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.
Star Trek engines are something between displacement and halo drives, though with the bubble technically being “internal” and the ship following all relatavistic limitations:
A warp bubble is a region of space time enclosed in a fold, or bubble, of highly curved space. By expanding the space time metric behind the bubble and contracting the metric in front, the bubble can be made to move without the use of propellant mass. The vessel can apparently be coupled to the warp bubble(s) in various ways; by containing the bubbles wholly within the ship, as in the Displacement Drive; in front of the ship, coupled by gravity and/or magnetism, as in the Halo Drive; or entirely enclosing the ship, as in the Void Drive.
Note that no warp bubble has ever been observed traveling at super-luminal speeds. It is thought that such faster-than-light travel is impossible with void bubbles, because of dynamical instability of the warp metric at speeds greater than light and a suspected high flux of Hawking radiation that would turn anything inside a faster-than-light void bubble into a plasma of fundamental particles.
In the Displacement drive configuration, void bubble based drive nodes, operating in either the Alcubierre or Natario configuration, are enclosed within one or more magnetic containment vessels aboard the ship. The drive nodes are magnetically linked to the vessel within the containment volumes and react against it as they move, effectively pushing or pulling the ship across space with no ejection of reaction mass.
Only wormholes are “FTL,” with the catch that they have to be created and transported very carefully with respect to their light horizons (lest a configuration creates closed timelike curves and makes them explode)
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.
The void drives in OA are a bit crazy in that they’re almost like little pocket dimensions: sub microscopic, maneuverable, “bigger on the inside” like a Tardis, and requiring further nested void bubbles to enter/exit them without destabilizing. They’re more like something Q would use in their civil war. The description may sound closest to ST’s “ship inside warp bubbles,” but mechanically the displacment/halo drives are closer and their attempt at “more physically consistent” ST warp drives, while void ships are at the absolute edge of what’s possibly plausible in physics, assuming all engineering issues go away.
A giant ship at 1/4c is still quite high, yes… it’s also at the point where, under normal physics, you’d have to worry about things like the exhaust plume vaporizing whatever’s behind it.
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 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.
They’re specifically soft when it comes using impulse vs warp for both subliminal and superliminal speeds. It’s whatever the writers needed at the time. It makes sense that they can use warp to go almost any speed, but it’s a whole lot of power to warp space just to cruise around a solar system. I think there was at least one episode of TNG where they went light speed or close to it with impulse, but I may be misremembering, I just remember thinking that’s not how their own science works.
They do and they don’t, again, depends on the writer, but relativity is a really hard concept for the average show watcher. Sci-fi doesn’t really exist without relativistic breaking tech of some sort. ST has warp and subspace communication. They have reasons those break relativity, and they kind of stick to them. Then they have beings like the Q that might as well be gods. And sometimes actual gods in TOS. As a whole, the series is nonsense. But they try to make it less so over time and that just makes it retconned nonsense.
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.
For the curious, OA has a pretty extensive, physically plausible theoretical writeups on warp bubbles:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/493f29cc472f0
They’re the STL kind, but still, they do seem to require power.
AFIAIK the impulse drives are sub relativistic in Star Trek, right? Or maybe they aren’t, but that seems.
they just throwin redshirts out the back thats why impulse drives are red
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
Exactly! This is what OA is using, albiet a modified version that doesn’t violate causality like the original Albecurie. See the original link and: https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-faq&topic=FTL+in+OA
Star Trek engines are something between displacement and halo drives, though with the bubble technically being “internal” and the ship following all relatavistic limitations:
Only wormholes are “FTL,” with the catch that they have to be created and transported very carefully with respect to their light horizons (lest a configuration creates closed timelike curves and makes them explode)
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.
The void drives in OA are a bit crazy in that they’re almost like little pocket dimensions: sub microscopic, maneuverable, “bigger on the inside” like a Tardis, and requiring further nested void bubbles to enter/exit them without destabilizing. They’re more like something Q would use in their civil war. The description may sound closest to ST’s “ship inside warp bubbles,” but mechanically the displacment/halo drives are closer and their attempt at “more physically consistent” ST warp drives, while void ships are at the absolute edge of what’s possibly plausible in physics, assuming all engineering issues go away.
A giant ship at 1/4c is still quite high, yes… it’s also at the point where, under normal physics, you’d have to worry about things like the exhaust plume vaporizing whatever’s behind it.
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.
A 1 gram rock would be “almost nuclear,” yeah, but not planet killing, and most micrometeoroids/cosmic dust is fortunately much smaller than that.
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.
They’re specifically soft when it comes using impulse vs warp for both subliminal and superliminal speeds. It’s whatever the writers needed at the time. It makes sense that they can use warp to go almost any speed, but it’s a whole lot of power to warp space just to cruise around a solar system. I think there was at least one episode of TNG where they went light speed or close to it with impulse, but I may be misremembering, I just remember thinking that’s not how their own science works.
ST doesn’t seem to respect relatively anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter, heh. The physics are different.
They do and they don’t, again, depends on the writer, but relativity is a really hard concept for the average show watcher. Sci-fi doesn’t really exist without relativistic breaking tech of some sort. ST has warp and subspace communication. They have reasons those break relativity, and they kind of stick to them. Then they have beings like the Q that might as well be gods. And sometimes actual gods in TOS. As a whole, the series is nonsense. But they try to make it less so over time and that just makes it retconned nonsense.
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.