Impulse and Warp Drive.

[Dora Resistance]

Today I will try to give a layman's explanation of the way ships move in the Star Trek universe.

Impulse is the first, and easiest to understand technology. It is based of the old principle of reaction.

Which means, the impulse engines are simply a nifty new way of sitting on a raft and tossing stones at the shore to move yourself away from the bank.

The 'particles' an impulse engine throws out are super heated plasma, carried by a forcefield and created by a Dutronium or Hydrogen based Fission Reaction.


Warp Drive is the 'interesting' technology. Basically, Warp drive engines open up a ship sized hole in our reality, bending the laws of physics in that area, and in fact, bending the shape of space itself. The ship does not use another motive force while in warp, for the 'warping' of the space around the ship is what makes it move forward, much like a whirlpool will move forward a conventional sailing vessel. (Put your rubber ducky in the tub sometime, then move your hand slowly through the water just ahead of the duck. The curve of the water will draw the duck toward your hand.) The more power used, the 'deeper' the curve of space around the ship will be, and the faster the ship will move forward. Finaly, the 'subspace' field thus created has the additional, neccesary factor of shielding the ship from the effects of, 'normal' physics, thus eliminating the need to deal with the lightspeed barrier, otherwise known as E=MCsquared.

Any questions class?

[Jessica Kanahoe]

Humm that might work....

[kale]

Just to clear a couple of things up, as ive read about this recently:
Most of the starship plans ive seen specify Fusion reactions of Deuterium. as its very difficult to break hydrogen and its isotopes down into anything smaller than they are already.

Reading memory alpha, it would be better to say that the ships in startrek move nowhere and that the space around them is moved, so the ship dosent move relative to the space its occupying, the occupied space is moved by means of distortions in subspace, which means that there is no relative time dilation, and therefore Travelling beyond the speed of light becomes possible.

Of course, I or my sources may be wrong, and i'd be happy to retract my statement if this proves to be the case.

[dakota]

You may want to check out the writings of this fellow, Lawrence Krauss. He is a physicist who has written extensively on this topic and has the best ideas on how this technology may work that I have come across.

www.phys.cwru.edu/~krauss/

[Aspera sutai Vraal]

Oh boy... I really want to post the "Dilithium and you" bit out of "How Much for Just the Planet", but alas for copywrite reasons I can't. Still if

Reading memory alpha, it would be better to say that the ships in startrek move nowhere and that the space around them is moved, so the ship dosent move relative to the space its occupying, the occupied space is moved

Einstein says it doesn't matter if you say the ship moved away or that everything else around the ship moved away from the ship, they are both exactly the same thing. That would be his law of General Relativity.

There are other foces at work that move the duckie, when you push the water in front of the ducky away you create a low pressure area and the water behind the ducky moves forward to fill it. Even if it didn't 'riding the curve' requires the external force of Gravity, which is notably lacking in space.

Newton's conservation of momentum (Reaction as you call it) is not sufficient to generate the accelleration we see in Impulse drives. The mass of a Galaxy class starships (Ent-D) is almost 5 million metric tons. In order to accellerate to full impulse (said to be .25c) you would need to eject about 1/4 of your mass at the speed of light. And you'll need just as much to slow down again. So that's half the mass of your ship that you are willing to throw out of your ship as reaction mass. Which would mean you could only accellate fo full impulse once before refeuling.

There is no canonical explaination for this. The most common fannish explanation of this is that the Impulse drives have thier own smaller Cocrane field generator that allows them to partially immerse the ship into subspace but not enough to power to completely leave real space.

[Ensign Markius Faulkner]

As I understand it, if you were to say that there is no time dilation with Warp travel, you might be wrong. You must coincide space and time as on dimension altogether. That being said, no matter if you move or space moves around you, you still experience the normal affects of time as you are moving through space/space is moving around you. This fact implies that the time in regions A or B won't matter at all, because you your self have aged in the time it took to 'travel' from A to B.

This correlates with the General and Special theories of Relativity, in the fact that you still age proportionate to the universe around your body/ship/planet etc.