Warp Factor
Warp FactorWarp Factor is the units of speed when using a WarpDrive. There is some disagreement over its meaning, or even if there is any consistent definition at all. Others shrug and point out that it is, after all, just a PlotEnablingDevice and not real.
Of course, others get very upset about that suggestion ...
Warp 1 is the speed of light. Kirk's Enterprise crapped out about Warp 6; supposedly there's an asymptote at 10 that can never be reached without invoking some kind of superhuman engineering. The series never gives an explicit calibration of the higher warp numbers, but if the travel times and distances are to make any sense at all, it needs to be some kind of log scale.
Warp 10 would require infinite power.Is it just a coincidence that the upper limit on velocity in the universe is the speed of light multiplied by the number of digits on a primate's hands? I'm starting to feel special and tingly all of a sudden.
(I don't think it's special at all. After all, my warp drive GoesToEleven.)
(( who are you, anne boleyn? :) ))
In the Voyager episode "Threshold" Tom Paris took a shuttlecraft to warp 10. He occupied every point in the universe simultaneously. Then he started evolving at an increased rate (Star Trek writers have no understanding of Darwin.) Before he turned into a giant newt (our inevitable evolutionary destination) he kidnapped Captain Janeway, made her go to warp 10 with him, "evolved" her into a giant newt, mated with her and sired a brood of super "evolved" giant newt babies. Then the Doctor found them and zapped them back to normal. I'm convinced I did not hallucinate this episode. -- EricHodges
Sadly, I too shared that hallucination. The punchline was that Paris and Janeway mated... -- PhlIp
As the ship is on subspace, her inertial mass goes to zero, and her speed goes to c. By increasing the frequency of the pulses through the Warp nacelles, the momentum increases. Once completely in subspace (mass <= 0) the increased momentum increases the speed of the ship. The 10 space was adopted when Warp physicist found that at those points, there's a dropout of energy consumption, and the ship can use considerably less energy when travelling at an integer Warp speed than fractionary ones. When the speed of the ship moves beyond Warp 9, the energy consumption curve moves up hyperbolically towards infinity which would correspond to Warp 10. The USS Enterprise-D from The Next Generation, had a top speed (Warp core melting) around Warp 9.6. USS Voyager could make Warp 9.975, about 1 and 1/2 faster... Boosted subspatial communications could reach Warp 9.9999, about 199,516c.
Warp speeds up to 9 can be calculated using this formula:
Speed = c * WarpFactor ^ 10/3
c is the speed of light (~1.08e9 kph)
In the old StarFleetTechnicalManual? it said that warp drive goes <warp number> ^ 3 times the speed of light. But really, that doesn't make any sense; the numbers don't add up.
See Also http://www.newscientist.com/cgi-bin/pageserver.cgi?/ns/19990612/newsstory8.html : (BrokenLink as at 2002/07/01 14:10 GMT) WarpDrive is back on the drawing board. It turns out that you can make one with as little as one gram of negative energy. Of course we don't know how to make negative energy, but we know it exists at a subatomic level, so a Roddenberry future is again a possibility ...
Unfortunately the warp bubble collapses, crushing your ship once you stop moving, but that doesn't matter because you can only have a microscopic entry to the bubble in the first place - hence warp drive will never be practical even if you can make negative matter (via some sort of CasimirEffect??), the better way would be selectively diverting inertial frame dragging. Anyone have a cluster of micro black holes?
I recall a lecture by JamesDoohan in the late seventies where during the question/answer period someone asked about the formula for converting WarpFactor into commonly understood units. The answer given was c * 2^ (WarpFactor).
(Of course, this means it isn't really a factor.)
Wouldn't this mean that Warp 1 is twice the speed of light? That can't be right.
Maybe it would work if the fomula were "c * 2 ^ (WarpFactor -1)". Then Warp 1 would be c * 2 ^ 0 thus one time the speed of light.
Warp factor one is c, the speed of light, while higher speeds are computed geometrically under one of two different formulae.
...The [Enterprise] reached warp 14.1 in 2268 when the warp engines were sabotaged by 'Losira'. (That Which Survives [TOS]). By the 24th century, a new warp-factor scale was in use that employed an asymptotic curve, placing warp 10 as an infinite value.
At the beginning of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Gene Roddenberry said he wanted to change the warp-speed scale to put warp 10 at the absolute top of the scale. ...The warp scale has been recalibrated so that all the speeds shown in the original show are "actually" less than warp 10. Interestingly, the original Star Trek series never established actual speeds for warp factors in any episode or movie, although the old warp factor cubed formula has come to be generally accepted.
Summary warp speed chart for Starship Enterprise, NCC-1701D
where c = 1078 million km/h
Speed Description ----- ----------- Standard orbit 9600 km/h (SUBLIGHT) Full impulse 0.25c (SUBLIGHT) Warp factor 1 1c Warp factor 2 10c Warp factor 3 39c Warp factor 4 102c Warp factor 5 214c Warp factor 6 352c Warp factor 7 656c Warp factor 8 1024c Warp factor 9 1516c Warp factor 9.2 1649c Warp factor 9.6 1909c Warp factor 9.9 3052c Warp factor 9.99 7902c Warp factor 9.9999 199516c Warp factor 10 infiniteThis speed is meaningless - since a starship at Warp 10 would occupy all points in the universe simultaneously. see also: InfiniteImprobabilityDrive
(Use these estimates for comparison only - your actual mileage may vary.) ("parsecage" :-) ) Hey! I resemble that remark! -- MartySchrader, prez of Parsec Systems, Inc. <shameless plug warning>
Source: The Star Trek Encyclopedia : A Reference Guide to the Future by Michael Okuda, et al (First printing - April 1994) pp.372-3
(For brevity, additional table columns and notes from the book are not shown here. -- CarstenKlapp)
[Please wiki-reformat my table if you can make it look any better. -- ck] {Might suggest that the comment that mass goes to zero while in warp is incorrect according to guides on Startrek in general. The mass becomes lower, but it never goes to zero. In fact, the actual mass lowering refers mostly to Impulse drive in the Startrek universe. A low level warp field is used to bring about lower mass so less power is needed for a given velocity. The assumption has always been that a high level warp field further lowers mass. But in none of the ST references out there does it lower it to zero. -- PKH]
The last episode of Next Generation showed the ships going warp 14. And the Borg cubes travelled at warp 10. Maybe we are reading too much in to this. [Those values are based on different scales, which is a major point made in this article. -- int]
Looking at your table, I see warp 6 is 352c. But according to StarTrekVoyager, when they were stranded in the far end of the Delta Quadrant, they were 70 years away at warp 6 (which is the fastest warp they can maintain for an unlimited time). That would make them 70 * 352 = 24640 light years away from the Alpha quadrant. But our galaxy is 100,000 light years long - at least according to http://www.seds.org/messier/more/mw.html - And that would mean that they cannot be in the far side of the Delta Quadrant. Maybe in the middle of it. -- DorKleiman
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