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The alternate USS Enterprise at warp

Warp drive or warp engine was a technology that allowed space travel at faster-than-light speeds. It worked by generating warp fields to form a subspace bubble that enveloped the starship , distorting the local spacetime continuum and moving the starship at velocities that could greatly exceed the speed of light . These velocities were referred to as warp factors . Warp drive was the most common form of interstellar propulsion used in the Milky Way Galaxy , making interstellar civilization, exploration, and commerce possible. By the 24th century, warp was the primary means of interstellar transport , but scientists from various cultures were pursuing various alternative propulsion methods that were hypothetically faster or more efficient.

• 1 Etymology
• 2.1 Parts of the system
• 2.2 System types
• 3.1 21st century
• 3.2 22nd century
• 3.3 23rd century
• 3.4 24th century
• 3.5 ...and beyond
• 4.1 Background information
• 4.2 External links

Etymology [ ]

The USS Discovery at warp in 2257

The USS Stargazer performs a warp jump

In 2063 , the term "warp drive" was already used by Zefram Cochrane of his engine on the Phoenix . However, Cochrane used the term "space warp generator" in the monitor displays on his spacecraft. ( Star Trek: First Contact ) Even as late as the 2150s , the warp five engine was still officially known as a " gravimetric field displacement manifold" ( ENT : " Cold Front ").

Most cultures throughout the Milky Way Galaxy used the term "warp drive" and by the late- 23rd century it was the most common term used by the Federation as well ( Star Trek: The Original Series , et al.). In the 2250s the term "hyperdrive" was used by Starfleet , ( TOS : " The Cage ") and the Ferengi occasionally used the term "lightspeed drive". ( TNG : " Peak Performance ") Finally, there was the term "star drive" which was only used by the Federation and Starfleet in the 2260s. ( TOS : " Bread and Circuses ", " The Paradise Syndrome ")

Space warp was one of the vocabulary words listed on the chart "A Tunnel in the Sky". This chart was seen in the schoolroom aboard Deep Space 9 in 2369 . ( DS9 : " In the Hands of the Prophets ")

The process of going to warp was described as a warp jump . ( ENT : " Horizon "; TNG : " Peak Performance ", et al.)

Technology [ ]

Enterprise with a disabled warp engine

Warp engines were the bulky units found, in many cases, in a starship's nacelle . ( TNG : " New Ground ")

24th century Federation warp engines were fueled by the reaction of matter ( deuterium ) and antimatter ( antideuterium ), mediated through an assembly of dilithium crystals, which were nonreactive with antimatter when subjected to high-frequency electromagnetic fields . This reaction produced a highly energetic plasma , called electro-plasma or warp plasma , which was channeled by plasma conduits through the electro-plasma system (EPS); that system also provided the primary energy supply for the ships other electronic systems. For propulsion the electro-plasma was funneled by plasma injectors into a series of warp field coils , usually located in remote warp nacelles . These coils were composed of verterium cortenide and generated the warp field .

Other civilizations used different power sources, such as the Romulans ' use of artificial quantum singularities to power their warp drives, ( TNG : " Timescape ") but the basic process was similar. In some vessels, such as the Intrepid -class , the nacelles were mounted on variable geometry pylons . ( VOY : " Caretaker ")

A display showing the main components of a warp drive

Parts of the system [ ]

• Antimatter containment
• Antimatter inducer
• Antimatter relay
• Deuterium cartridges
• Deuterium control conduit
• Electro-plasma
• Emergency shutdown trips
• Main stage flux chiller
• Magnetic interlock
• Bussard collectors
• Plasma injector
• Nullifier core
• Pre stage flux chiller
• Phase inducer
• Plasma conduit
• Plasma coolant
• Plasma regulator
• Power transfer conduit
• Power transfer grid
• Space matrix restoration coil
• Warp field generator
• Warp plasma conduit
• Antimatter injector
• Antiproton injection seal
• dilithium articulation frame
• dilithium chamber hatch
• dilithium crystal
• dilithium regulator
• Intermix chamber
• Matter injector / deuterium injector
• Theta-matrix compositor

System types [ ]

• Class 7 warp drive
• Class 9 warp drive
• Enhanced warp drive
• S-2 graf unit
• Subspace resonator
• Tetryon plasma warp drive
• Tricyclic plasma drive
• Warp five engine
• Warp three engine
• Yoyodyne pulse fusion

Development [ ]

Warp drive and other faster-than-light (FTL) propulsion technologies were the linchpin of an interstellar civilization, making trade and exploration across vast interstellar distances viable. Without these technologies, these distances could not be crossed in any reasonable period of time, making interstellar civilization usually limited to a single sector. ( TNG : " A Matter Of Time ") To put this in perspective, planets that were years away with impulse speeds could be reached in days with ships equipped with warp drive. ( TOS : " Where No Man Has Gone Before ")

The IKS Rotarran accelerates to warp, viewed from within the vessel

Cultures in the galaxy discovered warp drive at their own pace and rate of development, as most of the cultures had to do. The Vulcans were an interstellar civilization by 9th century BC and had reached the level of warp 7 by 2151 . ( ENT : " The Andorian Incident ", " Fallen Hero "; DS9 : " Little Green Men ") Klingons had interstellar travel capability around the time of Kahless in the 9th century . They had achieved the capability of warp 6 by 2151. ( TNG : " Rightful Heir "; DS9 : " Little Green Men "; VOY : " Day of Honor "; ENT : " Judgment ") Romulans were once considered a group of petty thugs and warp drive was regarded as the key technology that allowed the founding of the Romulan Star Empire . ( Star Trek: Insurrection ) The Vissians developed warp drive around the 12th century . ( ENT : " Cogenitor ") The Borg in the Delta Quadrant began to establish their interstellar collective by the 15th century . ( VOY : " Dragon's Teeth ") In the Alpha Quadrant, the rapid progress of Humanity in the 22nd century led to the wide-scale exploration of the galaxy being one of the basic goals of the United Federation of Planets , founded in 2161 .

The development of the warp drive was recognized by the United Federation of Planets as the marker of an advanced society. It was only after a people developed warp drive that the Federation made contact, as codified in the Prime Directive . ( TNG : " First Contact ") A warp capable society was deemed technically and psychologically ready to embrace the universe at large.

According to Science Officer Spock in 2259 , not once in the entire history of first contact had warp been first developed as anything but a drive. However, the Kiley had developed warp in the form of a warp bomb . ( SNW : " Strange New Worlds ")

21st century [ ]

Phoenix goes to warp

On Earth , warp drive was initially developed by Zefram Cochrane , in the period following World War III . ( Star Trek: First Contact )

The spacecraft credited with discovering the space warp phenomenon was the Bonaventure . ( DS9 : " The Nagus ", production art )

Despite the hardships imposed by the war's aftermath and the lack of advanced materials, Cochrane was able to build a manned warp-capable vessel using a converted Titan II missile. The successful first flight of his ship – the Phoenix – took place on April 5 , 2063 , and drew the attention of a Vulcan exploratory vessel, leading to the event known as First Contact . ( Star Trek: First Contact )

The Bonaventure then became the first deep-space starship to have warp drive installed. ( TAS : " The Time Trap ")

22nd century [ ]

Two NX-class starships in tandem warp flight

Development of warp technology by humans proceeded slowly over the next eighty years, after the flight of the Phoenix – due, in no small part, to the cautious advice of the Vulcans – and it was not until the 2140s that a warp engine developed by Henry Archer at the Warp Five Complex could exceed warp factor 2.

This engine was successfully tested in the second NX prototype by Commanders A.G. Robinson and Jonathan Archer to a speed of warp 2.5, breaking the so-called " warp 2 barrier " in 2143 . Eight months later, Duvall achieved warp 3 with the NX Delta . Warp 4 was first achieved by the USS Franklin . ( ENT : " First Flight "; Star Trek Beyond )

By the year 2149 , warp technology was sufficiently advanced to begin the construction of Enterprise , a vessel capable of warp 5 and launched in 2151 . ( ENT : " Broken Bow ") Although Enterprise was at first unable to fully realize this potential (maxing out at warp 4.7), the starship finally reached warp 5 on February 9 , 2152 . ( ENT : " Fallen Hero ")

By 2161 , Starfleet warp drive technology had achieved the capability to reach warp 7, and these engines were being built into the latest class of Starfleet vessels as the NX-class ships were being decommissioned. ( ENT : " These Are the Voyages... ")

23rd century [ ]

The USS Shenzhou at warp in 2256

Development and improvement of warp drive continued apace, and by the 2240s , Starfleet vessels of the Constitution -class had standard cruising speeds of warp 6 and emergency speeds as high as warp 8 (although under the right conditions, the engines could reach warp 9). These ships took advantage of a major breakthrough in warp technology that took place between 2236 and 2254 , the breaking of the so-called " time barrier ". ( TOS : " The Cage ")

Higher warp factors continued to be reached, mostly through alien intervention, or dangerous malfunction. The USS Enterprise was modified by the Kelvans to maintain a speed of warp 11 in 2268 . Later that year, the Enterprise accelerated to a speed of warp factor 14.1, after being sabotaged by a Kalandan planetary defense system . At that velocity, however, the ship came within moments of destroying itself. ( TOS : " By Any Other Name ", " That Which Survives ")

At around the same time, warp engines were being redesigned to allow standard speeds of warp 8 and above. During the refit of the Constitution -class, the cylindrical-shaped nacelles were replaced with a new flattened design. Engines required precise tuning; imbalanced engines caused a wormhole effect that almost destroyed Enterprise on its first mission after refit. ( Star Trek: The Motion Picture )

The USS Enterprise -A jumps to warp to escape an incoming photon torpedo

Warp theory continued to advance with the development of the first transwarp drive engines in the mid- 2280s , which would have theoretically allowed greater efficiency and any warp speed to be available for a ship. However, the transwarp experiment of USS Excelsior ended in failure, and the technology was abandoned at that time. The Excelsior itself was deemed spaceworthy, retrofitted with conventional warp drive and commissioned as NCC-2000 under the command of Captain Hikaru Sulu . ( Star Trek III: The Search for Spock ; VOY : " Threshold "; Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country )

24th century [ ]

The USS Enterprise -D at warp

At some point in the 24th century, a new warp factor scale came into use, which placed warp 10 as a theoretical maximum. ( VOY : " Threshold ")

By the time the Galaxy -class starship was being designed in the 2360s , warp technology had progressed to the point where speeds of warp 9.6 could be sustained for up to twelve hours, although warp 9.2 was considered the "red line." ( TNG : " Encounter at Farpoint ")

In 2367 , the warp drive on the Galaxy -class starship was managed by the warp propulsion power system . In that year, when Data hijacked the USS Enterprise -D , he issued a command override on this system giving him complete control of the system from the bridge . ( TNG : " Brothers ")

Voyager accelerates to warp

The USS Voyager was capable of a top cruising speed of warp 9.975. ( VOY : " Caretaker ", " Relativity ")

The USS Prometheus was capable of a sustained cruising speed of warp 9.9. ( VOY : " Message in a Bottle ")

In 2370 , the Hekaran scientist Serova discovered that the use of conventional warp engines caused damage to the fabric of spacetime. The Federation Council imposed a speed limit of warp factor 5 on all Federation vessels in all but extreme emergency cases, such as medical emergencies. A conspiracy theory posit by Steve Levy suggested that the discovery of this was part of a Vendorian morality test ( TNG : " Force of Nature ", " The Pegasus ", " Eye of the Beholder ", LD : " Caves ")

It was not until 2372 , that the transwarp threshold was broken by the Federation. Tom Paris of the USS Voyager managed to achieve infinite velocity on the shuttlecraft Cochrane . However, this form of travel was found to have severe, unanticipated side effects . ( VOY : " Threshold ")

...and beyond [ ]

In what was originally the future which was observed and altered by Jean-Luc Picard , speeds of at least warp 13 were possible. ( TNG : " All Good Things... ")

Appendices [ ]

Background information [ ].

Gene Roddenberry originally intended the Enterprise to become transparent while in warp drive, as depicted in " The Cage " (later reformatted into the two-part "The Menagerie"). The idea was that the ship would be traveling faster than light, which means that light would not reach it, rendering the vessel invisible to the naked eye. However, according to Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, the speed of light is a constant from any frame of reference; an observer moving at close to c would still observe light moving toward him and away from him at c .

External links [ ]

• Warp drive at StarTrek.com
• Warp drive at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• Hyperdrive at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• Warp drive at Wikipedia
• André Bormanis's explanation of warp drive (X)
• 3 Ancient humanoid

6 Warp Speed Measurement

The Physics and Technology of Warp Propulsion

6.1 Concept of Warp Factors 6.2 TOS Scale (23rd Century) 6.3 TNG Scale (24th Century) 6.4 Possible Future Scale

6.1 Concept of Warp Factors

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Real Physics and Interstellar Travel
• Chapter 3 - Subspace
• Chapter 6 - Warp Speed Measurement
• Chapter 7 - Appendix

A warp factor is a unitless figure that represents the speed of a starship or of a signal traveling faster than light. There is a non-linear dependence between the warp factor and the effective FTL speed. In every known variant of the warp scale the speed rises exponentially with the warp factor, meaning that from Warp 1 to Warp 2 the speed more than doubles. The exponent is subject to vary between the scales.

There is no common canon symbol or abbreviation for warp factors, although "WF" or "wf" are sometimes used in textbooks. In spoken language they are referred to as "Warp X" (written with a capital "W") or, now rather antiquated, "warp factor X" during the time of TOS.

In all known warp scales "Warp 1" corresponds to the speed of light. The warp scale is continuous, meaning that real numbers such as "Warp 8.179" are possible, although it seems that starships most often travel at integer warp factors 7, 8, 9, etc.

Warp factors below Warp 1 are occasionally mentioned in Star Trek, mostly in the scope of the 24th century scale. Consequentially these refer to sublight speeds. The question whether something like Warp 0.5 exists has some relevance. Warp 0.5 could either mean that the warp drive also operates at sublight speeds, without a need to activate the impulse engines, or that the warp scale is simply extrapolated below Warp 1, even if only the impulse drive is on. With the note in the TNG Technical Manual [Ste91] that the impulse drive makes use of subspace driver coils the latter makes sense also technically, because if the warp factor generally describes the formation of a subspace field, it may as well apply to the field generated by the driver coils at sublight speed.

Bearing in mind that the speed of light c is already as high as 3*10^8m/s, it is obvious that with conventional units such as meters per second or kilometers per hour as they are used for the speeds of today's planes or spaceships we would end up with unreasonably large and unhandy figures when describing FTL motion. Generally, it may have been possible to switch to something like light years per day or similar manageable time and distance units. The reason why Starfleet introduced the apparently abstract and strangely non-linear warp factor must lie in the physical principle and/or the technical implementation of the propulsion system. In other words, the function of speed vs. warp factor most likely reflects how strong a warp field must be to achieve a certain speed.

Side note Gene Roddenberry may have originally conceived warp factors for the sake of the dramatic impression of Kirk's commands. "Mr. Sulu, ahead Warp factor two." is more precise than "half speed ahead", and it sounds much more to the point than "increase to three light years per day". Moreover, with warp factors obscuring the real speed of the ship, calculation errors between speeds, times and distances mentioned on screen were less likely to occur. It was as late as in TNG that a correlation between all of the three figures was routinely made on screen (most often by Data), revealing the "true" significance of warp factors.

The sawtooth curve of the power expenditure vs. warp factor as shown in Fig. 6.1 and discussed in 3.3 Subspace Fields and Warp Fields is canon since it appeared on screen in ENT: "First Flight". The tips of the sawtooth are the so-called peak transitional thresholds, the points at which the power expenditure rises steeply because there is supposedly a physical threshold (in one possible interpretation, the transition to the next subspace layer) to be crossed. These peak transitional thresholds are located at the integer warp factors 1, 2, 3, and so on. Their existence is evidence that something significant happens at integer warp factors, justifying that the scale is based on these prominent points. In other words, the scale is designed in a way that the warp factors count up certain events that occur as the warp field is being expanded and intensified, which corresponds with an increase in speed.

Fig. 6.1 also shows a reason why ships customarily travel at integer warp factors or slightly above but never slightly below. We have to bear in mind that warp propulsion is non-Newtonian and a constant power supply is required to maintain a constant speed. If we imagine for a moment that the peaks are smoothed out, the power consumption (yellow sawtooth curve) overall increases stronger with the warp factor than the speed v/c (white for the TNG scale) does. In other words, the faster a ship goes, the higher is the energy consumption for the trip.

However, as we take into account the peak transitional thresholds, the power consumption per cochrane rapidly drops to a much lower value on the right side of each peak. More precisely, the drop happens slightly above the integer warp factor, but for the sake of simplicity we may assume that "increase speed to Warp 6" means to cross the sixth threshold, after which the ship may be actually at Warp 6.01. Here the power consumption is a lot lower than at Warp 5.99. It is obvious that staying slightly below Warp 6 would be very disadvantageous.

We can also see that a bit above Warp 6 the power consumption per cochrane is the same as at Warp 5.6. Since the cochrane value is equivalent to v/c, the effective increase of power consumption between Warp 5.6 and Warp 6.01 is the same as the speed increase. So the total energy consumption for a trip at Warp 6.01 is the same as at Warp 5.6 but the ship is some 25% faster. Hence, Warp 5.6 is some sort of break-even point, above which it is advantageous to speed up even further to Warp 6.01.

6.2 TOS Scale (23rd Century)

During the era of The Original Series (TOS) a warp scale was in use where the warp factor was described with:

So the warp factor equals the cubic root of the ship's achieved speed ratio v/c, with v being the effective ship speed and c being the speed of light. Warp 1 corresponds to the speed of light.

Side note The TOS scale is often referred to as "Cochrane scale" in fandom, but this is conjecture and, like the underlying formula, was never mentioned in the series.

Strictly speaking, the warp scale used in the TOS era is conjectural. There is no reference that would allow us to relate a warp factor stated on screen to a distance and a time. The now widely accepted scale, however, must have been established behind the scenes in a kind of writer's guide. David Whitfield, who had access to essential documents of Roddenberry's staff mentions the scale in his book The Making of Star Trek [Whi68] as soon as 1968. In his reproduction of the warp scale, Warp 1 denotes the speed of light, Warp 3 is 24c, Warp 6 is 216c and Warp 8 is 512c. Actually Warp 3 should be 27c, but with the other values following exactly the third-power law of Eq. 6.1 we have a confirmation that the scale was really being used at least as a guideline.

The continuous curve of the TOS scale (teal in Fig. 6.1) insinuates that warp factors below 1 and fractional values were well possible in this measurement system. Warp factors below 1, however, were not mentioned once in TOS, and fractions occurred only occasionally. As late as in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (TMP) warp factors lower than Warp 1 appeared for the first time, when Sulu carefully activated the untested warp drive and slowly accelerated to warp speed. More precisely, the ship was already at Warp 0.5 but was only running on impulse drive when the warp drive was engaged. So it appears that impulse speeds can be measured with warp factors as well, the scale is uninterrupted. Since we shouldn't assume that the measurement system has changed between TOS and TMP, we can assume that warp factors below 1 already existed in TOS. In TOS, it often seemed like Kirk ordered to go to warp, a switch was flipped and the ship's speed immediately jumped up to Warp 1, but perhaps we should ascribe this immediate effect to dramatic license.

Warp factors higher than 10 are possible in the TOS warp scale. We know of a few incidents where the Enterprise was said to have achieved such high speeds that are well beyond the nominal top speed of Warp 8. The first one is in TOS: "The Changeling", where Nomad improved the Enterprise's engines to achieve speeds of up to Warp 11. Another one is in TOS: "That Which Survives", where a modification to the engines by Losira accelerates the Enterprise to as much as Warp 14.1. This is also one of very few examples of fractional warp factors. On another occasion, in TOS: "By Any Other Name", the Enterprise was tampered with by the Kelvans crossed the Galactic Barrier at Warp 11. The Kelvans were going to reach the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.3 million light years away, in three centuries. This gives us an indirect speed reference of as much as Warp 19.7. Yet, a definite figure was not mentioned for the warp factor during the long trip.

As already mentioned above in Section 6.1 , the warp factors likely reflect the physical principle and/or the technical implementation of the warp drive. The peak transitional thresholds and the corresponding prevalence of integer warp factors is a reason why the structure of the warp field and/or of subspace is most likely a layered one, as outlined in 3.3 Subspace Fields and Warp Fields . So in the TOS warp scale "Warp 1" may simply mean that the subspace field extends just into the first layer of subspace, having crossed the first peak transitional threshold. This may go on for Warp 2, 3, and so on. In the TOS scale there is no theoretical limit for warp factors and for the according submersion of the warp field into subspace. Only the power available on a ship imposes a limit to crossing the peak transitional thresholds of always deeper layers.

In TOS: "That Which Survives" one of the following two things may have happened when the ship attained Warp 14.1. The first possibility is that actually 14 subspace layers were subsequently crossed by tuning the warp field accordingly, although this has never been attempted before. The other possibility is that the Enterprise's engines were never built to penetrate more than eight layers (Warp 8 was said to be the maximum safe speed), and that simply so much power was pushed into the first to the eighth layer, overstressing these layers, that the equivalent warp factor was 14.1. In other words, in the latter case the Enterprise's instruments would not have registered further thresholds and may have been off scale anyway, so the equivalent warp factor would have been calculated from the actual speed.

Use in Star Trek Enterprise

For the sake of plausibility, we should assume that the 22nd century (Star Trek Enterprise) uses the same warp scale as in the 23rd century (TOS), rather than the one of the 24th century (TNG). Enterprise NX-01 has a top speed of Warp 5, which in the TOS scale is reasonably slower than the max. speed of the Enterprise NCC-1701 (Warp 6) or its max. emergency speed (Warp 8). If Enterprise used the TNG scale, NX-01 would be almost as fast as the NCC-1701.

There are some cases in which the original Enterprise must have traveled at extremely high speeds, even without alien modifications to the engines. The first example is Pike's line in "The Cage" that his ship comes from "a stellar group at the other end of this galaxy" . Also, in TOS the Enterprise crosses the Galactic Barrier no less than three times, which is supposedly at the very least a thousand light-years from Federation space. Finally, in "Star Trek: The Final Frontier" the Enterprise-A explicitly travels to the center of the galaxy, which is some 25,000 light-years away, a journey that would take a lifetime at Warp 8. Enterprise NX-01 too is occasionally much faster than Eq. 6.1 would allow. The most blatant case is in ENT: "Broken Bow" when the travel time to Qo'noS is said to be "Four days there, four days back." , which would place the Klingon homeworld only 1 light-year away from Earth, considering that Enterprise's top speed at the time is merely Warp 4.5.

There are occurrences in other Trek series too where the starships are effectively many times faster than they should be, or travel to destinations that should be far out of reach. See also the examples in Section 6.3 . These are most often fundamental plausibility problems of the stories, rather than of the warp speed measurement. Yet, it has been suggested that the actual speed of a starship at a given warp factor depends on environmental conditions.

The TNG Technical Manual [Ste91] states: "The actual values [of the cochrane value and hence of the speed attainable at a warp factor] are dependent upon interstellar conditions, e.g., gas density, electric and magnetic fields within the different regions of the Milky Way galaxy, and fluctuations in the subspace domain. Starships routinely travel at multiples of c, but they suffer from energy penalties resulting from quantum drag forces and motive power oscillation inefficiencies." In order to explain away warp speed inconsistencies along these lines, we need a correction factor k to give us the actual relation between warp factor and speed, modifying Eq. 6.1 for the TOS scale to WF=k*(v/c)^(1/3). While some regions of space may allow only below average speeds, most importantly there have to be other regions in which a much higher speed is attainable at a certain warp factor (known as "warp highways" in fandom). In these regions k has to be considerably lower than 1 and in extreme cases (travel across the whole galaxy) close to 0. There are a couple of problems with this assumption, however:

If there is a coefficient k (x,y,z) of spatial conditions that locally influences the warp speed at a given warp factor, this k ought to play a role in the stories. It is totally implausible that it was never mentioned in any form. Well, we know of the low-warp Hekaras Sector in TNG: "Force of Nature", but here the problem is to maintain a stable warp field in the first place; there is no hint that in this region warp factors may correspond to lower speeds. The whole series Star Trek Voyager makes no sense under the assumption that there are warp highways everywhere. The crew was seeking wormholes and other rare phenomena all the time, not on-ramps and exits of warp highways. Well, thanks to Seven's work in the astrometric lab five years could be shaved off as mentioned n VOY: "Year of Hell, Part I", but on the display it looks like Seven, with the more accurate Borg technology, just plotted a straighter course than the previous one (or one with fewer obstacles to be avoided). A ship's captain (sea or space) orders a course and a speed. If a captain has to take into account the gradient of an additional coefficient along the flight path that strongly influences the speed, he either has to be a genius in mental calculus, or he doesn't really care how soon the ship actually arrives. Well, there is always the possibility of asking the computer to calculate the course and the travel time in advance, but in Star Trek offhand ETA calculations and swift orders to go to a certain course and warp factor are commonplace. These would be pointless if the travel time to the same destination could vary between minutes and months, and the best course would not be a straight line. Well, we may expect that realistically the interstellar conditions don't vary too strongly, with a factor of perhaps 2 between the highest and the lowest possible speed at a given warp factor, which would alleviate the preceding point. Moreover, on very long journeys the varying conditions in the flight path will average out. But then the theory of fluctuating conditions couldn't explain phenomena such as the Enterprise's journey to the center of the galaxy at all. Eq. 6.1 and Eq. 6.2 give us quite simple relations between warp factor and speed, without a correction factor (or with k=1) or any other coefficients in it. If anything, these formulae look like they describe a "basic" or "optimum" condition of space (without interstellar dust, without interfering fields, etc.), rather than an average. And if they really describe an average as hinted at in the TNGTM , there is the question of the averaging method, the size of the sample, the sampling region and how frequently such an average would need to be updated.

Summarizing, there may be regions in which warp travel is facilitated, meaning that less power is required to achieve and/or maintain a certain warp factor. There may be other regions where the contrary is true (such as the Hekaras Corridor). But while the peak transitional thresholds may be lowered, they rather wouldn't shift with the natural inhomogeneity of space, because this would make the concept of warp factors pretty useless. And even if they do shift, it may not suffice to explain anomalous warp speeds.

6.3 TNG Scale (24th Century)

Definition up to warp 9.

Some time between the TOS Movie era (late 23rd century) and the TNG era (mid-24th century) the warp scale changed. The new scale is valid in all series set in the 24th century (TNG, DS9, Voyager). In this new TNG scale Warp 1 still denotes the speed of light. But above Warp 1 the speed corresponding to a certain warp factor is generally higher than in the TOS scale. The discrepancy slowly grows between Warp 1, where the curves intersect, to Warp 9, where the speed is 729c according to the TOS scale but 1516c for the TNG one (see Fig. 6.1). The exact equation for speeds up to Warp 9 in the TNG scale is:

So the exponent increased from 3 to 10/3=3.333..., accounting for the higher speed at a given warp factor.

Definition between Warp 9 and 10

The difference between TOS and TNG scale, however, becomes dramatic above Warp 9. The warp speed table was changed in accordance with Roddenberry's wish that Warp 10 should be the absolute maximum speed.

Side note The TNG Technical Manual [Ste91] states about the real-life rationale for the recalibration: "Figuring out how 'fast' various warp speeds are was pretty complicated, but not just from a 'scientific' viewpoint. First, we had to satisfy the general fan expectation that the new ship was significantly faster than the original. Second, we had to work with Gene's recalibration, which put Warp 10 at the absolute top of the scale. These first two constraints are fairly simple, but we quickly discovered that it was easy to make warp speeds TOO fast. Beyond a certain speed, we found that the ship would be able to cross the entire galaxy within a matter of just a few months. (Having the ship too fast would make the galaxy too small a place for the Star Trek format.) Finally, we had to provide some loophole for various powerful aliens like Q, who have a knack for tossing the ship millions of light-years in the time of a commercial break. Our solution was to redraw the warp curve so that the exponent of the warp factor increases gradually, then sharply as you approach Warp 10. At Warp 10, the exponent (and the speed) would be infinite, so you could never reach this value. (Mike used an Excel spreadsheet to calculate the speeds and times.) This lets Q and his friends have fun in the 9.9999+ range, but also lets our ship travel slowly enough to keep the galaxy a big place, and meets the other criteria. (By the way, we estimate that in 'Where No One Has Gone Before' the Traveler was probably propelling the Enterprise at about Warp 9.9999999996. Good thing they were in the carpool lane.)"

In the TOS scale the speed continued to increase with the third power as in Eq. 6.1, with Warp 10 being as "slow" as 1000c. In the TNG scale, beyond Warp 9, the exponent rises in a way that at exactly Warp 10 the speed (as well as the power expenditure) becomes infinite. In other words, the TNG scale ends at Warp 10. The recalibration compresses the whole range from about Warp 9 to infinite Warp factor in the TOS scale into the Warp 9..10 interval of the TNG scale.

A table in the Star Trek Encyclopedia III [Oku99] lists selected TNG warp factors and the corresponding speeds above Warp 9. But these figures don't seem to originate in Mike Okuda's Excel sheet mentioned in the TNGTM . In an e-mail from January 1995 Mike Okuda states, "Between 9 and 10, I gradually increased the exponent so that it approached infinity as the warp factor approached 10. Lacking knowledge of calculus, I just drew what looked to me to be a credible curve on graph paper, then pulled the points from there." So there does not seem to be an "official" underlying formula for the range between Warp 9 and Warp 10.

Side note There are some fan-made approximations, notably the formula by Graham Kennedy at DITL and the ones on Joshua Bell's site for TNG warp factors beyond 9.

The following table compares the two warp scales:

Tab. 6.1 Comparison of TOS and TNG warp scales

As the TNGTM explains, the real-world reason for changing the warp scale was to put a limit to the warp factors that otherwise may have continued rising indefinitely (in a similar unfortunate fashion as the amounts of quads that can be stored in the computer did on Voyager).

Making up a fictional explanation for the recalibration is not so easy, however. Speed measurements can be expected to be very accurate, their improvement certainly wouldn't lead to a factor of 2 at Warp 9 between the TNG and the TOS scale. Likewise, the peak transitional thresholds that define the integer warp factors wouldn't shift just because the measurement of the ship's power consumption is improved. We have to seek the explanation in a better understanding of subspace physics, one that allowed to refine the working principle of a ship's warp engines in a way that the peak transitional thresholds and hence the warp factors could be moved to higher speeds. In other words, the warp engines were improved in a way that less power was necessary to attain the same speed. This modification must have been so successful and universally applicable that it was decided to change the warp scale. For older ships without this modification the new scale would give us just an equivalent warp factor, meaning that an old ship with the true power expenditure of Warp 6 (TOS scale) is rated with an equivalent warp factor 5 (TNG scale). The same equivalent rating may apply to alien ships whose propulsion system may work differently than that of the Federation, and perhaps not even based on conventional warp fields.

This theory still doesn't explain the dramatic speed increase between Warp 9 and 10 in the TNG scale though. But we could imagine that, as part of the refinement of the propulsion system, at least on Federation vessels, it was recognized that submerging the warp field more than nine layers into subspace was not practically possible or at least inefficient. We have to bear in mind that, as seen in Section 6.2 , the maximum possible speed of the TOS era was Warp 8, and that the warp factor 14.1 attained by the Enterprise in TOS: "That Which Survives" may have been just an equivalent figure. So it may have been discovered some time between TOS and TNG that there are other, more efficient methods to attain high speeds than crossing the tenth subspace barrier. And since the peak transitional thresholds 10, 11, etc. don't exist any longer, the scale was changed to reflect this, effectively compressing the whole range from warp factor 9 to infinite warp factor into the new range between Warp 9 and 10. We may even speculate that the refinement of the warp scale has something to do with the Excelsior transwarp experiment, and that "transwarp" here merely means that the principles that would be commonplace in the TNG era were tested for the first time, rather than "transwarp" being something akin to "Borg transwarp" or even Tom Paris's alleged Warp 10 engine.

In TNG, DS9 and Voyager there are various statements by crew members such as Data that allow to correlate warp factors, distances andtravel times. Sometimes they correspond to Eq. 6.2, sometimes they are significantly off. Overall, however, there are no gross violations of the concept of limited speed, because the ships don't travel to regions of space that should be out of reach, unless the ship's warp drive was explicitly accordingly modified. In Star Trek Voyager it is even a key concept of the series that the ship would need 75 years at maximum warp to travel the 70,000 light-years back to Federation space. This corresponds to about Warp 9.8, going by the figures in Tab. 6.1.

There are three incidents that conflict with the TNG scale more fundamentally because they call the Warp 10 limit into question. The first is in TNG: "Where No One Has Gone Before". During Kosinski's experiment Geordi says at one point: "We're passing Warp 10." This should be absolutely impossible considering that Warp 10 means infinite speed, and there can be nothing equal to or even faster than infinite speed. But there is an explanation for Geordi's line. A few moments later Data states that the speed is off the scale. This could mean that Geordi was reading some sort of overflow on the speed display, which was simply leaving the valid range up to Warp 9.9something, so he didn't mean "infinite speed" or even "more than infinite speed" although he effectively said it. Still later, however, Kosinski claims that the "warp barrier" has become meaningless thanks to his work. This seems to corroborate the wrong notion that Warp 10+ might be possible. On the other hand, Kosinski may simply mean the peak transitional thresholds that have shifted or were lowered thanks to his work (or actually, thanks to his assistant, the Traveler).

The second mention of breaking the Warp 10 barrier is in TNG: "Time Squared", where Riker notes that accelerating beyond Warp 10 would enable time travel. More precisely, he states that this constitutes the only known method of going to the past, which is not true for all we know from the countless time travel episodes. Anyway, if we believe him and anything beyond Warp 10 is equivalent to time travel, we may interpret it in a way that achieving exactly Warp 10 may be still impossible. Beyond Warp 10 the speed of a ship becomes undefined within the bounds of our space-time, because speed as a physical quantity always requires a fixed time frame that doesn't exist during a time travel.

The third problem with the Warp 10 limit occurs in the infamous episode VOY: "Threshold". There are many problems and errors with this story, the most pressing of which is how Tom could possibly attain a speed of Warp 10 with his shuttle. As correctly stated in this very episode by Harry Kim: "Nothing in the universe can go warp ten. It's a theoretical impossibility. In principle, if you were ever to reach warp ten, you'd be traveling at infinite velocity." We could argue that, just as in Geordi's case, the speed of the shuttle was simply off scale and hence may have registered as Warp 10, although it was actually slower. The dilemma is that the very intention of Tom's flight was to "break the warp barrier" as already Kosinski expressed it, and explicitly to speed up to Warp 10 and not to Warp 9.999something. Also, the speed was later confirmed to have been infinite, unlike it was the case in the TNG episode. This Voyager episode only makes sense if we ignore many statements and essentially major parts of the story.

6.4 Possible Future Scale

The warp scale changed yet again in the late 24th century, albeit just for the TNG series finale "All Good Things", part of which is set in the year 2395. In this new AGT scale, starships such as the three-nacelled Enterprise-D and the Pasteur routinely achieve Warp 13.

There is no official formula to calculate the speed corresponding to the revised warp factors. In the October 1995 issue of the Omni magazine, science advisor Andre Bormanis states: "I raised that question in a TECH note. Basically, the idea there was that they recalibrated the warp scale. I don't think that ended up in the final draft teleplay, but the idea there was that if you've got ships that can routinely travel at speeds in excess of Warp 9, then maybe it makes sense to recalibrate your speed scale so that Warp 10 is no longer infinite velocity. Maybe Warp 15 will be the ultimate speed limit, and Warp 13 in that scale will be the equivalent of warp 9.95 or something like that."

See Fig. 6.7 for an illustration of Bormanis's proposal (yellow). Here AGT Warp 13 corresponds to 5200c, which is about the same as TNG Warp 9.95 just as Bormanis reckoned.

The only thing really known about the AGT scale is that it permits warp factors higher than 10 that, as fans are well aware of, were not allowed in the TNG scale. The obvious real-world reason to switch to this new scale for this one episode was to emphasize that a lot has changed from 2370 to 2395 - just like the additional nacelle on the Enterprise or the new uniforms.

The in-universe explanation may be just as Bormanis suggested. At some point it would be tiresome for the crews of always faster ships to speak out warp factors in the TNG scale with always more decimal places. "Go to Warp 9.9996." and "Go to Warp 9.99996." are unhandy, and they look and sound so much alike to a human crew member that it is likely to become a source of confusion. If, however, the scale was only changed to decompress the warp factor range of high warp speeds for the sake of convenience, the question arises why it was compressed in the first place and if the move of the limit to to Warp 15 or something wouldn't just postpone the problem yet again.

Perhaps, rather than being a totally arbitrary recalibration along the lines of "We think Warp 10 is too low a limit, let's move it up to Warp 15", the new AGT scale reflects a change in the propulsion principle yet again. As already explained for the TNG scale in Section 6.3 , the highest possible warp factor may denote the deepest possible subspace layer boundary that the ship's warp field penetrates. If, in the year 2395, warp engines are generally modified in a way that they reach down to the the 13th layer, the AGT scale makes sense again. And if 14 subspace layers instead of previously 9 is a commonly accepted limit, the limit of the scale may be located at Warp 15 just as Bormanis suggested, only that the rationale would be different one.

Alternatively, we could imagine that the perhaps impractical warp factor limit was dropped altogether. In Fig. 6.7, the orange curve shows the TNG warp scale without the asymptotic behavior at Warp 10 (TNG scale) or at Warp 15 (AGT scale as suggested by Bormanis).

It is even possible that the warp factors up to Warp 10 are still exactly the same as in the TNG scale, denoting conventional operation of the warp drive, but that a completely new and independent AGT scale begins above Warp 10, denoting a new propulsion system such as transwarp or quantum slipstream drive. In this case, the new warp factors may as well have been named "Transwarp I, II, III, etc." Anyway, the two scales wouldn't be compatible, but we could imagine a transition from one scale to the other. The ship naturally wouldn't go up to Warp 10 with conventional warp drive, but may accelerate up to the break-even point at something like TNG Warp 9.5 and then activate the new propulsion system. After a short transition phase in which both engines (or both working principles of the same engine) are active, the ship may end up at AGT Warp 10, which is perhaps the equivalent to TNG Warp 9.6.

Power & Propulsion - about the right intermix ratio, warp inside a star system, how to stop a starship etc.

A Close Look at 22nd Century Technology - with considerations about the speed of Enterprise NX-01

Voyager Inconsistencies - with a rant about Tom's "Warp 10" flight

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Have you ever wondered how long it would really take the Enterprise to travel from Earth to Vulcan at warp 5? Or how far the Defiant could possibly get at warp 9 in just five days? What about figuring out how fast Voyager ’s maximum speed (Warp 9.975) is in multiples of the speed of light? The Warp Speed Calculator is designed to answer these questions. Simply input two of three variables (speed, distance, and time), and the form will calculate the third for you. It will even convert equivalent units, like years to days, light-years to parsecs, or warp factors to multiples of c . And you, too, can sound like a Treknology expert!

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In honor of 'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' Season 2, a tour of the physics

Regina G. Barber

Berly McCoy

Rebecca Ramirez

Season 2 of the critically acclaimed Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premiered June 15 ( streaming on Paramount+ ). So today, Short Wave boldly goes where many, many nerds have gone before and explores the science — specifically the physics — and the science- fiction of Star Trek . Scientist in Residence Regina G. Barber chats with two Trekkie physicists about why they love the franchise. Astrophysicist Erin Macdonald is the science consultant for Star Trek , and Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is a theoretical physicist and author of the book The Disordered Cosmos .

This episode, the trio discusses the feasibility of warp drive, global cooperation and representation and how the transporters that beam crew members from the surface of a planet to the ship might be breaking fundamental laws of physics. They end at the galaxy's edge — and discuss why its portrayal in Star Trek might be problematic, scientifically.

Space is vast – it takes years for real spacecrafts to travel within our solar system! In Star Trek, characters zip around the galaxy in their starship vessels thanks to warp drive, which let spaceships travel faster than the speed of light. But physics puts a speed limit on anything with mass. These objects have to move slightly slower than the speed of light, which itself has a speed limit. So what's the loophole here?

According to Erin, good ol' suspension of disbelief isn't necessary because, "the math checks out." For that reason, it's one of Erin's favorite pieces of sci-fi in the series. Spacetime is the three dimensions we humans are used to living in, plus time. The universe is situated in the four dimensional fabric of spacetime, with heavier objects "pulling" that fabric down more than lighter — or, weightless, in the case of light — objects. So, spacetime itself could be a loophole to this speed limit. Erin says that to bypass the cosmological speed limit of light, you could simply, "build a bubble of space time around your ship, and then that pushes you faster than the speed of light. " This is the various warp speeds . One bubble for warp 1, another bubble around that first bubble for warp 2 and so on.

Of course, Erin and Chanda both point out that using spacetime in this way requires an extraordinary amount of energy — well beyond what humans are capable of at this moment in time.

'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' season 2 is a classic sci-fi adventure

Transporters.

It would be great to teleport to work, as Star Trek characters do thanks to their transporters. Upside? No traffic. Downside? The fear that once you've been broken down into particles and beamed across the city, you might not be rearranged in the right order.

In order for a transporter to work, users would have to know both where a given particle is and its velocity. Unfortunately, this is not possible due to a well known physics conundrum, the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle . Star Trek plugs this plot hole with something they call a Heisenberg Compensator that is connected to their transporter mechanics. How it works is never explained. All we need to know is that, in the Star Trek universe ... it does!

So, transporters require a little more suspension of disbelief than warp drive — or good-humored humility if you're Chanda. "I don't think transporters will ever be a thing that we can do. But I always say that it's important for me as a scientist to be humble, and so it may be that there is some science beyond the uncertainty principle that we are just not aware of at this point," she quips.

Galactic Barrier

Warp drive can get ships to light speed and faster in the Star Trek world but space is still HUGE. The Milky Way galaxy is 100,000 light years across so, even at Warp 9, it would take the Star Trek crew years to travel the galaxy. It's pretty rare that any starship gets near the edge of our galaxy, but in the 1960s, Star Trek writers had the crew arrive at the " galactic barrier ." According to the show, this barrier doesn't let communication signals through, is dangerous and gives characters " strange energies ."

Chanda says that the impenetrability of signals is what winds her up most about this fake barrier. "But we see other galaxies all the time, and those are signals," she says. "We see radio observations. We see across the electromagnetic spectrum."

These three sci-fi concepts barely scratch the surface of what "science" — and science — Star Trek uses throughout the series . There's so much physics we didn't cover — and so there will be much more science to dissect in the future.

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify , Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts .

Questions about the "scientific" underpinnings of other pop culture? Email us at [email protected] . We'd love to hear from you!

This episode was produced by Berly McCoy, edited by Rebecca Ramirez and fact checked by Katie Daugert. Josh Newell engineered the audio. Johannes Doerge is our main legal duderino.

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

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Star Trek Warp Calculator

27 August 2017

Select warp scale: The Original Series (before 2312) The Next Gegeration (after 2312)

Description

For Star Trek: The Original Series, the warp equation is generally accepted to be (\(v\) — velocity through space, \(c\) — the speed of light (\(3·10^8\) m/s) and \(w\) — the warp factor):

For Star Trek: The Next Generation, the warp scale has changed. Gene Roddenberry stated that he wanted to avoid the ever-increasing warp factors used in the original series to force added tension to the story, and so imposed the limit of warp 10 as infinite speed.

Scale change occurred in 2312. Warp factors were established to be based upon the amount of power required to transition from one warp plateau to another. For example, the power to initially get to warp factor 1 was much more than the power required to maintain it; likewise warp 2, 3, 4, and so on. Those transitional power points rather than observed speed were then assigned the integer warp factors.

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Comment and Physics

How star trek’s warp drives touch on one of physics' biggest mysteries.

Field notes from space-time | Star Trek’s light speed engines may not be possible in our universe, but we are learning more about the particles that fuel them

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

12 June 2019

Paramount Pictures/RGA

EVERY year, I attend the Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, and every year, I get asked whether warp speed will ever be possible. In the Star Trek universe, humanoid species zoom around the galaxy at speeds faster than light, using warp engines fuelled by antimatter. Travelling faster than the speed of light is unlikely, but antimatter is real. Every particle has an antimatter partner that we call an antiparticle.

So, as a particle physicist, what I really want to be asked about isn’t the likelihood of travelling long distances quickly, but instead about the particle type that underlies this fictional technology. Star Trek ‘s futuristic antimatter engine touches on one of the great unsolved mysteries in particle physics: where is all of the antimatter anyway?

The best known type of antimatter is the positron, which is the antielectron. The positron has the same mass as an electron, but the opposite electrical charge. When matter collides with its antimatter partner, they annihilate each other . This isn’t simply a matter of theory: we have seen antimatter in the lab, and not just with the electron and its partner.

Positrons can be made through radioactive decay. They are also created in a pair with electrons when extremely energetic photons, better known as gamma rays, interact with atomic nuclei. Antiprotons have also been produced, and, in 1995, scientists were finally able to directly combine positrons and antiprotons to create antihydrogen.

Although antimatter is real, it is rather difficult to make in the lab. Since matter and antimatter annihilate one another on contact, one has to wonder why we are here at all. If they are each other’s complete opposites, one might expect the same amount of matter and antimatter to have been produced in the big bang, quickly leading to annihilation and an empty universe. Instead, we live in a highly asymmetric version of the universe, where the negatively charged electron is a fundamental particle that forms a core part of all atoms, hovering in their orbitals. Why did nature use only half of the building blocks available to it?

“ Star Trek ‘s futuristic antimatter engine touches on one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of particle physics”

Efforts to make sense of this asymmetry are under way in both theoretical and experimental physics. Many theorists believe that the lopsided bias towards matter is connected to violations of something called charge-parity symmetry, more commonly known among physicists as CP symmetry. This is a property that demands that all particles are interchangeable with their antiparticle when their spatial coordinates are flipped, a kind of mirror symmetry. Most observed particles obey CP symmetry, but it can be violated.

Though most famous for being the facility where the Higgs boson was first detected, the Large Hadron Collider is also home to experiments that are seeking to learn more about CP symmetry breaking.

The Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment, for example, specifically focuses on b-physics. B-physics refers not to low-budget physics, something that our governments surely dream of, but instead to the physics of beauty quarks (sometimes referred to as bottom quarks).

Beauty quarks are just one of six flavours of subatomic quarks, which are the constituents of neutrons and protons. The other five varieties have equally delightful names: top, up, down, strange and charm. The fundamental “weak” nuclear force can cause quarks to change flavours, and it also causes the quarks to break CP symmetry. This gives us an important hint that CP symmetry violations are possible, leading theorists to consider matter-antimatter models that rely on it.

In addition to beauty quarks, LHCb can also study the properties of charm quarks. Excitingly, the experiment recently found the first evidence of CP violation among them. In order to achieve this result, LHCb looked at decays of D° mesons – short-lived particles made of a charm quark and an up antiquark.

This result is an exciting affirmation of a phenomenon that scientists had expected to find for decades, but had yet to produce in the lab. The discovery doesn’t radically change our perspective on physics yet because it matches theoretical predictions – and it certainly isn’t a warp engine. But it suggests that, under the right conditions, CP violation can occur. Perhaps those conditions existed during the big bang, producing the nearly antimatterless universe we see today.

• This column will appear monthly. Up next week: Graham Lawton
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Star Trek: How Fast Is Warp Speed Exactly?

"Star Trek" fans are well accustomed to hearing Starfleet captains give the order to travel at maximum warp, but what, exactly, does that mean? The intergalactic storytelling in the "Star Trek" franchise is enabled by the futuristic invention of faster-than-light travel, with starships able to cross impossibly vast distances of space in the time it takes for a commercial break. But for fans who've wondered how fast warp speed actually is, things start out relatively (pun intended) simple. The way warp works is the complex part.

Basic warp speed, also referred to as warp 1, is exactly the speed of light. That's approximately 300,000 kilometers per second. Anything below that speed is described on board a Starfleet vessel as a fractional. But the scale isn't linear, which makes things tricker to calculate at any speed other than a flat warp 1. The best scale to use is the one from "Star Trek: The Next Generation," by which point there was an actual mathematical formula in use to calculate warp speeds. By that scale, a warp factor of 0.5 is only about one-tenth the speed of light, while warp 5 is 213.7 times faster than light.

As seen in many "Star Trek" episodes, the laws of space-time start to break down entirely once warp 10 is reached . Warp 10 gets defined as infinite speed, which means anything traveling at it would occupy all points in space at the same time. Even in science fiction, there must be a limit somewhere.

The science of Star Trek's warp speed

Faster-than-light travel isn't possible with current technology, and may not be possible at all. The speed of light, 300,000 kilometers per second, is thought to function as a sort of "cosmic speed limit." Nothing with mass can travel at that speed or faster, with light being the exception since it has no weight. As Einstein proved, this simple rule holds the fabric of space and time together. So how does the warp drive in "Star Trek" circumvent this apparent law of nature?

As astrophysicist Erin MacDonald explained on the Star Trek YouTube channel , "Just because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light on the surface of space-time, nothing says that space-time itself can't go faster than the speed of light." But how does a warp engine use that loophole in the laws of physics to accomplish FTL travel? By generating a field of energy that warps the space-time around a starship. Said MacDonald, "The idea with warp drive is that you build a bubble of space-time around your ship and then that propels you faster than the speed of light." These bubbles are called warp fields.

This is also how different warp factors can be achieved. A single warp field causes a starship to travel at warp 1, but adding an additional bubble around the first causes even more acceleration — warp 2, 3, and so on. "Eventually, you get to the point where you wrap all of space and time around your ship, and that, you can think of as warp factor 10," MacDonald said.

The history of Star Trek's warp drive

The invention of warp technology is well-documented in "Star Trek" lore. In the franchise's fictional history, Earth went through a dark period between the late 1900s and mid-21st century. First, the Eugenics Wars ravaged the planet, though its dates have been retconned. Next, starting in the early to mid-2020s, World War III broke out following a period of economic collapse. We see the beginnings of this during "Star Trek: Picard" Season 2. But in the post-atomic wastelands of the period that followed, a scientist named Zefram Cochrane managed to engineer the first warp-capable ship.

The movie "Star Trek: First Contact" tells the story of what happened next. Visited by Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) and the crew of the Enterprise after they travel through a temporal vortex created by the Borg, Cochrane finishes his work on the warp drive. On April 5, 2063, he takes it on a maiden voyage. This triggers the attention of nearby Vulcans, who, realizing a new species has become interplanetary, visit Earth to introduce themselves to humanity.

In the "Star Trek" universe, April 5 is celebrated across the Federation as First Contact Day, and many fans join in on the fun in real life by honoring the holiday. More than a time to celebrate "Star Trek," it's a day to celebrate what the franchise represents: the hope for a future where humanity warps past our petty quarrels to unite with a shared sense of curiosity and exploration.

May 6, 2009

The Final Frontier: The Science of Star Trek

As the new movie warps into theaters this week, we ask physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of The Physics of Star Trek, how the sci-fi franchise keeps it real, and also how it bends--or breaks--a few laws of nature

By Adam Hadhazy

Ever since the starship Enterprise first whisked across television screens in 1966, Star Trek has inspired audiences with its portrayal of a future, spacefaring humanity boldly going where no one has gone before.

Creator Gene Roddenberry's vision went on to spark five other TV series and now 11 movies, as a new film hits multiplexes this week. This prequel, simply titled Star Trek and directed by J. J. Abrams—the force behind TV's Lost and Fringe, among other projects—chronicles the early years of Captain Kirk and some of his Enterprise shipmates, including Spock, McCoy and Uhura.

To get a sense of how much actual science has made its way into the science fiction universe of Star Trek, ScientificAmerican.com spoke to Lawrence Krauss, author of The Physics of Star Trek, the first edition of which appeared on bookshelves in 1995. Krauss is a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University's School of Earth & Space Exploration and the director of the university's Origins Initiative , a project that explores big questions such as human consciousness and the beginning of the universe. Krauss is also the author of several other books and co-author of the Scientific American articles: " The End of Cosmology? ," " A Cosmic Conundrum ," and " Should Science Speak to Faith? ".

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We asked Krauss about the plausibility of crossovers from the Trek universe, including warp speed, humanoid aliens such as Klingons and, of course, whether anyone will be "beamed up" by Scotty or otherwise, anytime soon.

[ An edited transcript of the conversation follows. ]

You penned the original edition of The Physics of Star Trek about 15 years ago. What is an example of something in science that has changed dramatically since then? When I first wrote the book, we thought most stars could have planets, but we had no idea of the frequency or of the diversity of ways that exoplanets could form. [Since the discovery in 1995 of the first planet orbiting a normal star other than the sun, more than 300 exoplanets have been found.—Editor's note]

So we know these planets are out there. What about actually getting to them? Let's talk warp drive. I don't think we're any closer to warp drive —it was and is still a wild idea. Applying what we know about general relativity , the idea of faster-than-light travel is possible in principle. You can expand space behind you and contract it in front of you and therefore quickly go from one place to another across the galaxy. But the amount of energy required is just unfathomable. So while getting to exoplanets fast is still far-fetched, getting to them slow is no more far-fetched than it was before. I think that's the way we're going to do it eventually—we're not going to be building warp drives anytime in the near future.

As we "seek out new life and new civilizations," per the opening credits of the original series and The Next Generation, do you think we'll actually find anything living beyond Earth? Not only have we learned that life is far more robust here on Earth and living in environments that we once thought impossible, but there are life-forms that can survive dormant for millions of years in rather extreme circumstances. The idea of panspermia , in which microbial life could travel across interplanetary distances and maybe even interstellar distances to seed other worlds, is not so crazy anymore. We have also learned there are environments even right here in our solar system that are promising for life. There's water on Mars , and it was probably once warm; Jupiter's moon Europa likely has a liquid ocean. For exoplanets not in the [Earth-like] Goldilocks zone around their stars, maybe they have an environment sustainable for [non–Earth-like] life. Perhaps there is life out there that is silicon-based rather than carbon-based like our own.

What about aliens that resemble us, like the Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans, along with virtually every other race on Star Trek ? While the likelihood that there isn't life elsewhere is extremely small, the likelihood that extraterrestrial life resembles life on Earth is probably not great either, in my opinion.

As for dealing with potentially hostile aliens, what exactly are phasers? Phasers are like lasers , really—they are directed-energy weapons.

Could they exist someday? I just got one on my iPhone. You can go online and download a phaser app because of the new movie. I thought I'd better have it.

But the problem with a real phaser is that it would be pretty hard to generate the energy to heat something or someone up to a billion degrees to vaporize them. You would get some recoil, too.

What about space ordinance—that is, photon torpedoes? Well, I could never understand the name, because photon torpedoes are antimatter weapons. You get the biggest bang for your buck that way—you never get more energy than you do when you annihilate matter with antimatter. That's why the warp drive is matter–antimatter-powered, as well. Of course, it's hard to create antimatter, much less carry it around. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to produce antimatter. If we used the antimatter-making device at Fermilab just outside Chicago, the energy cost would be many thousands of times the gross national product of the U.S. to produce enough antimatter to light up a lightbulb. As for storing antimatter, you need huge magnetic fields to keep it away from touching container walls made of matter. Given the infrastructure required to keep antimatter around, it might be more effective ounce-for-ounce to just carry around hydrogen bombs.

What about when the space weaponry is aimed at you? The shields in Star Trek work by bending space like gravity, so objects get carried away with space as it gets bent around the ship. Sounds great, of course, but as I say in my book, the sun, which is a million times the mass of Earth, bends light around it by less than a thousandth of a degree. So it's very hard to imagine the gravitational energy that would be needed to swerve something 90 degrees. I think the only kind of shields that are feasible are those that would destroy the incoming object before it hits you, rather than diverting it.

On to, " Beam me up ." How plausible are transporters? As I discovered pretty quickly, I would not make a transporter the way the Star Trek writers do. First you decompose somebody into a matter stream, although taking a person apart at the atomic level would require heating them up to a few billion degrees. Then you turn them into energy. However, the energy equivalent of an average human being is something like a 1,000-megaton nuclear weapon, so that's not environmentally friendly either.

So I would do what I do when I surf the Internet—I'd move the bits. I'd scan you and try to get all the information, the bits, which make you a human being. But that's a hell of a lot of information. From Earth, you'd have to stack 100-gigabyte hard drives a third of the way to the center of the Milky Way or so to hold it all. And at current information transfer rates, it would take longer than the age of the universe to transmit that much data. But the key obstacle is still the Heisenberg uncertainty principle , which says I can't scan you and measure you at the atomic level to make an exact replica of you, much less actually put you together in a remote place with atomic resolution. [As Krauss points out in his book, the Star Trek writers get around this physical showstopper by outfitting transporters with "Heisenberg compensators".—Editor's note]

What about quantum teleportation ? That's one of the things that has happened since the book was first written. Quantum teleportation does for a single atom essentially what the transporter is supposed to do for people. The phenomenon is possible with single atomic states only because of the weirdness of quantum mechanics . If people were quantum mechanical, we could run into walls and every now and then we could go through them. That hasn't happened for anyone I know, but you can try and experiment if you want. So we'll be able to do this for single atoms or molecules but not for Hungarian goulash or people.

How might particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva, Switzerland, and its ilk push the envelope on physics as presently understood and perhaps get us closer to Star Trek ? We will no doubt learn more from those machines about the fundamental nature of space and time and matter, and that will obviously help us understand issues that ultimately would be related to everything from extra dimensions to creating exotic energy configurations that we might need for warp drive. There's the remote possibility that at the LHC we might actually discover extra dimensions in space beyond the four that we've measured. These dimensions may even be large enough to fit aliens or other universes in—and from a Star Trek perspective, nothing could be better, right?

What are some potential insights related to Star Trek involving dark energy? Dark energy produces a gravitationally repulsive force throughout empty space . In fact, dark energy is causing regions of the universe now to move away from us faster than the speed of light, or at "warp speed" in the Star Trek sense. Dark energy is just the kind of thing you need to put behind a spacecraft to make space expand behind it exponentially and make the ship travel faster than light. Unfortunately, as I've written, the impact of this expansion is that the rest of the universe will disappear before our very eyes.

Time travel: Do you think it's possible? The time travel episodes are about my favorite ones in Star Trek . They often come down to some kind of weird paradox. If time travel is possible then we have to somehow understand how we can build a physical universe in which you can kill your grandmother before you were born.

An example I gave in my book is a wormhole where one end of the hole is moving through space very fast and the other is static. Say one end of the wormhole is moving in a big circle five light-years around, and it takes nearly five years for it to move in that circle. If you're sitting on the fast-moving end of the wormhole, because of special relativity your clock is slowed down, so the whole trip might take just a week. If you then went through the wormhole, you'd come out five years minus a week behind in time. Suppose the wormhole is located two light-years away and you get back at near light-speed, then you can arrive back three years before you left .

If you could create a traversable wormhole, then you could create a time machine , there's no doubt about it. But the question is: Can you create a traversable wormhole? And that all depends on having weird negative energy configurations. We simply don't know if that's possible. It's not ruled out, but I wouldn't bet on it. It's an open question for modern physics that people like me continue to work on every day.

The biggest question: Of all the TV series, which is your favorite? The Next Generation is the best series overall, though I think some of the best individual episodes may have been in the first, classic series, if you suspend disbelief and take into account that the special effects were much worse.

If you had to pick just one, who is your favorite Trek character? I always liked the science guys. So in some sense Spock was interesting in the first series, and I kind of like Data [the android from The Next Generation ]. Data is probably my favorite character.

The U.S.S. Enterprise , depicted here in the 2013 movie Star Trek: Into Darkness , relies on its warp drive to zip across the galaxy.

Inside the Quest for a Real ‘Star Trek’ Warp Drive

It may be a while before starship captains can race across the galaxy, but engineers and physicists have a few ideas for making it so.

Within the Star Trek universe, traveling across the galaxy is a breeze thanks to the famed warp drive . This fictional technology allows humans and other civilizations to zoom between star systems in days rather than centuries.

Such rapid travel times are impossible in the real world, because our best theory for the way the universe works, Einstein’s special relativity , says that nothing moves faster than the speed of light.

While current rocket propulsion systems are bound by this law, plenty of hopeful engineers and physicists are working on concepts that might bring us a step closer to Star Trek ’s vision of racing across the cosmos.

“Currently, even the most advanced ideas behind interstellar travel entail trip times of decades and centuries to even the closest stars, due to the restrictions of special relativity, and our abilities—or lack of—to travel at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light,” says Richard Obousy , director and founder of Icarus Interstellar, a nonprofit dedicated to making progress toward interstellar flight.

“Being able to build starships with the capability to travel faster than the speed of light would open the galaxy for exploration and possible colonization by humans.”

Nuclear Engines

Distances in space are so vast that astronomers usually measure them in light-years, the distance light can travel in a year’s time. A single light-year equals about six trillion miles.

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The closest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri, is 4.23 light-years away, so even traveling at the speed of light, a one-way voyage there would take 4.23 years. That may seem pokey, but it would be a huge improvement over current technology.

Right now, the fastest spacecraft headed away from Earth is Voyager 1, which is puttering along at about 38,600 miles an hour. At that rate, it would take more than 70,000 years to reach Proxima Centauri.

Still, various teams have proposed ways to at least reach a fraction of light speed and hasten our exploration of interstellar space.

Back in 1958, researchers at San Diego-based defense contractor General Atomics came up with Project Orion , which involved a spacecraft driven essentially by nuclear bombs. A controlled series of nuclear explosions would propel the ship at high speeds, rapidly carrying a hundred tons of cargo and eight astronauts to places like Mars and even the outer solar system.

Faster propulsion technology would allow us to visit our galactic neighbors, like this satellite of the Milky Way known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Blueprints were also created showing how to adapt the technology for interstellar travel. However, all experimentation with this so-called nuclear-pulse propulsion came to a halt with the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

Announced earlier this year, the ambitious Breakthrough StarShot initiative represents a less explosive effort to undertake an interstellar mission. Run by a conglomerate of billionaires and big thinkers, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, the project’s goal is to send a flotilla of postage stamp-size spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, a triple star system that’s 4.3 light-years away. (See “Is the New $100 Million ‘Starshot’ for Real?” )

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The tiny spacecraft would be attached to a thin light sail, a piece of technology that would allow mission managers to propel the probes with lasers shining from Earth’s orbit. The lasers would accelerate the craft to 20 percent the speed of light, and the probes would arrive at their destination in roughly 20 years.

While many of the tiny travelers may never make it to Alpha Centauri, a few of them should survive and may even fly past any planets orbiting the far-off stars , beaming back data about these alien worlds.

“I’m incredibly excited to see private money being used to explore breakthrough ideas that may advance the field of interstellar flight,” Obousy says.

“I hope to see more like this in the future. While there are engineering challenges associated with the Starshot Initiative, none appear insurmountable.”

Warping Reality

Of course, the real breakthrough would be a true warp drive, which requires technology to catch up with our theoretical designs.

In 1994, Trek fans got a glimmer of hope from Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, who came up with a radical theory of hyper-fast space propulsion that doesn't break Einstein’s special relativity.

Instead of accelerating the spacecraft itself to light speed, why not bend, or warp, the fabric of space and time around the ship itself? Alcubierre presented calculations that produce a bubble in space-time in which one end is expanding and the other is contracting. A spaceship could, in theory, be carried along with the warp bubble and accelerated to velocities up to 10 times the speed of light.

While that sounds simple on paper, to make it work, we may need to harness exotic forms of matter, like antimatter, that for now are poorly understood. In addition, numerous unsolved issues plague the creation and control of a warp bubble, Obousy says.

“One such problem, for example, is the idea of causal disconnection, which implies that any spacecraft sitting within the bubble would not be able to ‘communicate’ with the exterior of the bubble, suggesting that a ship would not be able to ‘turn off’ the bubble once inside of it,” he notes.

As is often the case in space travel, developing true interstellar travel like what we see in Star Trek will require significant changes in the cost and energy requirements.

“Currently, the amount of energy and money required to entertain the notion of manned interstellar travel is measured in large fractions of global output—specifically, tens of trillions of dollars, and energy measured on the scale of what many large countries use annually,” he says.

Still, he adds, “the finest minds of the 15th century could not have predicted the technological wonders of the 21st century. Similarly, who are we to say what technology the humans of the 27th century will have mastered.”

Andrew Fazekas, the Night Sky Guy, is the author of Star Trek: The Official Guide to Our Universe and host of NG Live! " Mankind to Mars " presentations. Follow him on Twitter , Facebook , and his website .

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59 Years Later, Star Trek Just Proved It Still Needs Its Oldest Sci-Fi Plot Device

Trek just can’t quit the warp drive, even in the 32nd Century.

After almost six decades and hundreds of years of future history, the fastest way to travel in the final frontier is still by firing up your faithful warp drive. Star Trek’s famous faster-than-light tech was originally conceived as a “time warp” drive in the 1964 pilot “The Cage,” but was later changed to just a “warp” drive to avoid confusion. But why is this concept still around? Surely people living in the 25th and 32nd centuries have come up with something a bit faster? In a new clip from Discovery Season 5, a piece of dialogue reminds us why warp drive is still such a big deal, even 900 years after the era of Captain Kirk.

Although the plot of Discovery Season 5 is still vague, we do know it will involve a galaxy-wide treasure hunt that will see our Starfleet heroes compete against thieves named Moll (Eve Harlow) and L’ak (Elias Toufexis). In an extended preview revealed at San Diego Comic-Con, we find Captain Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) chasing them and jumping on their ship as it goes into warp. As Burnham hangs out inside their warp bubble and tries to disable their engines, another Starfleet ship arrives: the USS Antares , commanded by Captain Rayner, a new character played by Callum Keith Rennie.

Some brief technobabble ensues, in which Burnham realizes that if the Antares keeps their tractor beam on the escaping enemy ship, its warp bubble will collapse and she’ll be crushed. Why can’t the Antares just pull this smaller ship out of warp? Burnham raises this same question, saying, “reverse engines and pull them out of warp.” But Rayner can’t , and it’s all connected to the type of FTL drive his ship is using.

“If I had a Pathway Drive, maybe,” Rayner says. “But we’re still making do with Burn tech out here.”

By “Burn tech,” Rayner means old-school warp drive. The “Pathway Drive” is an experimental propulsion system Starfleet was working on during Season 4 of Discovery . So although the ships in the 32nd Century of Discovery look slicker, they’re running off the same FTL drives that Pike, Kirk, Sisko, and Picard deal with in the 23rd, 24th, and 25th centuries.

Why does this matter? Well, Discovery Season 3 posits that a catastrophe called “the Burn” put the entire galaxy’s ability to develop new technology back roughly 120 years. The Burn also made dilithium, the crystal crucial to stabilizing warp fields, even rarer than it already is. Dilithium also caused the Burn, which is like saying Star Trek’s reliance on warp drive caused Star Trek to become reliant on warp drive.

Star Trek’s alternate warp drives

The Enterprise-D going waaaaay too fast.

Discovery has been trying to make other forms of space propulsion happen since Season 1. The obvious example is the USS Discovery’s Spore Drive, which uses the Mycelial network to instantly transport the ship. But it’s way more complicated and can only be operated by specialists like Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp). The Spore Drive isn’t sustainable, just like Star Trek’s other alternate drives.

In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock , the USS Excelsior had something called a Transwarp Drive. This was mostly a punchline, and Scotty was easily able to sabotage it. The Excelsior is still around in Star Trek VI, but had been refitted with a regular old warp drive. In The Next Generation’s “Where No One Has Gone Before,” Kosinski and the Traveler attempt to introduce a thought-based form of propulsion that goes horribly awry, and in “Remember Me” Wesley traps his mom, Dr. Crusher, in an alternate dimension when he tries to create a new kind of warp bubble. And, of course, in the Voyager episode “Threshold,” crossing the Warp 10 barrier turns Janeway and Tom Paris into salamanders.

You get it. Anything that’s not warp drive, in the Star Trek canon, is unpredictable and dangerous. And yet, now that Trek canon has pushed several centuries beyond its original timeline, it seems likely that at some point warp drive will have to become obsolete. Back when The Next Generation was in early development, Roddenberry and other producers briefly floated the idea that in the distant future transporters will be so powerful that Starfleet wouldn’t even need ships. So, if Trek ever does get rid of warp drive, they can just beam people around.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 is expected in early 2024.

Ryan Britt's new book on the history of Star Trek's biggest changes. From the '60s show to the movies to 'TNG,' to 'Discovery,' 'Picard,' Strange New Worlds,' and beyond!

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What Is a Spore Drive in Star Trek?

Quick links, how does the spore drive work in star trek, why the uss discovery is the only starfleet ship with a spore drive, is the spore drive faster than warp speed, why star trek should probably stop using the spore drive.

With Season 5, Star Trek: Discovery embarks on the final mission for its dynamic crew and one-of-a-kind starship. There are many things about this series that diverged from past series or films in the universe created by Gene Roddenberry six decades ago. How the spore drive that powers the USS Discovery works is perhaps the most fanciful concept in Star Trek . When piloted by Ripper the "space tardigrade," Lieutenant Paul Stamets or Kewijan empath Cleveland Booker, this organic propulsion system is one of the most powerful technologies in all science fiction and fantasy.Despite the universe's reputation for somewhat grounded science-fiction, the displacement-activated spore hub drive is squarely in the realm of fantasy. This is not new territory for Star Trek , however.

Vulcan mind-melds, the concept of "subspace" and Star Trek's ubiquitous transporters are all, to varying degrees, magical nonsense. What helps sell these far-out technologies to skeptical audiences is the (lovingly named) technobabble that accompanies them. Vulcans use innate psychic abilities to connect to another consciousness like file-sharing over wifi. Transporters break people down into atoms and beam them to another physical location, where they are reassembled just as they were. Subspace allows communications to travel faster than speed of light, as well as any number of anomalies that create workarounds to the immutable laws of physics. USS Discovery's spore drive is equally able to break the laws of physics and travel on a "mycelial network" that exists outside of regular spacetime .

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Former Star Trek: Voyager producer Bryan Fuller was tapped to bring the universe back to television, and he co-created the series with Alex Kurtzman. He left early in pre-production, but many of the concepts he introduced remained, such as the controversial Klingon redesign . The spore drive was one such concept, which drew from the research and philosophy of real-world mycologist Paul Stamets. This is why Anthony Rapp's character has that name, after all.

Next to engineering, the USS Discovery has a room where Lieutenant Stamets grows the spores needed to power the drive. He created it with his friend Straal, and Starfleet "co-opted" the technology once the Klingon-Federation War broke out. It was Straal who figured out the spore drive needed a pilot with compatible DNA to pilot the ship. He used a creature which Michael Burnham called a "tardigrade." Eventually, Stamets injected himself with tardigrade DNA which made him the only person capable of successfully using the spore drive. Later, Cleveland Booker was also able to serve as a navigator because of his natural empathic abilities.

Through their connection to the spores, the navigator is able to pilot the ship using invisible connections on a galactic mycelial network. In Star Trek: Discovery this network is represented much like the Quantum Realm in the Marvel Cinematic Universe . Like the Avengers, the ship is able to travel through this lower dimension and emerge in real space anywhere. However, the network the ship can travel on is limited to the Milky Way galaxy. Put another way, the spore drive allows the USS Discovery to teleport anywhere in the galaxy in an instant.

Star Trek: Discovery's Mary Wiseman, Wilson Cruz and Blu del Barrio Hype Finale

Despite existing a decade before the time of Star Trek: The Original Series , the USS Discovery was a bleeding-edge scientific vessel before the war. Once the USS Glenn and Straal were killed in their accident, Lieutenant Stamets became the only person in the universe to understand how the spore drive worked. While he sent his designs to Starfleet, none of their scientists could get it to work. Once the ship time-traveled to the 32nd Century, Starfleet was able to build a working prototype, but it was destroyed when it was stolen by Booker in Season 4 .

Even if Starfleet's scientists and engineers were able to replicate the machinery that made the spore drive function, they still lacked a crucial element: a navigator. Without the tardigrade or a compatible human, the spore drive could only safely travel a few hundred kilometers. Stamets can only serve as the navigator because of the tardigrade DNA he injected into himself. Since the creatures are sentient, difficult to catch and the Federation is against genetic modification, no one else can use his method. Booker's natural empathic abilities allowed him to serve as navigator, but his gifts are unique to Kwejian, which was destroyed in Season 4 .

In the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 , Stamets is depressed because Starfleet has abandoned its efforts to recreate his technology. He wanted the spore drive to be his legacy. Instead, Starfleet and the Federation committed to a technology called the "pathway drive," an unknown method of faster-than-light travel that doesn't require dilithium crystals like warp engines. This means that the USS Discovery will be the only serviceable Starfleet vessel capable of traveling via the mycelial network, at least so long as Stamets or Booker are willing to serve as navigator.

How Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Connects to TNG's Biggest Open Mystery

While it's natural to compare the spore drive to Star Trek 's famous warp drive, the USS Discovery isn't traveling at speed when it jumps. In fact, it's closer to Star Wars ' hyperspace , a dimension that exists underneath spacetime. Yet, unlike the Millennium Falcon, the USS Discovery is able to enter and exist the mycelial network in mere seconds. Ships traveling through hyperspace still take time to get from one point to another. The USS Discovery's spore drive flies through the network far faster than warp drive, but it's a completely different method of travel .

Of all the sci-fi Star Trek inventions, warp drive is one of the more plausible ones. Einstein's Theory of General Relativity established that the speed of light is as fast as anything can go through space, but not how fast spacetime itself can go. Thus, while Starfleet vessels travel faster than light, they do it by slipping through a loophole in the laws of physics. Warp engines create a bubble that bends spacetime itself. The ships ride it like a wave and are able to go faster than Einstein's universal speed limit. However, with the spore drive, the USS Discovery is able to just pop out of reality and emerge at a different physical location in the galaxy.

While there are some actual scientific concepts behind both the spore and warp drives, the latter is far more sound . Physical travel via the mycelial network is as plausible as trying to use tree roots as a subway. Still, even though the math works for warp drive, there are countless other effects that would make traveling at those speeds unsurvivable. This is why bridge and engineering officers in Star Trek are always talking about "inertial dampers." Similarly, travel via the mycelial network is not without risk, specifically from "Hawking radiation." This theoretical energy somehow turned the crew of the USS Glenn inside out after a test jump in Season 1, Episode 3, "Context is for Kings."

Star Trek: Discovery Wasn't Originally Going to End With Season 5, Reveals EP

All science fiction requires some level of suspension of disbelief, and there are many technologies in Star Trek that are just as magical as the spore drive. Still, the concept was met with a lot of criticism from fans that goes beyond the typical reluctance to embrace new iterations of this universe. "Although physically implausible, warp drive isn't laughably ridiculous. The [spore] drive is, " scientist Steven Sazlberg wrote for Forbes . Of course, Star Trek is full of ridiculous concepts like Thomas Riker, Will Riker's "transporter clone. " The fantastical nature of the spore drive isn't why it should stay on the USS Discovery.

The USS Voyager-J was revealed to be the first ship set to test the new pathway drive, whatever it is. However, if the spore drive existed and worked in the 24th Century, the original USS Voyager could've used it to get back from the Delta Quadrant before Captain Janeway's coffee got cold . Everything about the USS Discovery was classified at the end of the show's second season, which explains why the spore drive was never even considered as a means to rescue the USS Voyager. They also lacked a compatible navigator. But more importantly, the spore drive would have made the seven seasons of Star Trek: Voyager unnecessary.

The spore drive is a fun conceit for Star Trek: Discovery , but in truth it is simply too powerful a technology. The purpose of Starfleet is, after all, to explore the unknown. If every vessel in every Star Trek universe had a spore drive, at least 500 of its 900 total episodes wouldn't have happened. That Stamets is the only person truly able to crack this technology also speaks to the unique nature of humanity. Even with all of Starfleet's brilliance, there is an irreplaceable human contribution to make its most magical technology work.

Star Trek: Discovery debuts new episodes Thursdays on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Discovery

Release Date September 24, 2017

Cast Oyin Oladejo, Emily Coutts, Anthony Rapp, Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Mary Wiseman

Main Genre Sci-Fi

Genres Drama, Sci-Fi, Action, Adventure

Rating TV-14

REVIEW: Star Trek: Discovery Season 5’s ‘Jinaal’ Draws on Star Trek History for a Fresh Story

Star Trek: Discovery's latest episode, "Jinaal," uses a Trill ritual from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to take Culber, Burnham and Book on an adventure.

The following contains spoilers from Star Trek: Discovery, Season 5, Episode 3, "Jinaal."

In the premiere episode of Star Trek: Discovery Season 5, Captain Michael Burnham met Captain Rayner and learned the truth behind the "Red Directive" that sent them chasing after an 800-year-old Romulan vessel. The brusque captain is now her first officer, and together they have to race space-pirates Moll and L'ak for technology that could change the galaxy and, effectively, introduce them to "God." But before they can do that, they must deal with the long-dead Trill symbiont host who gave this episode its title: Jinaal.

In the second episode, Burnham and Mister Saru went "Under the Twin Moons" of a planet to find the first piece of the puzzle and a clue to the next one. Moll and L'ak, however, beat them to it, but they didn't find the entire clue. Instead, they were sent on a wild space-goose chase to the planet Betazed, while the real clue was hidden on the Trill homeworld. Meanwhile, on the ship, now-Commander Rayner has to bond with the crew of the USS Discovery, despite his wildly different style of leadership than the folks on the ship are used to.

Both stories speak to the theme of this episode and the season overall: the connections between individuals, even between those who share very little in common. But what made this episode truly memorable was how it linked itself to a previous Star Trek show. This was done in the way that Jinaal, the symbiont host who possesses the information Burnham and company need, revealed it to them comes directly from Star Trek 's past. Specifically, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .

Captain Michael Burnham Is in Peak “Star Trek Captain’ Mode

Captain michael burnham didn't let setbacks and personal problems slow her down, review: star trek: discovery season 5 premiere 'red directive' takes off at warp speed.

One of the most interesting things about Star Trek: Discovery Season 5's third episode is very subtle. Throughout the season so far -- but especially in "Jinaal" -- Michael Burnham seems comfortable as the captain . While she was made for the center seat, Season 4 was a tough period of adjustment for her. This was especially true in light of the galaxy-destroying threat the Discovery faced last time. But at the start of this episode, Burnham was wholly in control of her ship and crew .

It's also worth noting that Burnham's authority remained steadfast even if her personal life wasn't in the best place. Ever since betraying her in Season 4 , Cleveland Booker's relationship with Burnham is on the rockiest ground it's been she first arrived in the 32nd Century.

Season 5's first episodes showed they no longer operated together with a near-symbiotic shorthand. Moll, it turns out, is the long-lost daughter of his mentor, who previously used the name "Cleveland Booker." Burnham isn't sure she can trust him. Still, the first scenes of "Jinaal" show her quickly and easily making decisions, including taking a leap of faith by trusting Booker to join them on the mission on Trill.

While it's unclear how much time has passed since Burnham became captain at the end of Season 3, Rayner definitely had more years in command under his belt. However, after Starfleet tried to force his early retirement, Burnham made him her new first officer. He accepted a demotion to Commander, and the two now have to figure out a way to work together. Yet, when Burnham welcomed him aboard, there was no doubt who is in charge.

In fact, it was no accident that she paired him with Lieutenant Sylvia Tilly. Of everyone aboard the USS Discovery, Tilly has the most personal connection to the crew, and she's also (obviously) not afraid to challenge her superior officers. After all, she was promoted to First Officer in Season 3 even if she was merely an Ensign.

The USS Discovery’s Away Mission on Trill Connects to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Star trek: discovery used the zhian'tara ritual for more than a nostalgic callback, review: in under the twin moons, star trek: discovery shines brighter than ever.

Upon arriving at the Trill homeworld, Captain Burnham was asked a riddle as a security measure, though even Moll and L'ak likely could've answered it. The clue they found in the previous episode pointed to Betazed, which is presumably where the two pirates went. Burnham answered the riddle, and her team was taken down to the Trill symbiont pools where she then met the long-lived symbiont's host who knew where the clue was hidden. But in order for Burnham and company to get the piece of the puzzle they need, they had to be tested by Jinaal. This was thanks to the Zhian'tara, the Trill's ritual for closure, which was first created on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .

In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Facets (Season 3, Episode 25)," Jadzia Dax went through her zhian'tara, which allowed the memories of past hosts to be telepathically transferred into another's body. It's a ritual all Trill hosts go through once they are joined. In Star Trek: Discovery's case, Jinaal wanted a body to physically take Burnham and Booker to the clue, while testing them without their knowledge. He wanted to make sure that they were worthy of the powerful technology of Star Trek: The Next Generation 's Progenitors. He led them to the nesting grounds of alien predators whose skin effectively served as cloaking devices.

Jinaal also wanted to see if they were willing to destroy innocent creatures to possess this knowledge. He was also willing to let "unworthy" seekers die to protect the secret. Thanks to Booker's empathic ability to connect to animals and the creatures' higher levels of intelligence, they passed the test. When Burnham discovered the creatures were only protecting their eggs, they agreed to abandon the hunt for the clue. When they reunite with Jinaal, he had the puzzle piece ready for them because they proved themselves worthy. This was yet another instance where Star Trek: Discovery took an element of past Star Trek canon and applied it to its own stories in a fresh, fun and meaningful way.

Star Trek: Discovery Took Some Detours Into Politics & Love

"jinaal" strengthened one of its core relationships but ended another, star trek: discovery's alex kurtzman & michelle paradise talk final season.

Fans worried about not seeing Saru again after he left the USS Discovery will surely be pleased to see him appear, with his betrothed T'Rina, at Federation headquarters. He's been named an Ambassador for a number of smaller planetary systems, and he participated in his first diplomatic session with his colleagues. This was an interesting look at the inside dealings of Federation politics unlike any Star Trek series has shown audiences.

Rather than have crewmembers discuss ethical and political dilemmas during an action-packed mission, "Jinaal" set the clash of ideas in a boardroom. The discussions were exceedingly formal and exactly as "boring" as longtime fans would expect a utopian society's politics to be. In fact, Saru's greatest struggle wasn't with dealing with his potential political rivals, but with the woman he loves. Or, at least, her staff.

President T'Rina's aide spoke to Saru offline, explaining his reservations about their pending nuptials. Despite the Vulcan-Romulan reunification and the return of Ni'Var to the Federation, it seems there are still dissidents. These "Vulcan Purists" would object to Saru and T'Rina's marriage.

When Saru told T'Rina that they should delay their marital announcement, she understandably got angry with him . While Saru was trying to protect T'Rina by making this decision for her, he neglected to see that she'd already considered the issue. After they made up, she told him that not announcing their engagement would make it seem like she had something to hide, which would be more damning to her public image and personal convictions.

Star Trek: Discovery's Adira Is The Next Generation's Wesley Crusher Done Right

Conversely, on Trill, Adira Tal and Gray -- the former Tal symbiont host who was put into a new, synthetic body with the zhian'tara ritual -- saw each other for the first time in six months. The reunion was bittersweet because unlike Saru and T'Rina, who patched things up rather quickly, Adira and Gray broke up shortly after. This was a questionable decision for the history-making couple.

Gray is the first transgender character in Star Trek , while Adira is the franchise's first explicitly non-binary character. Their relationship was a foundational part of each character's lives. There are quite a few ongoing love stories in Star Trek: Discovery that are on shakier ground than Adira and Gray, but they're still together. Breaking apart this particular couple is a questionable decision at best, and insidious at worst.

Given how little screentime Adira and, especially, Gray already had on Star Trek: Discovery , it would've been better to allow their relationship to flourish off-screen . There is merit in showing struggle and even the end of nontraditional relationships in fiction. But given the many "firsts" that Gray and Adira represented and in light of current events, their breakup undercut the episode's and the season's themes of shared connection.

Everyone else in the series, even the standoffish Commander Rayner, found themselves drawn closer to others during this week's episode. Even ignoring the negative implications, driving Adira and Gray further apart doesn't add any suspense, tension or value to the series' wider story. This could be addressed better in later episodes but, for now, it's one of the series' weakest narrative decisions.

The Theme of Connection in ‘Jinaal’ Runs Throughout Star Trek: Discovery Season 5

Star trek: discovery season 5 is beginning to tackle one of the oldest questions in history, star trek: discovery's mary wiseman, wilson cruz and blu del barrio hype finale.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation writers developed "The Chase (Season 6, Episode 20)," the message the Progenitor hologram delivered was a classic moral for the universe. However, it was really included to offer an explanation to nitpicky fans as to why the vast majority of aliens in the universe had two arms, two legs and other humanoid characteristics. This in turn also meant that every species, including classic Star Trek villains , were related to each other on a foundational genetic level.

As corny and implausibly convenient as this primordial connection could be to some, it can also bring Star Trek's vastly different societies together in ways that even the Federation couldn't. Not only that, but as Burnham and Culber discuss at the end of the episode, the Progenitors' truth could also answer deeply spiritual questions. Specifically, "Why are we here?" Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 took one of Star Trek's most existential yet overlooked ideas, and explored it in ways that previous shows and movies didn't.

For the longest time, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wanted his characters to meet "God." While Star Trek V: The Final Frontier took an ambitious stab at this existential idea but fell short of expectations, it might just be Star Trek: Discovery that finally delivers a version of a higher power and its implications that Roddenberry himself would approve of.

Because instead of some mythical or mystical being, this show's version of the creator is merely an advanced race of humanoids who felt alone in the universe. Even though they knew their species wouldn't live to see the fruits of their creation, they wanted to make life in their own image and out of nothing but love.

Star Trek: Discovery debuts new episodes Thursdays on Paramount+ .

Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery follows Michael Burnham on her journay from a mutineer in the 23rd Century to Starfleet captain in the 32nd. With its one-of-a-kind spore drive, the USS Discovery is a ship unlike any other, with a crew to match.

• Michael Burnham is at her best as a Starfleet Captain.
• The use of the zhian'tara draws connections to classic bits of Star Trek history.
• The episode blends action and character moments quite well.
• Breaking but Adira and Gray feels like forcing romantic tension where it doesn't need to be.
• While better than not seeing him, the Saru portion of the story risks unbalancing the central narrative.
• The cards-down approach to the Season 5 antagonists risks undercutting how cool they are.

Screen Rant

Star trek is ditching discovery's spore drive - and that's good.

Stamets reveals that there will be no more spore drives after Star Trek: Discovery season 5, which is good news for Starfleet in the 32nd century.

WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episodes 1 & 2!

• Starfleet's decision to abandon the spore drive in Discovery season 5 is a smart move for the future of the franchise.
• The spore drive's ability to instantly transport the USS Discovery can hinder dramatic tension and urgency in storytelling.
• The new pathway drive technology will likely power the adventures in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, replacing the spore drive.

Star Trek: Discovery has revealed that Starfleet is ditching the groundbreaking spore drive, which is a good thing for the future of the franchise's 32nd century timeline. The USS Discovery's spore drive was an experimental technology from the 2200s that became invaluable in Star Trek 's dilithium-starved 32nd century. Pioneered by Commander Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and his research partner, Straal (Saad Siddiqui), the spore drive was a way to navigate a subspace mycelium network of fungal roots that spanned the entire universe . The Federation-Klingon War necessitated a rapid scaling up of Stamets and Staal's research to create a brand-new propulsion system.

The USS Discovery is the only starship in the entire Star Trek timeline to both possess and successfully operate Stamets and Staal's spore drive. The ship owned by Cleveland "Book" Booker (David Ajala) had a stolen spore drive prototype fitted in Star Trek: Discovery season 4, but it was destroyed when Ruon Tarka (Shawn Doyle) crashed into Species 10-C's hyperfield. The Discovery's predecessor, the USS Glenn, suffered a catastrophic accident when testing one of the original spore drives, resulting in the death of all hands . Now that Starfleet has shuttered the spore drive project in season 5, the USS Discovery will always be a one of a kind starship.

Every New Version Of Warp Drive In Star Trek

Why star trek is right to drop discovery’s spore drive after season 5.

Star Trek: Discovery 's spore drive may be a huge leap forward for Starfleet, but it can create a lot of story issues for the viewers at home. Ultimately, the USS Discovery's ability to appear wherever it needs to can seriously hamper the dramatic tension . Discovery season 5's treasure hunt is a good example of how the spore drive can negatively impact storytelling. The audience is repeatedly told that the Progenitors' treasure must not fall into the hands of L'ak (Elias Toufexis) and Moll (Eve Harlow), setting up a thrilling race against time.

The only problem is that, because Discovery can just instantaneously jump to the next location on their treasure map, there's time for the crew to drop off Captain Saru (Doug Jones) before they head to Trill. This undermines any sense of urgency with Star Trek: Discovery season 5's treasure hunt. In other Star Trek shows, a warp drive means that the hero ship and its crew are constantly moving forward, heading to their next destination . There's an urgency to these onward journeys that Star Trek: Discovery just doesn't have.

For example, it's hard to imagine Star Trek: The Next Generation 's classic "The Best of Both Worlds" having the same impact with a spore drive. The emotional gut punch of the USS Enterprise-D arriving too late to save the thousands of lives lost at the Battle of Wolf 359. By dropping the spore drive in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, it could restore some dramatic urgency and forward motion to the storytelling in the upcoming Starfleet Academy show , which will also be set in the 32nd century.

Discovery’s Warp Drive Replacement Made It A Different Star Trek Show

Ironically, given its name, the USS Discovery hasn't done much discovering over the course of Star Trek: Discovery 's five seasons . While it's true that they've sought out strange new worlds and made contact with new life and civilizations, their discoveries have been a lot less spontaneous than those of their predecessors. Possessing a spore drive, the USS Discovery is regularly dropped into the heat of the action, be that a battle with the Emerald Chain or a short hop to the Galactic Barrier to meet Species 10-C.

Star Trek: Discovery "Ushered In A New Era" & "Made A Difference", Say Executive Producers

This has given Star Trek: Discovery a unique feel from other Star Trek TV shows , helping the show to stand out from its franchise stablemates. Discovery being dropped into various hot spots by Starfleet is often very exciting, and marks out Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) as the most important captain in Star Trek 's 32nd century. The only drawback of this approach is that it can often feel like the Discovery crew are sitting around waiting for orders, rather than exploring the wider Star Trek universe .

Starfleet Is Right To Abandon The Spore Drive In Discovery Season 5

After the events of Star Trek: Discovery season 4, it might be prudent for Starfleet to abandon the spore drive going forward. The actions of Ruon Tarka and Book showed just how dangerous the spore drive technology was if it fell into the hands of people with bad intentions . Tarka and Book almost caused the destruction of Earth by launching hostile action against Species 10-C, and this worst case scenario was averted when Booker finally saw sense.

Indeed, the very fact that Stamets' spore drive research was co-opted by Starfleet during wartime is proof of its more dangerous implications. Villainous figures like Captain Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) and Osyraa (Janet Kidder) have coveted the USS Discovery's unique technology, hoping to use it to assert power and destroy their enemies rather than learn more about the mycelial network. By closing down the spore drive research program in Star Trek: Discovery season 5, Starfleet can further prevent this valuable technology from falling into the wrong hands .

Star Trek: Discovery Science YouTube Show BioTrekkie With The Admiral Returns In April

Will star trek: starfleet academy have its own warp drive replacement.

Star Trek: Discovery 's spore drive is just one of many attempts made to replace Starfleet's traditional warp drive . First, there was the USS Excelsior, " The Great Experiment " which tried and failed to perfect transwarp technology in the late 23rd century. A hundred years later, and Star Trek: Prodigy 's USS Protostar was equipped with a proto-drive, allowing it to cross lightyears like never before. Similarly, the USS Dauntless, commanded by Vice Admiral Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) in Prodigy season 1, was fitted with a quantum slipstream drive that was also incredibly powerful. Starfleet's latest innovation in the 32nd century is the pathway drive, first mentioned in Star Trek: Discovery 's season 4 premiere.

Star Trek: Prodigy season 2 will unveil the USS Voyager-A, which will be "bigger" than the USS Protostar, suggesting improvements on either the proto or quantum slipstream drives.

Not much is known about this new technology, but now that the spore drive has been dropped, the pathway drive will be the new standard in Star Trek: Discovery 's 32nd century. Captain Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie) notes that his ship, the USS Antares, doesn't have a pathway drive, meaning that it's still in the early stages. The pathway drive was tested by the 32nd century's USS Voyager , and has presumably been proven as a more viable alternative to dilithium-powered warp than the spore drive. This means that the new pathway drive will likely be powering the adventures of the crew in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy .

Star Trek: Discovery streams Thursdays on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery is an entry in the legendary Sci-Fi franchise, set ten years before the original Star Trek series events. The show centers around Commander Michael Burnham, assigned to the USS Discovery, where the crew attempts to prevent a Klingon war while traveling through the vast reaches of space.