Time to wrack our brains, people. What methods have Our Heroes come up with or discovered that allowed them to go way faster or way farther than their regular warp drives du jour would have allowed? Just the ones that are still accessible. The Kelvans are gone, so we can't use them, for example. TOS through to Nemesis...
--Jonah
Posted by Cartman (Member # 256) on :
Pft... well, excluding the roughly seven billion variations of transwarp (coil, conduit, corridor, whatever) and, erh, most of the alien tech encountered by Voyager (the catapult thingy, coaxial warp drive, spacial folding, and the Vaudwaar's subspace tunnel network), we've got quantum slipstream, the Traveler's "bend space with your mind" trick and Barclay's Cytherian probe-influenced engine modding extravaganza which should both still be on record somewhere, and, uh, others that I really cannot be arsed to look up right now. B)
Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
Um...Soliton wave, flying straight at the sun (timewarp) Iconian gateways, Species 8472 singularities and of course the infamous plot-drive. Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
The Soliton wave didn't allow them to travel faster than regular warp drive. It was just for travel at warp speeds without warp engines (and would be singularly useless for exploration).
Likewise, flying straight at the sun was surely for time travel, and not used for increasing warp speeds.
Posted by Aban Rune (Member # 226) on :
Pissing Q off.
Enticing Sporocistian lifeforms in the Delta Quadrant to probe you.
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
Well, all truth be told, it was mentioned that Starfleet was working on coaxial warp drive, but could never quite make it work. Perhaps with the return of Voyager, they might be able to make it work only to find it impractical in some way?
Posted by WizArtist (Member # 1095) on :
There was "The little probe that could"...as in kill and bring back to life and send the Enterprise to warp 98 or something.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Did it throw them far away, or was it a wormhole type thing? I can't quite remember.
And as for their journey back, their excessive speed wasn't really due to an outside source. Well, it was, but it was just pushing the engines as fast as they could go, damaging and nearly destroying the ship in the process. Presumably the Enterprise could have done that anyway, without help.
Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
Okay, thanks to this preliminary survey and my own further noodling, I'd like to nail it down better.
Coaxial warp drive: What were the purported benefits/improvements, and why didn't it work?
Quantum slipstream: Had Our Heroes heard of such a thing before the "Dauntless" appeared? What were the performance characteristics, and why was it unstable when the Voyager attempted to recreate it?
Cytherian graviton whatsit: How did they say it worked? How far did they go and how fast? What were the downsides? And was there any indication it shouldn't still work?
Transwarp: What's the breakdown of all the different variations on this? Nothing was elaborated upon with the Excelsior. What were the particulars of Lore's Borg transwarp conduits? How did they differ from what we saw in Voyager?
Traveller-drive: Was there any indication at all of how it worked? And any reason why he and Wes couldn't reproduce it on a larger scale (i.e., on a ship they weren't on)?
What other ship-carried uberFTL methods are still around?
--Jonah
Posted by Mucus (Member # 24) on :
Hmmm, you could be more creative.
Technically, any of the various time travel techniques would work pretty well. Just use something like the sligshot effect to go far into the past and then use conventional drive to get there. Boom, you can not only be faster than light, you can arrive somewhere before you left.
You could even pump up the impulse drive to near-lightspeed and let relativity work its magic so it won't even seem to take all that long.
There's even the extreme of that Krenim timeship with that time inhibitng field or whatever: travel as far as you want for as long as you want and never age.
I assume by transwarp, you're including the characteristics of the squishy-Paris/Janeway Threshold drive? Posted by Captain Boh (Member # 1282) on :
I think Transwarp might be a broad term for any better-than-warp drive. Borg transwarp for example is likely the melding of several different forms of thinking giving them a single transwarp that has obviously evolved since we first saw it.
Posted by J (Member # 608) on :
quote:Originally posted by Peregrinus: Coaxial warp drive: What were the purported benefits/improvements, and why didn't it work?
If I remember correctly it was that they couldn't control the subspace field well enough to safely fold the ship. Benefit was instant travel.
quote:Quantum slipstream: Had Our Heroes heard of such a thing before the "Dauntless" appeared? What were the performance characteristics, and why was it unstable when the Voyager attempted to recreate it?
I don't know if our heroes had. I like relating that episode with the TNG book "Reunion" but books aren't canon. At the same time quantum slipstream is like the "Warp Highway" theory, it's just that you create the highway yourself. -- The reason it didn't work is because Voyager couldn't protect itself from the instabilities in the slipsteream, "Timescape" for reference.
quote:Cytherian graviton whatsit: How did they say it worked? How far did they go and how fast? What were the downsides? And was there any indication it shouldn't still work?
It was a wormhole IIRC. Instantly traveled to the center of the galaxy. And if I remember correctly it wouldn't work again because it was controlled by Barkley's super mind.
quote:Transwarp: What's the breakdown of all the different variations on this? Nothing was elaborated upon with the Excelsior. What were the particulars of Lore's Borg transwarp conduits? How did they differ from what we saw in Voyager?
I think that the Excelsior's Transwarp is closer to an advanced form of warp drive than anything else. Think of it like something that could get you at Warp 9.9999 on the TNG scale with ease, so much so that it would require a new warp scale.
Let's forget "Threshold."
Borg transwarp is an entirely separate thing. It is a method of accessing deep subspace tunnels that move you at fast speeds and/or the abilty to create these. Lore's Borg probably used a pre-existing transwarp tunnel, which once they opened remained open long enough for the Enterprise to use. On Voyager we saw a mix of using pre-existing tunnels, artifical tunnels [conduits, now that I remember the right term], or temporary passages that Borg cubes created with their engines [probably the least efficient method of transwarp travel].
quote:Traveller-drive: Was there any indication at all of how it worked? And any reason why he and Wes couldn't reproduce it on a larger scale (i.e., on a ship they weren't on)?
Like with Barkley's drive, this drive requires the user's ability to sustain it more so than the technology, in fact all the technology aboard the E-D was the same, it was the Traveller and Wes that were different.
That's my contribution.
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
Project Pathfinder developed (or at least wanted to use) geodesic folding, apparently a wormhole-like conduit.
I vaguely recall Starfleet/Bajoran experiments on artifical wormholes mentioned on DS9.
Some terrorist group (the Ansara?) used space-folding transporters, wich were instant-travel devices. Some DQ aliens used similar transporters.
Like Mucus mentioned, time travel effectively serves as a faster-than-warp drive too. Especially the Relativity's temporal transporters.
A few of TOS' high warp scenario's:
- wf 14.1 after M/AM integrator fuses (extremely close to wf 10 TNG).
- wf 19 under Kelvan influence.
- Karla Five's starship from the negative universe reaches wf 36 (which is almost certainly transwarp).
Posted by Bond, James Bond (Member # 1127) on :
When you say TOS through Nemesis does that mean you don't want anything from "Enterprise"? Because there are the Xindi Portals and indications in "Azati Prime" that the Xindi are at least friendly with the Federation in the future if not members. Of course that can change. The NX-01 was able to duplicate the Xindi Portal themselves.
The Nexus - Picard could have chosen to go to any time or place he wanted to regardless of the galactic position of the Nexus.
The Guardian of Forever - Travel through space and time.
Tachyon "Eddies" between Bajor and Cardassia - Possibly in other regions of space as well. It's not nescessarily faster the warp drive but it requires no propulsion system of your own.
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
Voyager's "Prime Factors" had a space-folding tech that could take them something like 30,000 lightyears, and just happened to be incompatable with Voyager somehow. Also, Lenara Kahn was working on artificial wormholes, though whether that counts as FTL is debatable.
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
Mr. Scott's guide claims that Excelsior's transwarp was based on the interphase phenomenon from "The Tholian Web", although it's a very vague story.
There's also the notion of 'hypersubspace', which the Pathfinder people used to communicate with Voyager.
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
quote:Originally posted by Harry: wf 14.1 after M/AM integrator fuses (extremely close to wf 10 TNG).
Er, you sure?
Posted by J (Member # 608) on :
Nothing is close to Warp 10 on the TNG scale... it is infinite... the warp scale in TNG continues to add decimal places with speed ever vastly increasing but no new stable area is found, like at the integral warp factors 1-9. 1.5 is faster than 1 but not as efficent as 2. The same is true for factors above Warp 9... they just haven't found the right combination of factors to eek out another point of efficency. This is perhaps a barrier of technology vertium cornide can only be refined so much and after that there isn't anything you can do to it to make it absorb plasma and transmit subspace fields better. At that point you need to add other technologies to the system [like the Borg's transwarp coil].
There is nothing that is pretty darn close to Warp 10... not even subspace comms which go 9.9997 IIRC [and probably faster since TNG TM].
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
I admit, the warp calculator I used was a bit off. I found a better one, and wf 14.1 = wf 9.5669 in TNG. Still pretty damn impressive for a Constitution.
Posted by Shik (Member # 343) on :
"Hypersubspace"...that'd be normal space, wouldn't it. And why do we forget Voth transwarp drive, which was obviously neither conduit-driven nor everywhere & squishy?
Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
Yes, "hypersubspace" was a really clever bit of Thresholdian technocrap. On nearly the same level as "warp particles" and "fast than light, no left or right".
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
If that diagram reveals anything, it's the futility of trying to depict a four-dimensional reality from a three-dimensional vantage point through a two-dimensional medium with one-dimensional iconography.
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
Dimension these!
Posted by Wes1701J (Member # 212) on :
Warp 10 = Infinite Speed right?
Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
That's the story, yeah.
So, like, subspace is more "compact" than realspace, maybe, which is why all that fancy subspace technology can draw way more power out of it than is available normally. Maybe. Look, it made sense when I was younger.
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