posted
Although Voyager was not syndicated in this area after the second season and UPN was not available, I have picked up a few Voyager episodes and a few quotes from the ones I haven't seen.
One of these perplexed me . . . Tom Parris saying "Faster than light, no left or right".
What the hell is that crap? Since we've seen starships turn and even pivot at warp, do we ignore it?
Or could it be that somehow some technosomething-or-other makes it improper, dangerous, or technologically inefficient to affect change to the yaw of the ship without also rolling/pitching to some degree (hence the "banking" so often seen)?
Any ideas?
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My car can't go left or right.. it goes forward.. i can turn though, and it will go in a direction that is roughly to the left or right of its former direction, even though the change in orientation of the car makes the new direction straight forward. I dont see any problem with it whatsoever..
If the statement was at all unclear its because the brilliant intellect of the good Mr. Paris was trying to preserve the meter and rhyme scheme of his little poetic masterpiece. He is a true renaissance man.
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By that logic, yes, technically, you could say that your car can't go left or right because it can't slide side-to-side (barring icy roads). But, by that definition, "slower than light, no left or right" is also true. In fact, it would just be "no left or right", period.
Since he said "faster than light", it's obvious he's distinguishing between that, and sublight speeds.
Registered: Mar 1999
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We've had this exact discussion before; it's somewhere either in General Trek Discussion or this forum. It'd be nice if we had a search function available (hint, hint, Charles ).
In the earlier discussion, I think we took Paris's comments to mean that no starship could change the path of it's direction while at warp. If you're going towards the galactic core at warp 2 and decide to visit Vulcan instead, you have to drop out of warp and adjust your trajectory then re-engage the warp drive.
However, that's not what earlier series and episodes have told and shown us. One example is to look at most episodes of The Original Series. During many battle sequences, Kirk orders evasive manuevers at warp speed. In one particular episode, the situation is grime because the Enterprise doesn't have the warp drive to manuever with. Those commands were often followed by one of two stock footage shots of the Enterprise veering left (supposedly at warp).
In The Next Generation's "Wounded," we see on the Enterprise-D's main viewer the Phoenix turning and heading off in pursuit of a Cardassian freighter. It had already been established through dialog and visual effects shots that both ships were at warp. Off hand, I can't think of any Deep Space Nine shots that illustrated this, but I'm positive that there was one Defiant turning-at-warp and quite a few runabout turning-at-warp shots. Oddly enough, I can't recall any Voyager episode doing this.
However, we're left with a situation where we know that starships can in fact turn and change directions while at warp speed. The only thing that contradicts this is Paris's statement. I suppose that changing direction while at warp could put certain strains on the ship (in particular I'm guessing the nacelle pylons) if we assume a change in direction is done by manipulation of the warp fields. This could jive with that all of the instances of changing direction while at warp has been while under extraordinary circumstances. So, it could be that changing direction is all right, but not supposed to be done on a regular basis.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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Maybe ... just maybe Paris was joking. Like, you know, "Hey, Captain, why can't we just go straight to Earth and not go veering left or right to visit some stupid planet every week, hmmmmmmmmmmm?!?!?!"
posted
I don't think so, Jeff. If I'm remembering this episode currently, he's demostrating to someone the basics of starship piloting. Saying something like that be on par with a driver's ed instructor telling his students that all stop signs with white borders are optional.
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For a Voyager instance, there's "The Basics, part 1".
We see Voyager at warp while a small Kaxon ship attacks it. Voyager travels straight, but the Kazon ship darts all over the place. I'm not sure that could even work at several multiples of the speed of light, unless the impulse engines are nudging the ship left and right without affecting the velocity too much, or some similar tecnobabble answer.
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Well say you have an aircraft carrier and a motorboat in the ocean.. obviously the motorboat is going to be able to run circles around the larger vessel, simply because its turn radius is so small.. the smaller vessel coyuld completely change directions and turn back, while the larger ship has to bring itself about. probably turning at warp is difficult in the big ships, since you have to make sure you know where you are going and compute what direction youll be heading in at the end of your turn (and the variables really increase when you factor a FTL speed into it)
ships can turn at warp, but its probably just not something you really need to do very often.
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I think Siegfried hit closest to home here: the silly rhyme sounds like basic instructions from the first lecture of Warp Piloting for Dummies 101. It's something the instructor teaches the class initially, so that when exceptions to the rule emerge later on, the class realizes these *are* exceptions.
So it would be something like the driving instructor saying "Now, ALWAYS slow down to complete halt when turning left at a crossroads" and later contradicting himself with "Floor it, nobody's coming from ahead and you're blocking the traffic" or "It's green for us, red for that guy, so drive on".
Probably turning at warp subjects the ship to stresses that can and should be avoided in "normal operations" whenever practical. But only in "normal operations". A fighter pilot is told not to pull gee during training because it's hard on his aircraft, but in combat it's much harder on the aircraft if he *doesn't* pull gee and evade that missile!
When we see course changes at warp in the various shows, they typically involve combat, or at least an emergency and thus typically also a speed change. Of course, outside combat and emergencies, there's little reason to change course anyway...
posted
"faster than light, no left or right" means nothing outside of racing. That little poem was meant for nothing else but racing.
We've seen ships turn at warp from TOS to VOY. The TNG TM gives us a way that ships can turn at warp. If you cause a slight imbalance in the warp field [say you increase the firing rate in the left nacelle] you can turn [towards the right (because it's kinda like thrust, since there is more push on the left side it will drift to the right)]. I don't need to mention specific instances in TOS. I'm fairly certain that "Farpoint Station" shows a turn at warp. I can't think of any specific instance from DS9 but I'm sure there is one. And VOY shows the best, and that is "Child's Play." Another situation outside of warp that is way faster than light is the slipstream turn in "Hope and Fear." There is no arguement on that one.
Tom's statement was about racing. And granted it's true. At Warp a turning radius would be huge. But if you were to slow to sublight, turn, then warp again... like in "Fury" you'd do a lot better.
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