in star trek how fast is impulse speed

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Star trek: how fast warp speed is (& how it compares to hyperspace).

Warp speed is the key to making Star Trek work - but just how does this fictional form of travel work, and how does it compare to Star Wars?

Here's how fast  Star Trek 's warp speed actually is, and how it compares to other forms of travel in science-fiction, such as  Star Wars ' Hyperspace. When Gene Roddenberry began to work on  Star Trek , he was faced with a thorny problem: he wanted the show to have some semblance of scientific accuracy, but at the same time, he also needed the Starship Enterprise to be able to move at incredible speeds.

The solution was the warp drive (or, as it was actually called in  Star Trek 's pilot episode, the hyperdrive). This brings matter and antimatter into collision in order to generate a phenomenal amount of power, and the reaction is regulated by a rare mineral called dilithium . The matter/antimatter reaction allows the starship to travel faster than light - several multiples faster.

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But just how fast is warp speed? The original  Star Trek series was unclear, but over time the franchise has established clear rules. Let's explore them.

Warp Speed In The Original Series

The original  Star Trek series was wildly inconsistent in its portrayal of warp speed, with the concept basically used as a plot device to get from A to B at whatever speed an episode's writer wanted. Warp speeds of 10 or higher were treated as unsafe, at least until the Enterprise was refitted in  Star Trek: The Motion Picture , when it gained the ability to safely travel up to warp 12. The fastest warp speed shown on-screen was an alien vessel that could actually reach warp 35. All these inconsistencies clearly bugged Gene Roddenberry, and as a result warp speed was recalibrated for  Star Trek: The Next Generation in order to create something a little more well-structured.

Warp Speed In The Next Generation Era

According to the Star Trek Encyclopedia , in simple terms, the new warp speed factor 1 is the exact speed of light, 299,792,458 m/s. Each factor above is a multiple of that warp speed, although what those values are vary depending on the show in question.

• Warp Factor 1 - 1x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 2 - 10x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 3 - 39x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 4 - 102x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 5 - 214x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 6 - 392x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 7 - 656x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 8 - 1,024x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 9 - 1,516x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 9.99 - 7,912x lightspeed
• Warp Factor 10 - Infinity

In theory, a ship traveling at warp 10 is moving so fast that it essentially exists in all places and all times simultaneously. It's only known to have been achieved once in the entire history of  Star Trek , in the  Star Trek: Voyager episode "Threshold". There, Tom Paris successfully traveled at warp 10, but the experience proved to have a transformative, evolutionary effect upon any organic matter. The crew of Voyager wisely ditched the idea, concerned about the consequences. It's worth noting that warp speeds seem to have been re-calibrated again in the future timeline glimpsed in "All Good Things," where two vessels are said to travel at warp 13. Presumably as technology became more efficient, Starfleet saw the value in creating a new scale with a wider range. In a technical note, science adviser Andre Bormanis suggested that in this future timeline, warp 15 would be the Threshold limit.

In truth, warp travel is usually little more than a plot device to help the Federation's starships jump across the galaxy at speed. Almost every sci-fi series has its own equivalent, simply because the alternative is to slow your story down for quite a while as the crew jumps from one star-system to another.

How Warp Speed Compares To Hyperspace

In  Star Wars , for example, ships that break the speed of light are able to access another dimension called hyperspace . This is essentially another plane of reality, one where the laws of physics operate differently. By accessing hyperspace, a spaceship can move at a phenomenal speed; there are different classes of hyperdrive, which allow different speeds.

It's important to note that a journey through hyperspace can be disrupted; if a vessel encounters the gravity shadow of a stellar mass, such as a planet, star, or black hole, they are ripped out of hyperspace. That's why the trip from Tatooine to Alderaan in  Star Wars took 16 hours, which is actually pretty slow for a 10,000 light year journey in a ship with an illegal class 0.5 hyperdrive, and is roughly equivalent to Star Trek 's warp 7. The dream scenario would be to acquire a hyperdrive of class 0.0, which would be analogous to Star Trek 's warp 10.

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Impulse speed

From star trek: theurgy wiki.

Starships used impulse propulsion systems (IPSs) to move slower than the speed of light, which was required for travel within a star’s gravity well, through solar systems, in starship combat, and similar situations. Impulse drives used fusion reactors to generate standard thrust via a standard Newtonian reaction—the thrust “pushes” the ship forward through space. Starships usually dropped to impulse when they encountered another ship to facilitate contact (or combat). IPSs had four components: the impulse reaction chamber (IRC), or fusion reactor, of which there are three per impulse engine; the accelerator/generator (A/G); the driver coil assembly (DCA); and the vectored exhaust director (VED). Energy released in the IRC by the fusion reaction was channelled to the A/G, which raised the velocity of the plasma and fed it on to the DCA. Electroplasma system (EPS) taps ran from the A/G to divert some energy to power other systems on the ship. The DCA created a field effect which aided the impulse propulsion process, then passes the energy on to the VDA, which directed it to thrust the vehicle in the desired direction.

A main impulse engine (MIE) capable of propelling a starship consisted of four linked impulse engines. These engines might have been grouped together, or divided into two groups of two to provide balanced thrust for structures such as separated saucer sections. An impulse engine was rated for the amount of velocity it could provide, expressed as a percentage of c (the speed of light). Thus, an impulse engine might be said to provide .5c thrust, meaning it could propel a vehicle at half the speed of light. Regardless of an engine’s maximum sublight speed, Starfleet generally limited impulse travels to .25c (paradoxically referred to as “full impulse”) to minimize the time-dilation problems which occur as a ship approaches speed of light travel. Only in starship combat situations do starships commonly move at impulse velocities in excess of .25c.

Impulse engines were also equipped with impulse capacitance cells which could provide a tiny burst of power to them. By releasing the cells’ power directly into the driver coils, a ship could generate a one-second burst of impulse speed when the engines were otherwise not functioning due to lack of power.

Note: The accompanying table lists the classes of MIEs. The XX/YY are Sustainable and Maximum velocities the engine could attain. Sustainable velocity is the highest speed it can maintain without stressing the ship or its engines (all impulse engines’ Standard speed is, by definition, .25c). Maximum velocity is the highest speed it can attain. Operating at Maximum impulse speed for longer than 24 hours risks damage to the engines.

Some of the texts are edits from LUG sources.

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Sub-light Speed in Star Trek: Can It Be Done?

Is Impulse Drive Possible?

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Trekkies have helped define the science fiction universe, along with the technology that the Star Trek series, books, and movies promise. One of the most sought-after technologies from those shows is the warp drive . That propulsion system is used on the spaceships of many species in the Trekiverse to get across the galaxy in amazingly short times (months or years compared to the centuries it would take at "merely" the speed of light ). However, there's not always a reason to use warp drive , and so, sometimes the ships in Star Trek  use impulse power to go at sub-light speed.

What is Impulse Drive?

Today, exploratory missions use chemical rockets to travel through space. However, those rockets have several drawbacks. They require massive amounts of propellant (fuel) and are generally very large and heavy. Impulse engines, like those depicted to exist on the starship Enterprise,  take a slightly different approach to accelerate a spacecraft. Instead of using chemical reactions to move through space, they use a nuclear reactor (or something similar) to supply electricity to the engines.

That electricity supposedly powers large electromagnets that use the energy stored in the fields to propel the ship or, more likely, superheat plasma that is then collimated by strong magnetic fields and spit out the back of the craft to accelerate it forward. It all sounds very complex, and it is. It's actually do-able, b ut not with current technology.

Effectively, impulse engines represent a step forward from current chemical-powered rockets. They don't go faster than the speed of light , but they're faster than anything we have today. It's probably only a matter of time before someone figures out how to build and deploy them. 

Could We Someday Have Impulse Engines?

The good news about "someday", is that the basic premise of an impulse drive  is scientifically sound. However, there are some issues to consider. In the films, the starships are able to use their impulse engines to accelerate to a significant fraction of the speed of light. In order to achieve those speeds, the power generated by the impulse engines has to be significant. That's a huge hurdle. Currently, even with nuclear power, it seems unlikely that we could produce sufficient current to power such drives, especially for such large ships. So, that's one problem to overcome.

Also, the shows often depict the impulse engines being used in planetary atmospheres and in nebulae, clouds of gas and dust. However, every design of impulse-like drives relies on their operation in a vacuum. As soon as the starship enters a region of high particle density (like an atmosphere or a cloud of gas and dust), the engines would be rendered useless. So, unless something changes (and ye canna change the laws o' physics, Captain!), impulse drives remain in the realm of science fiction.

Technical Challenges of Impulse Drives

Impulse drives sound pretty good, right? Well, there are a couple of problems with their use as outlined in science fiction. One is time dilation :  Any time a craft travels at relativistic speeds, concerns of time dilation arise. Namely, how does the timeline stay consistent when the craft is traveling at near-light speeds? Unfortunately, there is no way around this. That's why impulse engines are often limited in science fiction to about 25% of the  speed of light  where relativistic effects would be minimal. 

The other challenge for such engines is where they operate. They are most effective in a vacuum, but we often see them in Trek as they enter atmospheres or whip through clouds of gas and dust called nebulae. The engines as currently imagined wouldn't do well in such environments, so that's another issue that would have to be solved. 

Not all is lost, however. Ion drives, which use very similar concepts to impulse drive technology have been in use aboard spacecraft for years. However, due to their high energy use, they are not efficient at accelerating craft very efficiently. In fact, these engines are only used as primary propulsion systems on an interplanetary craft. That means only probes traveling to other planets would carry ion engines. There is an ion drive on the Dawn spacecraft, for example, which aimed at the dwarf planet Ceres. 

Since ion drives need only a small amount of propellant to operate, their engines operate continuously. So, while a chemical rocket may be quicker at getting a craft up to speed, it quickly runs out of fuel. Not so much with an ion drive (or future impulse drives). An ion drive will accelerate a craft for days, months, and years. It allows the spaceship to reach a greater top speed, and that's important for trekking across the solar system.

It's still not an impulse engine. Ion drive technology is certainly an application of impulse drive technology, but it fails to match the readily available acceleration ability of the engines depicted in Star Trek and other media.

Plasma Engines

Future space travelers may get to use something even more promising: plasma drive technology. These engines use electricity to superheat plasma and then eject it out the back of the engine using powerful magnetic fields. They bear some similarity to ion drives in that they use so little propellant that they are able to operate for long periods of time, especially relative to traditional chemical rockets.

However, they are much more powerful. They would be able to propel the craft at such a high rate that a plasma-powered rocket (using technology available today) could get a craft to Mars in little over a month. Compare this feat to the nearly six months it would take a traditionally powered craft. 

Is it Star Trek levels of engineering? Not quite. But it is definitely a step in the right direction.

While we may not have futuristic drives yet, they could happen. With further development, who knows? Maybe impulse drives like those depicted in movies will one day be a reality.

Edited and updated by Carolyn Collins Petersen .

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Impulse power

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Impulse power was source of power used to operate a ship's impulse engines . The amount of impulse power applied to an engine's output determined the impulse speed , i.e. velocity , at which a ship would travel. ( DS9 : " Emissary ")

Impulse power was generated by increasing the deuterium injection rate , then configuring the driver coils for impulse speed, by setting EPS taps to level three. ( DS9 : " For the Uniform ") Operational primary ODN lines were also required to initiate impulse power. ( DS9 : " Starship Down ")

Impluse power was a consumable, its availability could be measured by percentage . ( TOS : " The Doomsday Machine ", " The Immunity Syndrome ", " Elaan of Troyius ") Other systems could be rerouted to help boost impulse power, such as the auxiliary generators . ( TOS : " The Apple "; TAS : " The Terratin Incident "; Star Trek Beyond ) As well, it could be combined with warp power to allow for a "massive thrust" in the direction traveled. ( TOS : " The Immunity Syndrome ")

Impulse power could also be applied to other systems, including the deflector array , sensors , shields , and tractor emitters . ( ENT : " Zero Hour "; TOS : " The Squire of Gothos ", " The Immunity Syndrome "; TNG : " The Masterpiece Society ")

Uses of impulse power [ ]

The USS Enterprise used "impulse power two" to break free from the tractor beam used by Balok's pilot vessel . ( TOS : " The Corbomite Maneuver ")

After the USS Constellation had been critically damaged by the planet killer encountered in 2268 , and the landing party , including Captain James T. Kirk and Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott , became stranded on the derelict ship as his ship, the Enterprise was under attack, Kirk complained that " [w]e're stuck , blind , and deaf , " to which Scott added, " And paralyzed . No power. " Though Scott had previously stated the ship's warp drive was "a hopeless pile of junk", he figured he could coax some maneuvering power out of the impulse engines after Kirk suggested that Scott get him impulse power: " Half-speed, quarter-speed, anything. "

At the same time, the Enterprise , which was also damaged by the planet killer was fast enough to stay ahead of it under emergency impulse power , but doing so would exhaust their fuel supplies in less than a day . ( TOS : " The Doomsday Machine ")

When the refit Enterprise first cleared spacedock , Admiral James T. Kirk ordered Sulu to engage impulse power: " Ahead, warp 0.5. " ( Star Trek: The Motion Picture )

In 2285 , Lieutenant Saavik piloted the Enterprise out of spacedock at one-quarter impulse power. Later, the USS Reliant , under the command of Khan Noonien Singh , approached the Enterprise at one-half impulse power, under the guise of being "friends". Then, following the initial battle between the two vessels, the Enterprise was able to "proceed at impulse power" after its auxiliary power had been restored in order proceed at " [b]est speed to Regula I . " The Reliant also lost impulse power in the battle, and after Khan was lead to believe that the Enterprise had neither main nor auxiliary power, he concluded that upon the restoration of their impulse power, they were " [m]ore than a match for poor Enterprise," as the two ships orbited the planetoid . Following the Enterprise 's escape and run for the nearby Mutara Nebula , Admiral Kirk taunted Khan, who responded by issuing " [f]ull impulse power! " to enhance his pursuit. ( Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan )

During the pursuit of Jarok's scout ship by a Romulan warbird , a review found that as a result of the scout sustaining engine damage, it was forced to slow to 0.615 impulse power. ( TNG : " The Defector ")

After the USS Enterprise -D struck the first time by a quantum filament , in 2367 , it lost both warp and impulse engines. Following a second strike, the ship lost the ship's computer but still had impulse power, "but not much else." After the engineering station was brought back online, a more specific analysis was made, and it was determined that the ship had "half impulse power available." ( TNG : " Disaster ")

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Impulse Engine

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Impulse Engines are a type of starship equipment that increase a starship 's normal flight speed, turn rate, and full impulse speed.

There are three basic types of Impulse Engines in the game:

• [ Impulse Engines ] are balanced in terms of efficiency, speed, and maneuverability.
• [ Combat Impulse Engines ] are efficient at low power levels.
• [ Hyper-Impulse Engines ] are efficient at high power levels.

All special Engines are variants of these three types.

• 1 Impulse engine modifiers
• 2.1 Fleet Engines
• 2.2 Reputation Engines
• 2.3 Mission and Crafted Engines

Impulse engine modifiers [ ]

Some Impulse Engines may have additional modifiers that either increase existing bonuses or add new ones. Uncommon engines will have one modifier, Rare will have two, Very Rare three, and Ultra Rare four. All Epic Engines have [SecSpd-2] as their default fifth modifier, though this can be re-engineered into a different modifier. Below are examples of Impulse Engine modifiers. Some Engines and modifiers boost Skills by a certain amount, based on Mark level. Refer to the table above for these values.

• ↑ Can appear twice on one engine, though Fleet Engines and some special engines have 3 or more innate or added [Spd] mods, and engines can be re-engineered to have more. After calculating the base speed for the Engine's Mark level, the game will add 10% for one [Spd] modifier, 20% for [Spd]x2, and so forth. Thus, final speed for standard Impulse Engines will be (7.5+0.375*Mk) + N*0.1*(7.5+0.375*Mk) , where N is the number of [Spd] modifiers. This formula works up to Mk XII; Mk XIII items are treated as if they were Mk XVI (16), while Mk XIV items as if they were Mk XXIII (23); for Combat and Hyper-Impulse engines, respectively adding or subtracting 1 Mk level from the final formula will give you a close approximation.
• ↑ Engines have a base 4.5 Turn rate; one [Turn] modifier will give them 4.8, and two 5.1, regardless of Mk level. Can appear twice on one engine, though Fleet Engines and some special engines have 3 or more innate or added [Turn] mods, and engines can be re-engineered to have more.
• ↑ Can appear up to 4 times on one Engine. As with [Spd], Mk XIII acts like Mk XVI and Mk XIV like Mk XXIII, so Mk XIII [Full] adds 19.5, Mk XIV adds 24.8. The number displayed rounds to the nearest tenth. For example, [ Impulse Engines Mk IV [Full] ] would receive a bonus of 10.4.
• ↑ Does not scale with Mk level. Previously Starship Inertial Dampers .
• ↑ Integrated into Efficient Impulse Engines , and can be found on Elite Fleet Efficient Engines .
• ↑ Integrated into Dynamic Reroute Impulse Engines , and can be found on Jem'Hadar Combat Impulse Engines [Rrt] .
• [ Adapted M.A.C.O. Combat Impulse Engines [SecSpd] ]
• [ Klingon Honor Guard Impulse Engines [SecSpd] ]
• [ Adapted K.H.G. Impulse Engines ]
• [ M.A.C.O. Impulse Engines ]
• ↑ Can be found on Elite Fleet Protomatter Engines . This modifier gives 0.15% Shield Hardness per 1% of Throttle up to a maximum of 15% Shield Hardness at full throttle.

An Uncommon Impulse Engine will have one modifier suffix, Rare will have two, and Very Rare will have three. Rare and Very Rare can have multiples of the same suffix, and stacked suffixes are added together, not multiplied.

Special Impulse Engines [ | ]

Numbers taken from a level 60 character with no skill points spent, no traits slotted, no equipment but the shield, 50 shield power, and no specializations affecting item stats.

Fleet Engines [ | ]

Main article: Fleet Engines

Reputation Engines [ | ]

The following are reputation set engines. Note that flight speed and full impulse scale with Mark level; the stats below are for Mk XII items. Mk XIII adds +1.5 Flight Speed, just like a [Spd] modifier. Full impulse boosts (both innate and from mods) add 16.5 at Mk XII and 19.5 at Mk XIII. Stats using an X multiplier also scale as the item increases in Mark level, shown in the table above.

Mission and Crafted Engines [ | ]

Stats given for Mk XII items, as above.

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impulse speed

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