I don’t even care about the meme anymore, the number of people in here that are confusing bending with warping is driving me crazy! Watch some cute animated ducks and a british guy explain it.
edit: i forgot about einstein-rosen bridges, those ARE described as a wormhole that is created by warping spacetime, but this isn’t how the warp engines in the show supposedly work.
the number of people confusing warp with wormholes is luckily not that high, to my knowledge you are the only one here 😂
I saw at least 6 people describe star trek warp engines as “folding” space before I posted! The warp engines in star trek don’t fold spacetime like a wormhole, they contract spacetime in front of the ship and expand it behind the ship. You know, warping it! I’m having trouble getting images to upload with the migration but here.
ok, but why did you link to Wormholes Explained?
Because I couldn’t find anything that explains both folding and warping in a cute 8 minute video, so I posted the one that at least explains folding, figuring people on a Star Trek forum will be smart enough to infer the difference. Here’s a nearly 2 hour “intro to black holes” video as well as a collection of videos talking about warp drives if you’re interested.
yeah, i am “smart enough” to infer the difference, otherwise i couldn’t ask “why are you showing video that explains the wrong answer to the question discussed”. that is heavily counterintuitive 🤷♂️
I don’t mean for that to come off as rude, I was including you in the intelligent comment! Anyway, it was mostly a silly post in a silly thread about silly science fiction and this is turning into not silly fun anymore so I’ma peace out!
Yeah, at impulse they would still want the deflector shields, but at warp they can only remain faster than light due to power creating the warp bubble/field. Like a rubber band, you need to constantly exert force to repell the elastic forces.
To argue in the spirit of OP’s meme:
You can’t create warp bubble/field as you go faster than light. Under relativity (to say nothing about other physical theories) “faster than light” travel is possible only if the “warp field”/“bent spcetime”/“wormhole”/etc. is already there and you’re just using it to travel.
Faster warp is probally akin to “better bubble/space time folding.” Cant maintain this warp speed is akin to saying “we dont have the power right now to maintain this complex of a space time fold.”
My point is you can’t be the one making the “fold” that you’re traveling in, no matter how much energy or whatever you have. If you do that your travel would either be slower than light or it would severely violate relativity (in ways that Alcubierre drive or wormhole or whatever don’t).
An alcubierre drive is literally folding space around the ship, ST warp drives are more or less a primitive version of the concept. And do currently have an issue (as much as a theoretical technology can have issues) that we don’t actually know how you would accelerate such a bubble of folded space.
You all are mixing your metaphors a bit. Wormholes “fold” space; imagine if the universe was a piece of paper. Now fold the paper in half and poke a pencil through it. That’s folding. “Warp” engines, like the Alcubierre Drive, do just what they say - they warp spacetime itself around the ship by compressing the spacetime behind the ship and expanding the spacetime in front of the ship, essentially creating a pressure differential that naturally pulls the ship along it’s new modified world line. This is what they’re talking about any time you hear them mention a “warp bubble”.
The answer is you don’t. You (the person on the ship) can’t do it. That would be incompatible with relativity. Someone else has to set up the bubble for you beforehand. Alcubierre warp works more like a highway than a magical engine.
Futurama may have gotten this “correct” in that the ship doesnt move in warp as much as it lets the universe move past it. The warping ships are held outside of spacetime, and “move” based on the shape of the bubble.
Maybe higher warp is just a more complex bubble that makes the ship more abstracted from spacetime.
That doesn’t fix anything. Physics doesn’t care if you’re the one moving or if you declare yourself to be still and the rest of the universe is moving.
“Held outside spacetime” also makes no sense at all in the context of relativity, but if they want that to be their sci-fi sauce then that’s fine.
I dont know why youre so set about fitting Star treks science into the framework of ours science. They either are insanely past our limited understanding of physics, or its absolute bullshit and cant be slotted together.
We see in TNG alone that warp bubbles exist and are generated by onboard ship components. We seem them move great distances inside them, and know they require intense power to maintain. It clearly works because we see it work.
But besides that, TNG has lots of other impossible “move fast” options. We know that there ways of travel that far exceed warp speed powered by “thoughts,” and not just one “thought” based hyperspeed either. You have the “traveler sparkly warp” and the “barkley think good” wavy warp, hell you even have gumtoos “spinny warp” that tossed the enterpise and romulan ship way past their top speeds.
Dont get me started on Q or tom paris hitting warp 10 to go “everywhere all at once.”
Like a rubber band
A true Trekkie
So what you’re saying is, we need more rubber bands
There’s never a time when you don’t.
Good God, you’ve finally unlocked warp factor 10!
Let the salamander sex party commence!
All that technology but no idea how to use it, they truly are a primitive race.
Maybe it has something to do with active debris absorption 🤔
I am insufficiently versed in Star Trek to know whether there’s a known reason why that isn’t true at warp speed.
You’d need power to stop.
Otherwise, the ship would just keep going past system after system…
You’d need power to stop.
you would not, because you are not moving, so you don’t really need to stop. it is just the universe around you that is moving, which solves some problems with laws of physics ;)
it is impossible to go faster than speed of light.
check what happens in this equation when v (the actual speed) approaches c (the speed of light). the number below the fraction bar approaches zero and the whole value approaches infinity.
it is why nothing with mass can move in a speed of light, because it would need infinite energy, which is rather hard to get.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor
that is why startrek ships are not moving faster than speed of light, what they actually do, is contract the space around the ship (which, in science fiction, needs less energy than actually flying and is somehow doable.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_drive
also check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive
You’re describing an Alcubierre drive. Star Trek doesn’t use that. Star Trek warp forms a bubble in subspace and you traverse the galaxy there. This bubble makes your inertial mass smaller which allows you to reach velocity values above c.
The ship is moving because the few times we see something get ejected from the warp field it continues moving in normal space. It doesn’t stop dead.
(it’s just a TV show, man)
(You should really just re-lax)
OK how does subspace communication work faster than light
We have no meaningful understanding of how FTL works. It is presented to us as an active process, something that must be maintained, unlike normal space velocity.
But, again, no meaningful understanding.
Either way, you need power.
If warp speed respects inertia, you need power to stop.
If it’s an active process, you need power to keep going.
I like the system the writer came up with in ‘The Forever War.’ Einstein rules until you get to specific stars with ‘wormholes’
No, if warp speed has to be maintained, then when it stops being maintained, you stop moving at warp. This is very well outlined in the show. It doesn’t work with our understanding of, well, anything, but that’s covered under “we have no meaningful understanding of FTL.”
You’re trying to impose real world physics on something that has no real world analogue.
I’m not an expert, but I believe warp speed is theoretically achieved by warping two points in space so they’re closer together, then traversing them, and releasing the warp (which allows FTL travel). So you would definitely need continuous power to maintain that.
When moving at a high speed through the galaxy you potential may change. This must be paid and paid quickly too.
Scotty knows that conservation of momentum actually doesn’t happen over long distances in an expanding universe. Eventually you’ll stop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcjdwSY2AzM
But also you need a warp drive to maintain warp. As soon as you turn it off or damage the nacelles you’re kicked out of the warp bubble. This happened in Into Darkness.
In every ST series, they only ever say that in warp. And nobody has no idea how warp works.
But for some reason they keep dropping out of orbit around planets.
What else were they orbiting?
Stars, crystaline entities,…
Lady streamers at twitchcon
I can only remember occasions where they had atmospheric drag, dropping out of orbit is much more of a Star Wars thing.
But I can believe one of the new shows fucked the entire thing up.
less so in nutrek, old trek usually has some techno-babble included. i wonder if they think the viewers will get bored to death from a pseudo-explanation of how warp works, eventhough they sorta explained it over the franchise as (contracting and expanding space using a subspace field).
transwarp, vortex, slipstream kinda sidesteps the speed of light in our own universe, by interdimensional travel, hence why its faster than warp.
I just know if you go faster than Warp 9 you’re fucked
The Delta Flyer went above Warp 10.
But that was Voyager, and Voyager frequently is not considered cannon.
Warp 10 was how they got back, wasn’t it?
But it’s also at the end of the Star Trek timeline, so they’re allowed to advance the tech curve a little bit
Warp 10 was how they got back, wasn’t it?
no, warp 10 is how paris and janeway made their lizard babies, left them stranded somewhere and then never talked about them again. worf is parent of the year compared to these two.
Voyager took a Borg transwarp corridor to get back to Earth. Future Admiral Janeway facilitated it.
Yeah, but you get to have sex with the captain, uncaffeinated.
Well, at minimum, fucking seems to be involved.
Warp 10. The Enterprise C regularly surpassed 9.5.
Didn’t rikers enterprise go to warp 13?
Writers are not physicists, and the TOS Enterprise also had a few minutes above warp 10 at some point. It’s whatever a set of 2-4 writers and 3-5 producers decided that week, and retconning the awkward bits later.
I never was making that claim, just that the person I replied to say going above 10 was dangerous
Sure, but I’m saying that any thought or concern about a canon transwarp limit is at risk of being dashed by the whims of people looking for a plot device.
Oh for sure, warp factors and the limits thereof can be bent to fit a particular story
At some point in the cannon they decided warp 10 is the transwarp limit. They ignored it a couple of times.
they changed that between TOS and TNG.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Warp_factor#Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series
It’s whatever a set of 2-4 writers and 3-5 producers decided that week, and retconning the awkward bits later.
it is actually not, they had detailed manual for that. star trek was inconsistent or vague about lot of stuff (for example how their economic utopia works), but they usually tried to have their technobabble consistent.
they changed how the warp speed works between TOS and TNG.
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Warp_factor#Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series
(not saying there weren’t exceptions, for example there were some really random numbers flying in the equinox double episode.)
Then tell me what Tom Paris did in the Cochrane shuttlecraft ;)
That’s my point. It’s a standard until it’s not for a convenient plot reason.
TOS:
Warp factor speed (c) travelled in 24 hours (ly) Earth to Alpha Centauri 9 729 1.996 52.07 hours 10 1000 2.738 37.96 hours 11 1331 3.644 28.52 hoursfrom TNG forward:
9 1516 4.15 25.03 hours 10 ∞ ∞ 0the lizard babies episode, however absurd, is in line with this.
Rikers enterprise went to Warp 69
It did, but it also attacked the klingons from below rather than the standard head on so we know they writers were all high when they wrote that!
The D. We only saw The C once. That was the ship Tasha went to with Shooter McGavin.
IIRC the in universe reason for the E’s long ass nacelles was to allow it to achieve 9.95. I am pretty sure I remember part of the expanded universe going into experimental refits of the USS Sovereign that allowed it to hit 9.995.
nah, thats movement relative to space time, warp suggests bending said space time in order to, relative to your destination, move faster than light, while essentially staying motionless in spacetime.
In this paradigm inertia is very much not a thing
Then explain inertial dampeners buddy! (No seriously, someone please explain to me why they need inertial dampeners at warp. It’s been bugging me for literally years.)
They also use “impulse”, which seems to be a very high powered inertial type deal. That should follow the rules we’re used to
Oh yeah absolutely. But I’m almost certain I’ve heard them complain about the intertial dampeners being maxed out or something when they’ve been flung to crazy warp factors by one of the various near-omnipotent aliens they seem to encounter at least once a season lol.
I’d love to start making up nerdy explanations, and I mean its plausible bending spacetime all willy nilly might have some local inertial side-effects, but the concept of inertial dampers is honestly quite out there. That and the artificial gravity.
They’re inside a bubble of newtonion rules while doing crazy things to the space around them. If something jostles them hard enough, the whole crew would stop being biology and become physics. Inertial dampers stop that.
This, the power is needed to maintain the subspace bubble, being thrown from said bubble from losing power has been shown to be dangerous. Maybe you just drop out of warp, maybe you drop out too close to something and have no control.
Thank you. I read this thinking “yeah this is not simple Newtonian motion”.
At the speeds they travel literally everything is an external force on them
Pretty sure the warp drives need continuous power to contract space in front of the ship and expand it behind the ship to allow faster than light travel
The ship isn’t actually moving during faster than light travel, it just bends space around it
They can only move at impulse speed without engine output due to their being no friction and gravity in space
There is definitely gravity in space! It just doesn’t feel that way because there’s no ground so you’re mostly in free fall which to you is indistinguishable from being in no gravity. (fun fact: this indistinguishability is actually the crux of General Relativity!)
Yep, everything is in freefall orbit of something bigger.
What if you are in the gravity center of the universe?
we are not doing the math for your mom
Let me know if you ever go.
i think that would actually be the case most of the time.
you don’t care about anything outside the observable universe and inside that bubble, the cosmological principal would apply, stating that on a large enough scale, the universe and distribution of matter in it is considered homogeneous
so unless you are in close proximity to some local gravitational source, i think you would be generally affected by roughly the same gravity from all directions.
Even when the impulse drives are down, the ship always just stops 🤷♂️
I think they might actually be in fluidic space and just really unobservant.
I mean, technically all space is fluidic space. The interstellar Medium is a fluid. It transfers pressure waves, has a temperature, has a density, even a viscosity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_medium
Normally you can ignore the drag from the Interplanetary or Interstellar media, but if you had a ship that could travel at high relativistic speed, pushing past 0.9c, 0.99c, 0.999c, etc., you actually would have to consider the drag from it. Ships going that fast would have to be designed with aerodynamic principles in mind, just like atmospheric craft.
Like the ships (lighthughers) in Revelation Space and other works from Alastair Reynolds :D
Normally you can ignore the drag from the Interplanetary or Interstellar media, but if you had a ship that could travel at high relativistic speed, pushing past 0.9c, 0.99c, 0.999c, etc., you actually would have to consider the drag from it. Ships going that fast would have to be designed with aerodynamic principles in mind, just like atmospheric craft.
This is new and surprising to me. Do you have a source? It seems to me that if it gets to a point where you need to design your ship using aerodynamic principle, you should also be able to drive your ship using aerodynamic principle (i.e., push on stuff around the ship, instead of expelling propellant from the ship as usual spacecrafts do).
I suppose if you could develop some type of sci-fi magnet ram-air funnel thingy you could make something work with the hydrogen atoms drifting around, but you’d still have to jet something out the back to keep going. Less like a rocket, more like an airplane.
“It’s like flying through soup, sir!”
“Mmm… Soup… 🤤”
split pea, clam chowder, or bean with bacon? this commodore’s hungry
My favorite bit is how when life support goes offline, it’s like they’re running out of oxygen within seconds. I once saw the math referencing the actual canon dimensions of the Enterprise D and its canon crew complement. It’s comically large for the number of people in it. You could shut off all the CO2 scrubbers in a space that cavernous, and it would be months before the crew began noticing any ill effects. The Enterprises are god-damn ginormous.
It’s the Vulcans. That actually respirate at 1000x the rate of humans. It’s how they remain emotionless. They are too focused on breathing to get angry. The massive compression necessary to breathe that much is actually how they are constantly so full of hot air. They don’t actually need to breathe that much too survive, but they are just too proud to give it up even in an emergency situation. It’s all a weird power play. 🖖
Did you steal this from Dr mccoy’s Facebook?
Oh I’m sorry, is a ship’s head medical officer with decades of experience treating a dozen or more species of crewmen and guests not a good enough source for you? Don’t those pointy eared bastards fool you. They’re devious.
For one time in their cold-hearted miserable lives couldn’t they just give a damn?
Ok season 1 archer
I recently saw a DS9 episode where O’Brien said life support is down and it’s going to be a problem in a day or sth, was pleasantly surprised at that.
Might still not be accurate, but at least it was not a “oh shit we’ll die now” kind of thing.
It depends. Lack of air circulation can cause problems in minutes as people can end up breathing stagnant air. Less of a problem if you have artificial gravity as then you have convection and/or the coriolis effect to help keep the air moving. As for actually running out: less of an issue.
The Enterprises are god-damn ginormous.
It’s all those bowling alleys and home theatres they installed in the lower decks.
Except when they go into orbit and then things work as expected.
To suspend disbelief, when any non-hard sci-fi show says “speed” I subconsciously translate it to “acceleration.” If the ship they’re chasing (or being chased by) is pushing their engines to the max then the enterprise also needs to push its engines to the max to match the speed. If they just free-float at constant velocity then they’ll fall behind very quickly.
This. The writers just dumb it down a bit for the normies.
I don’t even think it’s dumbing down. Speed is relative. That’s just how you’d say it when you’re describing your acceleration relative to another body, spaceship, whatever. No one thinks or cares about your absolute velocity on a universal scale.
For the same reason we describe speed relative to the ground on earth. Nobody’s specifying that we’re traveling ~1,624km/hr west, and ~1724km/hr east, they’re just going 50km/hr
The Expanse had some great dramatic moments caused by this important distinction. Like, they only had gravity if they were constantly accelerating. The moment you stop, no matter what speed you’re at, relativity will get rid of the “gravity” effect. So if you wanted to, say, perform surgery in zero-g then you’d need to be constantly accelerating to higher and higher velocities for the duration of the surgery.
Unrelated but in the expanse they really nailed those aspects. When there’s a pursuit, it’s always an acceleration pursuit, which is limited by how much G the characters can tolerate, and for how long.
The only magic tech they introduce is a super efficient fusion core engine, but they use it to improve realism rather than destroy it. It’s great.
I’m on the second Expanse book and I am fucking loving it. I absolutely love hard Sci-Fi. I think The Expanse is taking the cake for my favorite Sci-Fi book series. Before this is was The Three Body Problem series. I specifically love Death’s End
Haven’t gotten around to the 3 body problem yet, but it seems reaaaaally nice !
Well, and the acceleration drugs they take to withstand the high G. Kinda unobtainium drugs.
Shit you’re right that’s also magic tech
And they accelerate through the first 50% of a journey, flip, and decelerate the remaining 50%. I can’t name another sci-fi tackle space journeys in a realistic way like that. Everything else just treats it like air travel - pushing your way through something with drag.
My favorite touch is how the rooms are stacked vertically in the ships so the gravity is provided by the acceleration. Also how pouring drinks always happens differently depending on the gravity and spin off the body they’re on. Man I love this show!
Man I love this show!
WHERE SEASON 7? 😭
I think the rest of the books happens after a hiatus of a thousand years, doesn’t it ? I doubt it’s even the same cast of characters, not sure i’m interested in that.
There are nine books and they all (give or take a few) follow the same main cast. Extremely minor time-skips excluding the following. Spoilers:
Tap for spoiler
There aren’t any time skips besides for minor ones, except at the end of the series, after the destruction of the ring network and the death of holden, where there is a massive time-skip to the point one of the ring colonies develops sufficiently advanced interstellar travel, to the point they are able to visit earth and be greeted by the now-immortal Amos.
I would like to see more settings with beam-powered propulsion. That’s honestly the most realistic way of actually achieving interstellar travel. You set up large beaming arrays powered by fusion reactors or huge solar arrays. Or you build a laser system right out of the Sun’s upper atmosphere. Then you accelerate to significant fractions of c, riding on a beam of laser light.
Slowing down is a problem, but even that can be done with beam power. As it approaches a destination system, a ship can unfurl a secondary mirror array. If the system back at Sol can maintain focus over that distance, you use the secondary array to bounce light back onto the incoming craft, slowing it down. And if you can’t maintain focus over that distance, you can use chained pushing lasers powered by the destination Sun to send a slow down array ahead of your incoming crewed starship. Then you just have pushing lasers installed in both systems, and you can easily send ships back and forth.
If we end up ever actually doing interstellar travel for real, it’s likely to be through this method. Laser light sails are the cheat code for practical interstellar travel, but they almost never show up in fiction. Which is a shame, as there’s a lot of interesting settings and themes that could be explored. If you’re riding on a beam ship, you don’t actually have engines onboard capable of speeding up or braking your ship. You surely have some engines - to avoid space debris and for navigating before/after being accelerated/decelerated by the laser arrays. But you are ultimately completely at the mercy of the people operating those beaming arrays. If you’re relying on a braking array to slow your ship down at its destination, what happens if the destination system decides you’re no longer welcome there? By simply not turning on the laser, you will be doomed to scream off into the void. And speeding up/slowing down is just such an intricate dance of light and momentum. Lasers have to be aimed at not where your ship is, but where it’s going to be. And a chain of many stations may need to work together, each in their turn, for the journey to succeed. And who is paying for all this infrastructure? Who controls it? Is it nation states, unified world government, is it private corporations? Is travel on them free, or do you have to pay a lifetimes of wages to afford a ride on a beam ship? Lots of possibilities. Oh, and since ships travel along known paths, space piracy is a real possibility in the right setting.
Not to mention a beam that powerful is naturally a highly potent weapon with potentially interstellar ranges, that’s a lot of power even for a government.
Alastair Reynolds is good about this in his work.
Yep. Did it way before the expanse. I think that was my first introduction to the concept of accelerate flip accelerate the other way.
When I saw the engines in front of the ships… I got so confused lol… like: wtf, why is it moving forward when the engines should be pushing it backwards? I had to google it and then I was like: aaaahhhhhh that makes so much sense now
Collapsing the warp field is bad for the same reason why the False Vacuum Collapse is bad.
It’s a different kind of space. They’re going faster than light.
have they reverse the polarity of the shields?
they can’t do that without decoupling heisenberg compensators, duh.
what if they decouple the shields and reverse the polarity of the heisenberg compensators
you would need to realign the nacelles plasma flow, but it might work. how much time do you need for that?
i did it while we were talking. so, two days?
if you want to be real miracle worker, make it one next time.
aye aye sir
o7
