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For any vessel/vehicle, travelling at maximum speed is not only unsafe, but it is also very inefficient on fuel and induces an exorbitant amount of stress on the engine, transmission, and propulsion system, requiring much more frequent and intensive maintenance.
Very few vehicles routinely exceed 80% of their maximum speed. And even then, only when the coast is clear and it’s safe to let the throttle out.
Warp 5? That’s really slow.
I’d say their common travel speed is more like warp 7.
Guess it’s time for another entire rewatch of TNG to check the stats.
Warp 8 was the most common warp factor used for general travel on TNG. Warp 9.2 was actually the maximum sustainable cruising speed of a Galaxy class ship. This was played for a laugh in Menage a Troi when Picard called for Warp 9 when returning Lwaxana to Betazed at the end of the episode.
Near the end of the series didn’t they set a speed limit of warp 7?
In Force of Nature (S07E09) they discover that high speed warp travel can damage the fabric of space and a speed limit of warp 5 is set by the Federation for non-emergency travel. It gets referenced a couple of times in the final season of TNG but doesn’t come up much after.
Though arguably Voyager’s situation and the Dominion War could both be reasonably considered “emergencies”. It’s also been suggested that the Federation was very quick to develop warp drives that didn’t cause this damage (this is one official but never-published explanation given for the Intrepid Class variable geometry warp nacelles).
Massive push to get everyone into therapy because literal face-to-face human interaction can’t be automated, but by gosh it can surely be commodified.
Everything has value. The question is should everything have a monetary value?
This is also why I can’t respond ‘good’ to how I am. If I am ‘good’ then it means I’m better than average or median. But if I say I am good too often, it becomes the average.
My husband always says he’s normal when asked. It took some time to get used to not hearing “good”. Our toddler now also replies with she’s normal.
Teaching the youngling how to voice emotions and sometimes you just need a society break will set that kid up far better than the usual education systems we have.
I’m the only person I know who thinks it’s incredibly rude to ask people how they are as a greeting when you don’t really want an honest answer. It puts the person being asked on the spot to be disingenuous like everyone expects, or offer information that the greeter really didn’t want, and therefore shouldn’t have asked for in the first place.
As someone with ADD I experience the flip of this. I’m stuck in a world that is not used to running at 200% which is where I operate. It’s been a lot of work but consciously slowing down because I need to understand people normally burn out if running over 100%.
It’s a struggle. As an ex once explained using a garden analogy. I am over watering the garden because it’s all I know but I need to understand not all gardens need heavy watering.
So yeah, ADD sucks. I want to stay at warp 9.9 but the rest of the world can’t handle it.
The other reason for traveling at Warp 5 is that the Enterprise is an explorer ship. If you never slow down you’ll “make good time” but miss the Universe’s Biggest Ball of String. Working at 100% can make you miss nuances that could be important, or could just add some ineffable element to your inner life.
There’s also that one episode where it comes out that fast warp travel damages the universe and they need to be slower than a certain warp to not damage it. But in good old TNG fashion this is never referenced again in the future.
I think any warp travel at all was damaging, and lowering warp speeds was the compromise to slow down the damage they were doing but did not completely eliminate it
They don’t directly mention it, but as I recall after that episode traveling at high warp speeds was greatly diminished and warp speeds above certain thresholds were only used in emergency situations/required special authorization. So not completely abandoned but they certainly didn’t build on the premise, which is a shame because I thought it was one of the cooler plot elements that was introduced in the series.
And I think that was the excuse for Voyager’s flappy wings, but that might be fanon.
As I recall it was vaguely mentioned (in a different series) that newer warp engines didn’t cause the same damage at high warp speeds.
Also because of that one episode that put a standard limit on warp travel, the entire warp scale got rejiggered at some point. Where warp 10 became the upper limit.
There are episodes where ships are noted to have been travelling at warp 13 or 14 before they reworked warp speeds
I think they just started calling those speeds transwarp.
I believe transwarp was a different thing altogether
It was two things, one just being fast warp, another being a different kind of warp drive that the Borg used. In the Kelvin timeline, it was a third thing where you’d use the transporter to beam onto or off a ship at warp.
It was two things, one just being fast warp, another being a different kind of warp drive that the Borg used.
The Excelsior used a different kind of warp drive. The Borg opened and traveled through “transwarp conduits.”
In a similar vein, when you drive anywhere in your vehicle you don’t keep your engine at the red line at all times. You would wear it out within 20,000 miles at best. In fact, the engine almost always tries to be at the lowest rpm feasible.
We should strive to be like our vehicles: operating at the lowest load possible, hustling only when necessary.Right. That speedometer goes all the way to 270 km/h but on average we drive at about 30km/h in a city. That’s why our cars can last 400000 km while a Formula 1’s engine last about one race.
Your analogy is a lot worse than the one from the guy you replied to. Formula1 engines last multiple races since each car is only allowed 3 engines per season. And the reason they last so short is cause they are running at insane amounts of compression and rpm, not because of the speed the cars are driving.
A Formula 1 car doing 30kmh in stop and go city traffic would break down after a lot shorter distance than a road going sports car doing a constant 300kmh on the Autobahn
But isn’t strange reptile sex stuff happening at those speeds? What’s the analogy?
That happens when you break the Warp 10 threshold (in normal space, doesn’t happen if you’re in a transwarp corridor).
And sometime you might need to crawl. And sometime you might need someone to carry you.
Makes me wonder why they didn’t make the ship strong enough that it was capable of sustaining 9.9. Also: they’ve broken the warp barrier like 2 or 3 times and the ship was fine. 🤷🏻♂️
they’ve broken the warp barrier like 2 or 3 times and the ship was fine
The ship, sure. Some crew members, however…
Makes me wonder why they didn’t make the ship strong enough that it was capable of sustaining 9.9.
They did; it’s called USS Voyager. Its maximum sustained speed was warp 9.975.
It’s not super obvious on-screen, but the Intrepid-class was considerably faster than even the Sovereign-class (Enterprise-E), let alone the older Galaxy-class (Enterprise-D).
It was also significantly less massive. And like 50% if of it was dedicated to the warp system.
Think of a better ship to strand on the other side of the galaxy than the fastest conventional warp capable ship.
Think of a better ship to strand on the other side of the galaxy than the fastest conventional warp capable ship.
That Borg ship that can generate its own wormholes.
Voyager at least had the excuse of “we might run outta gas.”
Presumably if they made a ship strong enough to sustain warp 9.9, it’d have a higher theoretical max speed along with it.
I am still watching through TNG for the first time, but the only instances I really recall it exceeding those numbers are when they had Dr. Kosinski and his traveler “assistant” performing a warp drive experiment which lasted a very brief time and yielded basically unproduceable results, and a couple instances of the ship being catapulted at impossible speeds by Q. The structure of the ship was fine in each instance, but the engine would have likely exploded if they tried to push it to those levels under normal circumstances.
There’s one where Barclay turns himself into a supercomputer and breaks the theoretical limits. But, IIRC, it’s in one of the last couple seasons.
That was a cool episode. I always get it mixed up in my mind with the episode where The Traveler spins them off into some nether realm and Crusher has to help get them back.
because if it could constantly do 9.9 then it’s max speed would probably be higher
Well much higher and the crew turns to salamanders
They really lost me there. Everybody knows everything evolved into crabs /s
They shoulda made it out of the same stuff as the flight recorder, too
How many parsecs is that?
Well, the ship analogy doesn’t really hold up. If we draw a parallel with existing maritime ships, they can sustain their rated top speed when necessary. However, this is rarely done primarily due to fuel efficiency. Since there are diminishing returns to pushing speed, it’s only done under serious time constraints.
“the ship analogy doesn’t really hold up … if you consider the ships to be a completely unrelated kind of ships … except here’s how it would still hold up anyway”
Warp speeds were clearly modeled to mimick knots. And I’m sure that the lore reason for them not traveling at Enterprise’s top speed all the time is again fuel efficiency and not because it would “blow up” (although 9.9 might be above its rated top speed, I don’t remember). So it doesn’t hold up with people, where you can just eat more and perform at your best all the time, we have additional emotional constraints that don’t apply to equipment.
Other than all that… perfect analogy.
There is a lot of equipment that is rated for short bursts of power that would be destructive when sustained.
Military aircraft for example can often reach high speeds for a short duration. This is not improvised but designed and rated for.
Most modern CPUs have non sustainable boost speeds that they can reach but not sustain due to thermal limits.
Electric turbochargers often can only operate in short bursts.
There are countless more examples.
Sure, but we aren’t talking about bursts speeds. We are talking about sustained cruising speeds. I’ve responded to a similar comment of yours in more detail in another branch.
But that’s literally what the post is about. You cannot perform in burst mode sustainably. If you could that wouldn’t be the top/burst speed anymore.
Then it’s literally the same. We can maintain our max for sustained periods too, but it burns more fuel, we require more maintenance, and eventually we break down.
You can’t just eat more and work 18 hours a day, 7 days a week. But you can and often do run equipment at it’s top rated performance because it doesn’t have emotions.
We could stretch the analogy and assume emotions to be a separate kind of fuel reserve, but I don’t know if this simplification does justice to the complexity of human nature.
Ships have a max speed due to drag from water and other complicated physics stuff involving hydrodynamics.
Modern ships are far more maneuverable and able to reach their top speed faster than they used to, even when carrying more mass. That is because their engines are more powerful and we maxed out ‘enough for top speed for naval vessels’ a long time ago.
I know why ships have max speed, I have a bachelor’s degree in maritime navigation.
But also, I honestly don’t see how this comment is relevant to the subject. Yes, modern ships are faster than older ships. But they still usually run at half speed or less.
To be super technical about the argument (sorry): Your initial comment is irrelevant to the subject since the post talks about (fictional) starships to which very different (and handwavy) physics apply.
Im still glad to have learned a tiny bit about real world ships though. Thanks.
The principle applies to pretty much all equipment. A CPU will happily sit at 100-ish% utilization for years (if there are no thermal constraints), because it can’t have an emotional breakdown.
Well, maybe it can, that would certainly explain a couple of cases that I have had…A cpu will not do boost speeds sustainably. That is what its best performance is though. If I remove the thermal limiter my cpu will happily cook itself even though it is rated for 5GHz top frequency.
Edit: Saying there are no thermal constraints is like saying it will not break. You presume the conclusion there.
If there are no emotional constraints I will also function a lot better sustainably.
I specifically didn’t mention overclocking because then there is no defined top speed. Depending on the binning, a CPU can be pushed arbitrarily far. If you provide proper cooling it can be sustained relatively indefinitely, but you still wouldn’t do that all the time because energy efficiency tanks. That 10-20% performance usually isn’t worth the added 100% power draw.
This argument hinges on the definition of “top speed”. Is top speed what’s written on the speedometer and what the device is designed for, or is it the max speed it can go before it explodes? I think, in this context we are talking about is max sustained speed/performance, judging by the fact that neither the human or the Enterprise have died/exploded. While devices are often designed to and perform at their “top speed”, people can’t for reasons other than inefficiency.
The thing is modern CPUs boost behavior is the intended, design for thing. We as humans should have a working regulator when top performance is acceptable even if damaging if sustained. A cpu also has that. That is a thermal/current/voltage limiter.
At least my takeaway from the post is that you one can’t sustain a level of power/performance that is achievable in moderation / bursts.
