Warp velocities ... and YOU!

[Rigil Kent]

This will display how absolutely inept I am when it comes to math...

I'm trying to figure out exactly how long it would take a ship traveling at warp 3 or so to traverse a distance of forty or fifty light seconds ... but I have no idea how to figure that out and I loath just "making shit up". Anyone?

From Wiki
A light-second is a unit of length. It is defined as the distance light travels in an absolute vacuum in one second or 299,792,458 meters. Note that this value is considered exact, since the meter is actually (as of 1983) defined in terms of the light second. It is just over 186,282 miles and almost 109 feet.

A light-minute is 60 light-seconds and a light-hour is 60 light-minutes, or 3600 light-seconds. A light-year is 31,557,600 light-seconds.

Some distances in light seconds:

* The mean diameter of the Earth is about 0.0425 light-seconds.
* The mean distance, over land, between opposite sides of the planet Earth is about 0.0668 light-seconds (which also means that communications between opposite sides of the planet, taking a circumferential path, can never travel faster than about 67 milliseconds).
* The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 1.282 light-seconds.
* The diameter of the Sun is about 4.643 light-seconds.
* The average distance from the Earth to the Sun (i.e. 1 astronomical unit) is 499.0 light-seconds, or 8.317 light-minutes.

It is also possible to add diminutive prefixes, such as the light-nanosecond, equal to almost exactly 30 cm (11.8 in or nearly a foot).

[Distracted]

Exactly how fast is "Warp 3"? Is it supposed to be 3 times the speed of light? If so, then it follows that a ship traveling at warp 3 would travel 50 light seconds in 50/3 actual seconds, right?

[Rigil Kent]

Therein lies the difficulty. I've read that warp factor 5 is 125x the speed of light, not 5x. Hence my question for any of the super Trek nerds.

[blacknblue]

I have never been able to figure out if the warp drive increases geometrically, logarithmically, mathematically, or rises like yeast. It never made any sense at all to me.

[hth2k]

Here is a site and table that may help.

http://www.calormen.com/Star_Trek/FAQs/ ... es-faq.htm
I think it may be fair to use TOS warp definitions for Ent.

This chart compares TOS-era Warp speeds with the speed of light:

Warp Factor Velocity
1 1 Speed of Light
2 8
3 27
4 64
5 125
6 216 Maximum stable speed of NCC-1701
7 343
8 512 Emergency speed of NCC-1701

s = seconds
k = 1000
mi = miles ( statute mile = 5,280 feet)

186k mi/s * 27 = 5,022k mi/s 5,022 * 50s = 251,100k mi. in 50s or 251,100,000 mi.

Earth - Sun = 8.3 light minutes or ~ 96m miles

HtH

[Rigil Kent]

Hmm. Looks like I'll need to jump it up to light minutes as, by my calculations, a ship traveling at warp 3 could cover a distance of 49 light seconds (14,689,830,442 meters) in under 2 seconds.

Thanks, HtH!

[Rigil Kent]

Warp Factor Velocity
1 1 Speed of Light
2 8
3 27
4 64
5 125
6 216 Maximum stable speed of NCC-1701
7 343
8 512 Emergency speed of NCC-1701

Okay ... on a second look, it occurs to me that each of these are cubed. Warp 2 is 2x2x2, warp 3 is 3x3x3, and so on. Very interesting ...

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Okay ... on a second look, it occurs to me that each of these are cubed. Warp 2 is 2x2x2, warp 3 is 3x3x3, and so on. Very interesting ...

Yeah, I was just going to make a post to this effect. The TOS warp scale is cubed. That goes back to some very early Trek reference works.

I have no idea how they calculate the TNG scale.

[CX]

It's exponential, with a limit at 10.

[blacknblue]

Which is truly stupid. Why change it? Dumbass. There was nothing wrong with it the way it was. They wanted to turn the Federation into a race of Godlike beings who could roam the galaxy at will, and turn the vastness of the Milky Way galaxy into a kid's sandbox. I liked it better when TOS presented space as what it really is. Vast. Huge. BIG.

[CX]

I suspect they changed it because they didn't just want ever increasing numbers for the velocity and wanted a definative limit, which nature tends to have a lot of. They must've gone back to the TOS scale for the AGT universe though, which is the only explantion for the E-D's velocity of "Warp 13" beyond he real explanation of just breaking all the rules in the series bible.

[Kevin Thomas Riley]

Well, the TNG scale would be quite cumbersome with ever increasing velocities on the ships. You'd have warp 9, warp 9.9, warp 9.99 etc. and that wouldn't be very practical.

[CX]

Maybe, but we're stuck with it sometime during the lost era.

[Elessar]

yeah TNG is (warp factor)^(10/3) with the 10/3 exponentially growing after warp 9.9. They don't really give a formula for how to calculate the exponent... just to indicate that goes to infinity at warp 10.

[Rigil Kent]

This seems like a pretty decent place for this question.

Moving on from warp velocities, I'm now trying to figure out Impulse drives. Obviously, it's a sublight engine of some sort and, according to Memory Alpha, is "essentially an augmented fusion rocket." The thing is, aside from the one line at MA stating "By the 2270s, impulse was capable of reaching 80% of light speed without the warp drive even being online", I can't find anything telling someone what kind of velocities an impulse-powered vehicle (say, a shuttlepod) could manage which means I don't know how long a shuttlepod ride from Jupiter Station to Earth (~588 million km or ~365 million miles) would take.

Any thoughts?