posted
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
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posted
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)
-------------------- ".mirrorS arE morE fuN thaN televisioN" - TEH PNIK FLAMIGNO
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posted
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.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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posted
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?
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posted
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.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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posted
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
-------------------- "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
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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?
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posted
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.
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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.
-------------------- Later, J _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ _ _ The Last Person to post in the late Voyager Forum. Bashing both Voyager, Enterprise, and "The Bun" in one glorious post.
posted
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.
-------------------- "You must talk to him; tell him that he is a good cat, and a pretty cat, and..." -- Data "I will feed him" -- Worf (Phantasms)
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posted
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.
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