velocities you might want to cube the above so that

Warp 1 = 1 c
Warp 2 = 1.42 c
Warp 3 = 2.126 c
Warp 4 = 3.375 c
Warp 5 = 5.832 c
Warp 6 = 11.39 c
Warp 7 = 27 c
Warp 8 = 91.125 c
Warp 9 = 729 c
Warp 10 = still infinity

 

[Uncle Bob]

Originally posted by Strephon Alkhalikoi:
I understand how you feel about Star Trek's warp drive and your decision to base your warp system off of fusion, but there's one big problem with the fusion concept. It was proven by the big brains of the era to be impossible to reach near relativisitic speeds with a fusion drive. Antimatter is the only thing that was able to generate the energies needed to hurl us to the nearest stars at multiples of the speed of light.

<choke> I missed this clunker. The big brains of the 1960s proved no such thing. A half kilo each of ant-matter and matter has about 25 times the energy of fusing a kilo of hydrogen, so antimatter wil get you to relatavistic speedswith 100x the payload, but neither will get you all the way to C.

To exceed lightspeed with a wormhole or Alcubierre/van den Broek drive requires a relatively small amount of negative energy.

Heinlein's Cherenkov drive

PAVEL ALEKSEYEVICH CHERENKOV

1958 Nobel Laureate in Physics for the discovery and the interpretation of the Cherenkov effect

Cherenkov effect
When a charged particle is emitted in radioactive decay with velocity greater than c/n (the speed of light in the medium), where c is the speed of light in vacuum and n is the index of refraction of the medium, a "shock wave" of photons is generated in the blue light range, analogous to the sonic boom of a jet flying faster than the speed of sound.
Applications of this effect include...

"

Sound like a version of the stutterwarp.

 

[Typhonis]

Star Wars style hyperdrive I mean in a day or so ,considering the time Darth Maul needed to get his ship rerady* he went from Coruscant((inner core world)) to Tatooine ((outer rim some estimsat the strait distance to be 30,000 ly)).