Did they exceed Warp 10? I thought Paris only hit the limit, not crossed. I’d rewatch to check, but… Then I’d have to watch the Warp 10 episode, and I’m not doing that again.
Warp 10 and 10+ are the same thing, as you essentially are everywhere and everything at once. The tricky part is parking in your own corporeal form in your own time as far as I’ve come to understand it.
This makes it seem like Tom Paris did park in the right place but did not come to a full stop and continued to “skid” in time.
I like it.
I prefer my explanation: exposure to the space/time distortion of warp 10 gives beings who are used to linear time psychic hallucinations that only diminish with time and space. Tom Paris didn’t begin evolving at all, he just had a Trainspotting freakout that unwittingly forced every sapient being onboard, including the EMH, to experience it with him. It diminished for everyone else once he bounced. Chakotay and Harry Kim didn’t actually find salamanders on that planet, they found Paris and Janeway rolling around naked in a mud puddle making salamander noises. The explanation was made up so they didn’t have to file paperwork detailing a captain and a flag officer being found fucking on the ground covered in their own barf and shit.
You can’t reach warp 10, let alone exceed it.
Didn’t they also say the same thing about the speed of light? Frankly it’s whatever the writers decide meets their plot points.
Probably. I’m just going by the officially published technical manuals that go over the in-universe physics in detail.
Warp 10 represents going infinitely fast. It’s not a speed limit in the usual sense, as you can always keep going faster than you were before. It’s an exponential scale. The jump from 9.9 to 9.99 is a bigger difference in speed than the jump from 9.8 to 9.9. while the change in warp factor gets smaller with higher numbers, it actually represents a larger difference in speed. Always chasing, but never reaching, warp 10.
It’s a hard thing to convey to the audience watching the show, so I think they sometimes abandon it in favor of linear speed when they want to stress high speeds without confusing people.
“I thought we discussed never mentioning this again!?”
Omg your image is perfect!
This one is not but I hope you at least enjoy it a little:
They did so in TOS, TAS, and TNG before the “warp factor” system got retconned for VOY.
warp speed is always a plot device in Trek. There’s never any consistency.
I get what you mean and don’t want to ummm acshually you, I just wanted to mention in TNG how they discovered high warp speeds were essentially causing damage to the universe and this resulted in the federation limiting warp speeds. I believe they even had to request permission to use a higher warp speed in a later episode, though I could be misremembering. I know they kept to the speed limit except in case of truly emergency situations
Does a higher warp factor use more dilithium or something? I have wondered, when a captain orders “take us to warp one”, why not choose warp two?
The higher the amount of energy you require from the dilithium, the quicker it fractures. In newer starships they recrystallize whioe still in use, but in older federation ships like when Those Old Scientists were roaming the stars, it was a real danger that you’d break the only dilithium crystals on the ship and be more or less stranded if you pushed them too hard.
Of course you still have to deal with warp core stress and heat dispersion on newer ships.
So when a sovereign class goes to warp 6, that’s more or less cruising speed. When she goes to warp 9.975, she needs to haul ass to get somewhere right the fuck now
Especially with subspace damage at higher warps with less streamlined ships/warp bubbles, starfleet limited travel in general to warp 6 and some areas the speed limit is warp 3.
/uMO So in other words… Whatever the plot currently demands, that’s what they go with. It’s just a show of “we need to be there quickly” or “we have some time to kill” more or less.
Dilithium only regulates the matter/anti-matter reaction to keep the flow consistent. The core itself is powered by the matter anti-matter reaction, which has always been shown to be fueled by deuterium.
I can’t remember if it was stated onscreen, but I always understood it to be that the cruising speed of a starship is where they find the maximum efficiency of fuel use vs speed as well as wear-and-tear on the nacelles and warp coils.
