This indicates that warp 9. Warp 9. Subspace communication signals travel at warp 9. In the pilot episode of the series, VOY : " Caretaker ", it is established that "at maximum speeds" it would take seventy-five years for Voyager to reach Earth, which was at that time approximated to be 75, light years away.
This would mean that the maximum speeds of the Voyager were around approximately , times the speed of light. According to the Star Trek: Voyager Technical Manual , this calculation was meant to be based on an unrealistic non-stop direct journey at the speed of warp 9.
A realistic estimate, according to the manual, was that the journey would last somewhere between two and four hundred years when taking into account the required engine cooling time needed on such an extended journey. However, in VOY : " The Voyager Conspiracy ", the ship cuts three years off its journey by crossing thirty sectors, implying that they expected to travel more than a month or approximately According to the Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology p.
Scott's Guide to the Enterprise p. Speeds in ENT : " Broken Bow ", which were mentioned as traveling at 30,, kilometers per second and going to "Neptune and back in six minutes", fit well into the ballpark of cubic warp factors between 4 and 5. The location was stated to be a three-month trip away from Earth at warp 5.
In the next episode, ENT : " The Xindi ", when Enterprise had arrived to look for the Xindi in that region, it was said they were fifty light years away from Earth. This indicates warp 5 would equal to a speed of approximately two hundred times the speed of light.
This would fall closer to the TNG scale figure for warp 5 instead of the TOS scale figure of times the speed of light estimated in the canonical chart. There are, however, instances in "Broken Bow" that do not appear to be compatible with any of the basic scales. Zefram Cochrane notes in his recorded speech that the warp five engine would allow a ship to travel a hundred times faster than what they could in Warp 2 was later on established to be the maximum warp ships in the early 22nd century had achieved in ENT : " Horizon " and " First Flight ".
Warp 5, however, was only sixteen or twenty-one times faster than warp 2 in the scales. The journey from Earth to Qo'noS in four days was another instance. In either scale, Enterprise wouldn't even reach the closest star to Earth in four days. In ENT : " Fortunate Son ", it is stated that a warp three engine would allow a ship to travel ten times faster than warp factor 1.
This doesn't work out in either of the basic formulas, unless we interpret the statement to indicate that a warp three engine would allow a speed of warp factor 3.
Warp factor 3 would be only around five times faster in either scale. According to background sources maximum warp of the ship was Warp factor 8. At the end of the broadcast, Chekov stated that the ship would arrive within three minutes.
However, there was an unknown amount of time the ship spent accelerating to maximum velocity, so there is no accurate way to ascertain the total travel time of the Enterprise from Earth to Vulcan beyond the obvious implication that it was not an especially lengthy trip.
Co-writer Roberto Orci acknowledged Montgomery Scott 's line about his time away from the Enterprise should have been something like "one week" rather than "one day". In the 25th-century timeline of the video game Star Trek Online , the warp speed scale appears to have been re-calibrated yet again to allow for the spread of new technologies such as a transwarp conduit network and quantum slipstream drive systems.
Warp factors higher than 10 appear in the game, but only when a ship is using a quantum slipstream drive or exotic equipment such as Borg-enhanced "Assimilated Subtranswarp Engines". Speeds higher than warp 10 are classified as "transwarp factors", with higher numbers equating to faster speed. Borg subtranswarp engines allow ships to travel at an average speed of "warp 15", while activating quantum slipstream gives a temporary speed boost of up to warp Memory Alpha Explore.
It's not an entirely unfounded idea. In , physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed the possibility of bending spacetime around an object. By condensing the space ahead of a craft and inflating the space behind, you could create a bubble within which a craft could travel without violating relativity.
The upshot is that anyone inside could travel effectively faster than the speed of light without experiencing any time dilation. In scientific circles, that's referred to as getting to have your cake and eat it, too. That's all a little too clean for our tastes.
If we've learned anything from the universe, it's that it doesn't like to make things easy for us. So let's assume we're at the mercy of relativism, just for fun.
We've already discussed the implications of moving at a significant fraction of C. You can pretty much say goodbye to any relationships you have at home as soon as you sign on to a Starfleet ship. After just a couple of trips to nearby stars, everyone you know and love will be dead while you haven't even been at work long enough to collect benefit time. Things get even weirder when your captain calls down to engineering to kick in the juice.
Once you're traveling faster than warp one, things get totally bizarre. The speed of light has an intrinsic relationship with causality. Once you go beyond it, the past, present, and future get a little wibbly-wobbly. We won't get into the mathematical weeds here. If you want a moderately simple explanation, check out the below video from PBS, but suffice it to say that once you get sufficiently beyond the speed of light, time goes totally out the window.
It's possible, at least hypothetically, once you're traveling at post-light speeds, to travel backward in time. There was some controversy about this a few years ago when, for a brief moment, scientists thought they might have observed superluminal neutrinos. In common terms, they thought they might have seen particles appearing before they were expected.
Eventually, it was determined that there were mechanical errors that resulted in inaccurate findings. In , physicist Chris Van Den Broeck showed that expanding the volume inside the bubble but keeping the surface area constant would reduce the energy requirements significantly , to just about the mass of the sun.
A significant improvement, but still far beyond all practical possibilities. Two recent papers — one by Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire and another by Erik Lentz — provide solutions that seem to bring warp drives closer to reality. Bobrick and Martire realized that by modifying spacetime within the bubble in a certain way, they could remove the need to use negative energy.
This solution, though, does not produce a warp drive that can go faster than light. Sign up today. Independently, Lentz also proposed a solution that does not require negative energy. It is essential to point out that these exciting developments are mathematical models. Yet, the science of warp drives is coming into view.
As a science fiction fan, I welcome all this innovative thinking. In the words of Captain Picard , things are only impossible until they are not. Imagine a supersonic aircraft travelling faster than the speed of sound.
The warp drive experiences the same effect with light waves, meaning there is no way to send a message ahead of you. How do you create the warped space-time geometry around your ship?
Agnew is more optimistic. Macdonald, too, is hopeful. She has an MPhys in mathematical physics and loves all things space, dinosaurs and dogs.
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