posted
The Enterprise went to warp from a standstill right after the shuttle crash-landed in ST5...
"Varp speed NOW..."
-------------------- Sheridan: "Well, as answers go, short, to the point, utterly useless and totally consistant with what I've come to expect from a Vorlon..." Kosh: "Good." Sheridan: "I REALLY hate it when you do that..." Kosh: "Good."
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Because cinematography-FX in Trek always has supplied the illusion that if you shut off your engines in Trek you stand still, like Kirk and Kruge did. Many ships also turn and bank in spite of momentum, turning on the 2d plane, like a bumper car.
Registered: Aug 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
But they dont slow down with their engines powered off- not impulse anyway. Possesed Picard even lectures Riker on it in season one (something about conserving power by coasting).
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
So the point is, trying to determine whether ships lose or retain momentum when dropping out of warp isn't gonna be solved by looking at whether ships gain momentum (or not) when entering it!
Warp speed /= normal speed, because there are no relativistic effects. There isn't even any time dilation from internal or external POVs when entering normal space, it's always appeared pretty instantaneous. But given the sheer speeds involved at warp, if even a fraction of these velocities can be carried over to normal space then relativistic effects would apply.
posted
One FX shot that's alwats bothered me - the Excelsior chasing the Enterprise out of spacedock in ST3. When the Transwarp computer fails because of Scotty's sabotage, the ship visibly slows down to a near-standstil (realtive to Spacedock). But the ship obviously wasn't at warp; was it at Transwarp? If at impulse it'd have retained the motion, and I'm sure Scotty specifically says he removed components from the transwarp computer. . .
posted
Maybe the ship lost all locomotive power at that moment and he proximity to Earth's gravity well stopped it... If we had seen more, it probably would have started moving backwards.
-------------------- I haul cardboard and cardboard accessories
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
posted
Back into Spacedock? Or down? Because the Excelsior is already travelling at an orbital velocity and I see no reason why losing transwarp drive would change that.
My problem, originally, was simply this: You can't say that ramming at warp is a perfectly logical tactic because nobody knows enough about how warp drive "really" works to say what would happen.
Registered: Mar 1999
| IP: Logged
1: we don't know what would happen if you rammed a ship (or anything) at warp speed.
2: the guys who do the SFX shots in trek don't remember to take physics into account when they go for the money shot.
-------------------- I have plenty of experience in biology. I bought a Tamagotchi in 1998... And... it's still alive.
Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged
posted
On seccond thoughts though - when you think about it, the amount of fuel required to move the ship using what is essentialty a fusion reactor is quite high.
(anybody know how to work out how much you'd need to move, say, the excelcior to full impulse from being docked?)
I'm guessing that it's plausable that the impulse drive uses another device to alter the laws of physics (such as the subspace device on the Ambasadors impusle drive), which went off line with the warp/transwarp drive, reducing the speed of the excelcior. Perhaps.
Or refer to point 2 in my previous post.
-------------------- I have plenty of experience in biology. I bought a Tamagotchi in 1998... And... it's still alive.
Registered: Apr 2005
| IP: Logged
quote:Originally posted by Lee: One FX shot that's alwats bothered me - the Excelsior chasing the Enterprise out of spacedock in ST3. When the Transwarp computer fails because of Scotty's sabotage, the ship visibly slows down to a near-standstil (realtive to Spacedock). But the ship obviously wasn't at warp; was it at Transwarp? If at impulse it'd have retained the motion, and I'm sure Scotty specifically says he removed components from the transwarp computer. . .
It slowed down because Scotty had temporarily transferred his own huge mass to the Excelsior via pre-arranged transporter beaming. The Excelsior's impulse engines were suddenly overloaded and the ship stalled- it comes to a stop as Spacedock's automatic tractor beams held the disabled ship in position (installed after some engineer saw an aincent movie called "RTOJ" and decided that a collision could be embarassing).
Later, (STV) Scotty cleary had regained all his Neutronium-level mass and the Excelsior is a speedy ship (as it should be without STIII's awful slapstick moment and engine-knock sound effects).
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
| IP: Logged
posted
Ginger's pretty close to what I think is the mark. I think this was hammered out pretty well in the Treknology section some time ago. The Ambassador was the first class to incorporate separate subspace driver coils into the impulse engine assembly. Prior to that, ships used the mass-reducing effects of low-powered subspace fields from the warp engines. So when the Excelsior's warp drive conked out, her apparant mass returned to normal, and her momentum wasn't sufficient yet to shift that bulk at more than a few metres per second. That may have been what inspired them to do what they did with the Ambassador...
As for other matters, in TNG times "full impulse" is limited to .25c for preactical reasons. This is not the functional top sublight speed of starships. If you pull out all the stops, you can run up to .99c if you feel like it, but will later have to compensate for relativistic effects. And a ship moving at nearly 300,000 kilometres per second is gonna do a lot of damage to whatever it runs into. Think cosmic rays, but about several billion times more massive.
At warp, things become even more interesting. If simple impact is what happens, then the ship essentially becomes a giant tachyon. If the subspace bubble somehow prevents physical interaction with sublight objects (which I can't imagine it would), then drop out of warp inside the target. Ick. Alternately, one could use the outlawed phasing cloak to similar effect.Or just pummel a Borg ship until its subspace field collapses (or at least becomes compromised) and have everybody start beaming antimatter inside.
Getting back to realistic tactics, photon (and presumably quantum) torpedoes have warp sustainer engines. Do a warp 9.975 run-up in an Intrepid, drop a passel of torps, veer off, and watch them plow into the Cube at several thousand times light-speed. Hell, even some warp-capable probes would do nicely, due just to velocity and the antimatter they carry to power their microwarp engines.
--Jonah
-------------------- "That's what I like about these high school girls, I keep getting older, they stay the same age."
--David "Woody" Wooderson, Dazed and Confused
Registered: Feb 2001
| IP: Logged
Printer-friendly view of this topic
