Isn't transwarp faster than warp?

[Crazedwraith]

Okay. Warp 10 is ultimate speend right? But hang on! transwarp and quatum slipstream drive are supposed to be faster than warp? It would have taken voyager 3 months to get home by SLIPSTREAM. at Warp 10 it would have got their instantly. Would someone please tell me how a drive system thats supposed to by faster actually gets u there slower?

[Darth Garden Gnome]

You can't reach Warp 10 (AFAIK "Threshold" Warp 10 couldn't possibly be Warp 10), so technically slipsteam and transwarp are faster. As for Warp, it gets faster by slapping some nines on the end ie-Warp 9.9999999999ect.

[Ted C]

It's quite simple really.

Star Trek writers make no sense when they talk about Warp Drive, Transwarp Drive, etc. In "All Good Things", Riker actually gave orders for the Enterprise to go at Warp 13 (Beverly gave similar orders for her medical ship). An alien ship (in "Journey to Babel") and the Enterprise itself on more than one occasion ("The Changeling" and "By Any Other Name" come to mind) also exceeded Warp 10 on more than one occasion in TOS. Warp 10 apparently isn't the hard-limit "infinite speed" that has been claimed; it's just not attainable with TNG-era Federation technology.

Warp drive appears to peak at around 10,000c. Transwarp drive can presumably go a good bit faster, but we don't have any quantifiable evidence of how much faster.

Borg transwarp conduits can carry a ship across a quadrant in a very short time, but the exact speed is difficult to calculate. In any case, they have to actually construct the conduit to get the benefit, and the time required for construction isn't known (it could easily be years).

Slipstream was apparently capable of about 2.6 million C in "Hope & Fear".

[Sir Sirius]

Okay. Warp 10 is ultimate speend right? But hang on! transwarp and quatum slipstream drive are supposed to be faster than warp? It would have taken voyager 3 months to get home by SLIPSTREAM. at Warp 10 it would have got their instantly. Would someone please tell me how a drive system thats supposed to by faster actually gets u there slower?

Voyager can't reach Warp 10.

And I think that you are confusing a measure of velocity with a method of FTL travel.

[Rye]

Weren't there ds9/tng episodes with vessels going warp 13 and stuff? I'm fairly sure they showed the future and they said they were going warp 13.

so perhaps you can go faster than warp 10, just not at warp 10, how this would work, i have no idea.

[Sir Sirius]

Weren't there ds9/tng episodes with vessels going warp 13 and stuff? I'm fairly sure they showed the future and they said they were going warp 13.

so perhaps you can go faster than warp 10, just not at warp 10, how this would work, i have no idea.

Yes in TNG: "All Good Things" Riker orders a future Enterprise to go to Warp 13, but that is in the future and they might have revised the Warp scale again.

Besides that was a scenario cooked up by Q, it might have just been makebelief. The episode featured a refit-E-D with three nacelles and since we know that E-D blow up in ST:G with out ever getting a third nacelle which sort of supports the Q playing games theory.

[SCRawl]

The "Warp 13" in the final TNG episode was likely due to a "renormalization" (not quite the proper use of that word, but it's close) of the warp scale. Their engines probably got incrementally closer to warp 10, which would result in much higher multiples of c, and ordering your helmsman to go to warp 9.99999999999999876 sounds awkward.
I have no canonical evidence of this, it's just that it appeals to my sensibilities.

[Darth Wong]

Transwarp adds an extra syllable, so it is obviously much faster

[Howedar]

I find myself wondering why a warp scale was ever chosen that wasn't linear with respect to c.

[Darth Wong]

I find myself wondering why a warp scale was ever chosen that wasn't linear with respect to c.

TOS was inconsistent with its warp factors, so fans worked out an exponential scale that solved most of the problems. When the TM was written, they decided to be pseudoscientific, and a large part of pseudoscience is making everything more complicated than it needs to be.

So instead of a simple, intuitive multiplier, they invented this goofy discontinuous exponential asymptotic function, whose application is so ridiculously counterintuitive that it becomes almost worthless unless you've pored over the painfully dry TM. You can thank Sternbach and Okuda.

[kojikun]

I find myself wondering why a warp scale was ever chosen that wasn't linear with respect to c.

Because then you'd be going warp 99999 instead of a simple clean number like warp 9.9999! honestly, how could they live with such huge numbers like 99999 when they coul do much better with a small 9.9999?

I'm guessing that the idea of using prefixes and suffixes never occured to them. 10KPSL is too much for their puny minds, I guess. Warp 9.9 is so much better.

[apocolypse]

The "Warp 13" in the final TNG episode was likely due to a "renormalization" (not quite the proper use of that word, but it's close) of the warp scale. Their engines probably got incrementally closer to warp 10, which would result in much higher multiples of c, and ordering your helmsman to go to warp 9.99999999999999876 sounds awkward.
I have no canonical evidence of this, it's just that it appeals to my sensibilities.

Actually, I unfortunately can't remember where I heard this at, but I believe you're correct. They apparently redid the warp scale again, because they got closer up the 9.999etc. so they added higher warp numbers.

[The Nomad]

I think GK had an interesting theory about Transwarp and stuff ( articles section IIRC )... but it could contain more BS than I remember ( been up to 2 years I didn't read it )

[His Divine Shadow]

Star Trek writers make no sense when they talk about Warp Drive, Transwarp Drive, etc. In "All Good Things", Riker actually gave orders for the Enterprise to go at Warp 13 (Beverly gave similar orders for her medical ship). An alien ship (in "Journey to Babel") and the Enterprise itself on more than one occasion ("The Changeling" and "By Any Other Name" come to mind) also exceeded Warp 10 on more than one occasion in TOS. Warp 10 apparently isn't the hard-limit "infinite speed" that has been claimed; it's just not attainable with TNG-era Federation technology.

Warp 10 is kinda like the lightspeed barrier, you cannot reach it, but you can get very very close, and as I've been told, there was an older warp scale that was unlike the newer warp scale.
The old warpscale was just a bunch of speeds posted while the new warpscale seemed to be a exponentially increasing system that peaks out at warp 10, which cannot be achieved, just like lightspeed.

So Warp 13 in the old scale might be like warp 9.2 or something in the new warpscale.

[The Nomad]

Transwarp adds an extra syllable, so it is obviously much faster

Illogical. "Quantum Slipstream" has both more syllabs and the word "quantum", yet it takes 3 months to cover a distance Transwarp covers in a matter of hours

[The Nomad]

Transwarp adds an extra syllable, so it is obviously much faster

Illogical. "Quantum Slipstream" has both more syllabs and the word "quantum", yet it takes 3 months to cover a distance Transwarp covers in a matter of hours

Forget it, I just remembered of "Timeless"

[Ted C]

Warp 10 is kinda like the lightspeed barrier, you cannot reach it, but you can get very very close, and as I've been told, there was an older warp scale that was unlike the newer warp scale.
The old warpscale was just a bunch of speeds posted while the new warpscale seemed to be a exponentially increasing system that peaks out at warp 10, which cannot be achieved, just like lightspeed.

So Warp 13 in the old scale might be like warp 9.2 or something in the new warpscale.

Ships have exceeded both in the past ("Journey to Babel") and the future ("All Good Things"). Unless they're changing their systems of measurement every few decades just for the fun of it, Warp 10 is not an insurmountable barrier; it's just not possible for typical Federation technology in the TOS/TNG timeframe.

I suppose that "redefining the Warp scale" is a valid explanation, but it makes about as much sense as "redefining the metric system" every few decades. Of course, I haven't really ruled out the possibility that the Federation did redefine the metric system, considering their frequent misuse of units and the fact that their stated ranges don't jive with visual evidence...

[Uraniun235]

Ships have exceeded both in the past ("Journey to Babel") and the future ("All Good Things"). Unless they're changing their systems of measurement every few decades just for the fun of it, Warp 10 is not an insurmountable barrier; it's just not possible for typical Federation technology in the TOS/TNG timeframe.

I suppose that "redefining the Warp scale" is a valid explanation, but it makes about as much sense as "redefining the metric system" every few decades. Of course, I haven't really ruled out the possibility that the Federation did redefine the metric system, considering their frequent misuse of units and the fact that their stated ranges don't jive with visual evidence...

No, they redefined the warp scale because the producers redefined the warp scale. Granted, it says so in the TM, but if that's the pretense that the TNG producers and writers were operating under (probable given the "warp 10 = infinity" episode in Voyager) then it seems ludicrous to just deny it.

"Journey to Babel" occurred under the old TOS warp scale, and "All Good Things" occurred in an alternate future that never happened.

[Solid Snake]

You can't reach Warp 10 (AFAIK "Threshold" Warp 10 couldn't possibly be Warp 10), so technically slipsteam and transwarp are faster. As for Warp, it gets faster by slapping some nines on the end ie-Warp 9.9999999999ect.

Not that it matters, but i read the last sentance out of the corner of my eye, and i saw this:

"As for warp, it gets faster by slapping seven of nine's ass."

Like i said, it matters not

[RedImperator]

The TOS warp scale was simple. IIRC, you just cubed the warp factor and you got your speed in multiples of c. Warp 13 works out to 2197 c, which is, (again IIRC) considerably faster than the E-D's top speed (E-Nil only achieved it when Nomad fucked with its warp engines, and the whole ship was in danger of flying to pieces). Enterprise also uses this scale, so for once B&B got some continunity right.

Then, for some in-universe reason that was never explained, the warp scale was reconfigured in TNG to an exponential system. Once you got over Warp 9, each decimal place dramatically increased your speed (so the difference between warp 9.999 and warp 9.9999 would be greater than, say the difference between warp 1 and warp 3). Warp 10 was the top of this system--the TMs (which aren't canon, but they were supposedly based on the guidelines the writers had to follow) state that Warp 10 is infinitely fast and would require infinite power to achieve (so I think, Mike, they did this to give a nod to relativity and not just to make it needlessly complicated). Transwarp, quantum slipstream, and the rest would, on the TNG scale, just be warp 9.9999999 or whatever. They still wouldn't be warp 10, because you can't reach warp 10.

That leaves us with two problems. The first is rather easily solved. In All Good Things, both the Pasteur and the E-D travel at "Warp 13". I think in this case it's just a matter that engines and spaceframes improved to the point that ships could routinely travel at speeds over warp 9, so warp 10, 11, 12, 13, etc. was easier to say than "warp 9.999". There is still an absolute top speed on this scale that corresponds to warp 10 on the old scale. The point is, Warp 10 on the TNG scale isn't just an engineering barrier--it's their equivilant to the lightspeed barrier, except this time there will be no way to get around it, because nothing can go at infinite speed.

The other problem is that horrible Voyager episode Threshold, where Tom Paris outsmarts 100 years of Starfleet engineers and develops a transwarp drive small enough to be mounted on a shuttlecraft in his spare time. It's explicitly stated that he achieves Warp 10 and according to him, he was everywhere in the universe at once. Then he turns into a salamander. There are three ways to handle this:

1. The elaborate warp scale system outlined in the TM but never explicily explained in a TNG or DS9 episode doesn't exist. This still leaves us with the problem of how they made a shuttlecraft move at infinite speed, or how, since it was everywhere in the universe at oce, how it managed not to crash into everything in the universe at the same time.

2. The entire Voyager crew is stupid. The shuttle didn't actually reach warp 10, and Tom hallucinated being everywhere in the universe. This certainly leaves us with fewer problems than the above solution, but we're still left with an entire crew that can't read a speedometer.

3. This episode is so horribly stupid it can't be reconciled, and thus it's non-canon, even within Voyager. This is my preferred solution, as it neatly defenestrates (thanks Marina!) the continuinty problems and lets everyone escape with a little bit of their dignity intact.

[hvb]

Transwarp adds an extra syllable, so it is obviously much faster

So does Ciswarp ,
but I am sure most (rational) people would agree that this must be a sublight speed drive (like Impulse drive), so that neatly precipitates that theory.
(no thanks Marina/RedImperator !)

[Ajaz50]

Just to clear it up, If you hit Warp 10 on the TNG/VOY/DS9 scale, you are everywhere at once (and you get mutated into a horney lizzerd being (acording to Voy at least)). Transwarp uses coridores in Multidemensional space and is now useless since Jainway (in her typical crusaider manner) colapsed the Transwarp tunnels so the borg culdenet get arround. Slipstream was something else....

Tom Paris reached warp 10 (supposaly) thanks to the smaller size of Delta Flyer, the advanced borg and D-Quadrent tech. I think that the decmils just got so long that the computer gave up trying to give a readout and flipped over to 10. After all, being everywhere at once is no reason to evolve at hyperspeed where as TRAVALING at super speed does. Breaking Warp 10 would be like launching from earth with a shuttle. You have to push really hard and go really fast and then you hit the threshold and theres no force and no probloms. Of corse the problom is getting fast enouph to reach the proverbial eye of ST Warp Theory's Horricane