Was talkin about that in another comment thread actually. My headcannon is that’s why you hardly ever see them use full impulse unless it’s a life or death situation. Like you said, even 1/4 impulse is still something like 20 million meters per second.
Edit: If anyone is curious, the fastest man-made object in the universe is currently the Parker Solar Probe, which hit 0.000641C by slingshotting around Venus seven times!
Been saving up styrofoam all year. For arts and crafts, of course!
Back in my day we just wrote bad checks! (I’m kidding, I’ve never even owned a checkbook unless it was a starter pad that came with the account)
I found a fun calculator trying to research this. An object weighing 1 microgram, travelling at 0.25c, would contain nearly 3 megajoules of kinetic energy. So yeah I guess dust wouldn’t be apocalyptic but that still wouldn’t be fun to bounce into/through.
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!
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.
Also Q help you if the navigational deflectors wink out for even a microsecond lol. I’m not a physicist but I’m fairly certain that hitting a mote of dust at 1/4C would cause a large enough explosion to wipe out an entire planet, if not an entire solar system.
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.
Okay cool, I didn’t put that together while reading the first post. Although my understanding is that Trek warp drives would fall into the Void Drive category based on these descriptions. The bubble completely encases the ship while at warp and effectively shortens the world line they’re following, at least from the ship’s perspective. In the famous “Neelix almost kills the ship with cheese episode” they create a “static” warp bubble and invert it towards the ship in order to heat up all of the biogel packs on Voyager. Also I looked up the impulse engine thing and they arent relativistic but they are capable of accelerating a ship to 1/4C which is surely enough to cause some time dilation issues.
For example, impulse engines can not accelerate a ship to anywhere near the speed of light. But they can accelerate it to enough of a fraction of C that things like time dilation become problematic. No breaking of physics but surprise surprise now your crew is 3 minutes younger than they should be, relative to Earth. Add that up over time and you’d potentially have to start swapping out crew members so that they don’t end up younger than their children when they retire. The Star Trek Voyager Technical Manual lists “full impulse” as 1/4C, or nearly 75,000 kilometers per second, which is probably why you hardly ever see it in use unless it’s a life or death situation.
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 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 bending.
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.
double edit: tried to post a cute short video but it doesn’t cover warp so here’s a significantly more technical series of videos covering warp drive.
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 speeds for the duration of the surgery.
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”.
Let the salamander sex party commence!
You just turn off the flat tire simulation program, duh!
There’s a writeup from a few years ago by a NASA scientist talking about the Alcubierre drive if you want something that’s closer to Star Trek engines. Although spoiler alert, they conceded that a ship would already need to be moving at SOME sub-luminal speed towards the destination first in order to control direction. Can’t just fire up ye olde warp engines from a standstill like they do in the show, apparently.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110015936/downloads/20110015936.pdf
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.)
In the Trek universe ships do not accelerate to anywhere near relativistic speeds, they create a “warp bubble” that compresses space behind the ship and expands the space in front of the ship, creating a kind of pressure differential/wave (as in ocean waves) in spacetime itself. The ship doesn’t “move” at all at warp. To quote the late, great Cubert Farnsworth: “I understand how the engines work now! It came to me in a dream. The engines don’t move the ship at all. The ship stays where it is and the engines move the universe around it!”
That said, I don’t think I’d want to be moving at any speed through space without a way to slow myself down.
Fill the shield bubble with jello?