Warp speeds

[bazbaziah]

We are all used to ships travelling at warp speeds in tv/film/books/games etc. but is warp 2 the same speed to the Feds as it is the Romulans or Klingons?
I'm going to assume that warp 1 for all races will be the same as the speed of light is a galactic constant no matter what units you use to measure it.
But is Klingons warp 2 faster or slower by a given percentage, what about the Gorn or Romulan?
Further all the races have developed warp drive at different times in their history (and vastly different dates when using the terra standard year as your base scale) but all races have different life spans to humans?
Let's look at the Vulcans, they developed warp long before humans did but were limited (and happy with it) to less than warp 5 until humans came around and developed the technology to do so Why?
Is it because Vulcans live almost twice as long as a human and age half as quickly so to them warp 3 or 4 was more than sufficient to them for their needs or was their warp 4 closer to Terran warp 5 but they called it warp 4 (or whatever in Vulcan)?
I assume with the advent of the UFP speeds were standardised for member worlds but it wouldn't be so for the other races.
I'm also discounting TNG here as the recalibrated warp speeds were just silly to me. It is like us recalibrating mph because aircraft can now fly faster than 1000mph and the numbers are getting to big??

[trynda1701]

Good point, bazbaziah !

In our Ship Recognition Manuals, everything is defined in Federation/Starfleet terms. So each Empires ships get a measure in Warp speed terms. But we do know that in STIII, we hear of 'kellicams' as a measure of Klingon distance.

EDIT: Also, in the Animated series episode "Time Trap", Spock mentions that Kors' ship has a "S2 Graph (Graf?) unit, which is roughly equivalent to our Warp drive". But that doesn't mean they use the same speed terms.

So perhaps the other Empires DO use different terms. I remember in "Blakes' 7", when our heroes first used the Liberator thru Zen, they said 'standard speed', and used multiples of that afterwards eg 'Standard by 6'. Servalans' Galactic Federation Pursuit ships used the term 'Time Distort' if I remember correctly? But no other speed measurements were applied, eg relative to light speed, so how fast WAS each term in that show?

In the fan series "Star Trek Continues", part one of their finale has Romulans mention their equivalent of a Warp field as a 'superluminal fold'. While not official, neither is FASA, but it gives us another reference point.

While the 'official' formula for Warp is c x Warp Factor cubed for multiples of light speed, Romulans might just say "Superluminal 120", just shy of the Starfleet shorthand of Warp 5. Their physical measurements terms might differ when describing light speed, but light speed is light speed to everyone!


I'll let others come up with possible suggestions for the other races terms, including one for Romulans if you think mine doesn't work.

Thoughts, people?

[JAFisher44]

I pretty much agree with trynda1701 . How fast you go is how fast you go. The scale we use to quantify that speed is arbitrary. The federation chose to use a cubic scale but other races may choose differently. Obviously a linear scale is an option, but there could be others that differently evolved brains would come up with that might be very unlikely to occur to our minds. An extremely competitive race, for example, might describe all speeds as a percentage of the current speed record:

    "Our ship is fast. She'll do 97.8% record if we push her."
    "This ship is tough but she's slow. She can only do .5 record."
    "Hot damn people! We set a new speed record today! Lets get this officially verified and submitted so the records council can update the scale!"

In my head I've always assumed that the warp scale is cubic because of some intrinsic function of how warp engines work. That power input is linear but the resulting speed is cubic. The amount of power you need for c is considered 1 unit. If you double that power you go 8c, if you tripple it you go 27c, etc. and this is why we use the scale we do. If this is the case it would be likely that many other races would arrive at the same scale. Light speed is a universal constant (mostly) so would be a likely threshold for a base unit of superluminal speed and the mechanical function of warp speed provides a fixed scale. A liner scale based on multiples of c would be another obvious one, but the numbers would get pretty big.

[bazbaziah]

Hey,
I get what you are saying light speed is light speed in whatever unit you want it's a constant as I said.
What I mean is do all the races use the same W^3*c or do some use W^2 or W^2.5 or someother value so there warp 3 is faster/slower than the standard?
Just like classic warp 4 is slower than next gen warp 4?

Jim

[JAFisher44]

bazbaziah I think warp would work the same way for everyone. Warp seems to be a very specific mechanic of the Star Trek universe to the point that they can recognize "warp signatures" from aliens ships and races that they have never even encountered before. As I said above, it has always seemed to me that the v=WFᵌ*c is based on how warp works, not just an arbitrary scale. I suspect that it works that way for everyone. There are other ways to go fast like transwarp conduits and those would function differently but I think warp is a uniform and specific science.

[bazbaziah]

So do all races use Dilithium to power their engines - even the Romulans who use forced quantum singularities in TNG?
Surely not every race in the galaxy relies on Dilithium for FTL travel?

Jim

[trynda1701]

May 17, 2022 9:44:47 GMT -7 bazbaziah said:

So do all races use Dilithium to power their engines - even the Romulans who use forced quantum singularities in TNG?
Surely not every race in the galaxy relies on Dilithium for FTL travel?

Jim

Hmmm, that's an interesting question, Jim. I'd say if it's standard Warp, yes, and that would include at least the Federation and the Klingons (both mine for it), plus the Orions for trying to disrupt the Babel conference involving Coridan.

I can't remember if TNG touched on the fact whether the artifical singularity drive involved dilithium or not, seeing as TOS never explained exactly what dilithium does, just that it's needed in Warp drive. Other tech manuals since the original show have come up with it's a power regulator, it's nonreactive to antimatter, hence being at the junction of the Warp core of TNG Starfleet ships, and other technobabble.

VOY may have come up with more than a few ships with different FTL methods not requiring dilithium. Didn't Voyager need another type of crystal to create a transwarp corridor in the episode where the ship crashed on a ice planet on the edge of the Alpha Quadrant. Then created a modulated pulse with the deflector to create conduits a couple of times (which would be generated by standard ships power, hence dilithium IS involved). Do other races with similar corridor technology use dilithium as part of their ships power systems to generate enough power to open such corridors, I can't remember much of the series, and whether they touched on such subjects. I do seem to remember a co-axial Warp drive, whatever that was!

Mark