Anti-Photons ;-)

posted on March 14th, 2009, 4:41 am

o ok i see i thought all negative numbers were imaginary. o what does star trek do with the universal speed limit (eg you can not go faster than the speed of light)

posted on March 14th, 2009, 5:33 am

Warp in star trek has something to do with actually warping space using subspace....I don't remember exactly how it works. I took it upon myself to study a while ago...and definitely don't remember it now. I know that it has something to do with the plasma coils in the nacelles oscillating once plasma's run through it. Something about the coils resonating makes something cool happen in subspace or something like that. Lol, sorry. Basically it kind of bends the whole rule about light because it doesn't apply in subspace...or something like that. Anyone else got a better explanation, or want to tell me I'm wrong? I'm kind of stretching. 

posted on March 14th, 2009, 5:46 am

They hold that the light-speed barrier is quite real.  Full impulse is close to the speed of light for most ships that have sufficient drive-power in comparison with their mass.

Subspace, being effectively another dimension, is governed by slightly different laws, and it's relativistic threshold is effectively Warp 9.99999999993 if memory serves.

There are several 'workaround' methods posited in Star Trek sources for FTL.

#1 - Warp Drive - Effectively creating a bubble around the ship that maintains relativistic law around it, allowing far greater velocity in actuality, though power consumption is extreme, and maximum velocity still has limits.  Also prone to the Warp 10 threshold, where speed becomes infinite.

#2 - Transwarp - Utilizes a Fludic-Space slipstream, similar to wormhole travel to allow near infinite speed.  Power consumption is beyond Warp Drive, requiring either a perfect reaction, or incredibally advanced or plentiful power sourcing.

#3 - Jump Drive - Short-range advanced transporter technology allowing instantaneous in-system travel via transporting the entire ship.  Power consumption is even worse than Warp Drive and Transwarp, and a single mishap is fatal for the whole ship.  No time for pilot correction.

#4 - Shunt Drive - A more advanced form of Jump Drive, allowing intersteller travel by sending the transporter stream through Subspace.  Only possessed by certain ancient races, and possibly the Borg, though it's effeciency is dubious at best, and the high risk of materializing inside an object forces it to only be used by those with starcharts accurate within seconds.

#5 - Slipdrive - This is nothing more than a drive system that isn't.  It uses a powerful graviton emitter to create an artificial wormhole that sucks in the ship and dumps it out the other end.  The one example of it required that the ship be built around the drive, and could be mistaken for a small moon.  The ship was basically nothing more than that drive, and a hull, more of a projectile than anything else, and meant to smash into an opposing race's homeworld, destroying the weapon and the planet at once.

I can't think of any other FTL systems in Star Trek sources off the top of my head.

posted on March 14th, 2009, 11:37 am

how do they fire weapons and such if they are in sub space. also why do the stars still appear.

[Atlantis]

posted on March 14th, 2009, 12:17 pm

Last edited by Atlantis on March 14th, 2009, 12:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Because space and subspace are joined, but subspace has 'depth'. The deeper you go, the faster you can go. It's best to use water as an example...

So,

1) The deeper you go into subspace, the faster the laws of "maximum speed" are*. Therefore, instead of making a ship need stronger engines to get faster, you just make the ship capable of going deeper into subspace.

*: This is the opposite of what happens in REAL water, but it's the only way to make everything else fit.

2) When you're in water (subspace), you can still see up and out, to see clouds etc. As you get deeper, though, you can't see so well (or at all), so I'll add to this model that the 'deeper' into subspace you go, the less stars you see. For this reason, it is more dangerous to travel at 'deeper' subspace depths, as it's harder to navigate. Also note that it's not exactly precise, so you can see stars and maybe planets, but it's difficult to see much else.

2a) You can't see into water from in the air, because of reflections. For this reason, it is difficult to see into subspace from normal space. With basic sensors, you can't detect subspace, just more normal space. It takes some advanced technology to be able to do this.

3) I'll also add to this model that stars would be like little islands. The water around them is shallower, so for this you have to warp slower when in a star system, because subspace itself isn't deep enough to allow such high speeds.*

*: This contradicts certain actions in ST:IV, but backs up actions in ST:I and ST:VII, and probably more.

I dunno what you'll all think of it, and I'm sure there's lots more I could add to this, but I've nto quite woken up yet, heh.

posted on March 14th, 2009, 12:31 pm

StarTrek as well as real physics assume the theory of special relaticity as a quite accurate model for discription our universe. This theory defines the light speed as the highest velocity locally. That means the hightes observable speed in an arbitrary vicinity. There are several ways of overcoming that problem.

The most popular is the warp drive, utilitizing the alcubierre "metric". The trick is to move the space of your vicinity, like standing on a carpet that moves through the room. You don't need to move yourself at all. Moving space can be achieved ba deleting space in front of you and creating some behing you. A way to dothat is to concentrate exotic matter in the front and rear of you ship, creating the socalled warp-bubble. This is not actually a bubble but two half-cups, to be precise, but that doesn't matter, because the gap is arbitrary thin. Though exotic matter (particles with negative energy-density) are not likly to exist they cannot be proven impossible yet. The warp bubble would completly seperate you from the environment, preventing any interactions. This means communication, use of weapons and sensor scanning would be impossible, in contrast to StarTrek. There is NO SUBSPACE involved from a physical point of view.

Another way, as silent93 mentied is the Slip-Drive, that utilizes a wormhole. This is also done by exotic matter, otherwise the wormhole would be impassable. To keep the tidal forces low enough to not rip the ship apart, the wormhole needs to be immensivly large. So the Slip-Drive is rather something utilizable for giant stations than for ships.

The last possible option known to me is leaving the universe (or at least our "layer"). You could hope to find a different light-speed there, but that would cause you to age differently. But different metrics could exist there and could be used to shorten the way in "our" space. Unfortunatly noone ever observed or EVEN IMAGINED any mechanism that would shift an element of spacetime through additional dimensions. I appreciate any proposials!

After all I'd like to remind everyone, that, if special relativity is a valid model for our universe's physics, FTL inevitably implies time travel and thus paradoxa of causality.

posted on March 14th, 2009, 12:41 pm

I dunno what you'll all think of it, and I'm sure there's lots more I could add to this, but I've nto quite woken up yet, heh.

That was a really nice theory, in my opinion, if there wasn't the problem that subspace is locally connected to real space. Your movement below light speed is directly coupled to movement in real space, as it can be in observed form "outside the water". If these 'layers' were disconnected for our 4 known forces of interaction, it could work. But if it was disconnected, it was like hyperspace.

posted on March 15th, 2009, 12:42 am

well there is that episode of voyager where they break warp 10 and are everywhere at once. but i dont know if it helps either one of your theories or not.

posted on March 15th, 2009, 5:41 pm

I guess that that would be analogous to "crashing into the sea-bed".

And, to add another thing to the "water" model, the warp flash isn't like a Sonic Boom, it's the "splash".

[mimesot]

posted on March 16th, 2009, 3:28 pm

Last edited by mimesot on March 16th, 2009, 3:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

@ Dircome
Just to avoid any misunderstandings: Your statement is not deciding any challange of theories. Atlantis and me are rather analysing theories from two independent points of view. Atlantis tries to explain the various FTL techs from the StarTrek storytelling, I contribute theories that derive from scientific hypothesis. So your statment is clearly committed to Atlantis. From a physical point of view, infinite speed is the same for a newtonian universe, as flighing at lightspeed for a relativistic one, thus no way achieavble even in a universe, that isn't described by einsteins physics.

Only here and there, StarTrack technologie and scientific descent theories come to an oberlap. One of these is warp.

Does anyone know, what warp coils are for? Is there a sensible idea beyond it, or just an idea of a designer, to give nacelles a reason?

posted on March 16th, 2009, 4:52 pm

I have a theory about them.  I suspect that they have a similar purpose to a resonance coil.

It's the only theory I've got about that, though.

posted on March 16th, 2009, 6:14 pm

As far as I know, the Warp Coils are what generate the Warp field.

posted on March 16th, 2009, 6:24 pm

Yeah they do. I'll ask more precisly next time. I rather wanted to know, what the warp coil does with the plasma, whixh is supplied by the Warp-Core, to create that warp field. the Thanks anyway!

Does anyone known anything further about resonace coils?

posted on March 16th, 2009, 7:12 pm

Unfortunately, what with it being a fictional technology, it's hard to explain how it works.

There are, however, a number of theories. Someone once said that the heating/cooling of the plasma causes "magnetic resonance", which somehow acts to shift the ship into subspace.

= Also to add to the "water" model. Everything floats, so if you turn off the warp drive, you'll float back up to the surface (drop out of warp).

posted on March 17th, 2009, 7:50 pm

But why coils? ... It might be, that they thought rotating plasma could generate a gravitic fielt like rotatine charges create a magnetic field.

Or it does something phantastic with subspace, and any thoughts about it (from a scientific p.o.v.) are waste.