Any Trekkies?....I was under impression all these years "Warp Drive" was the speed of light on Star Trek. A

Question

friend told me no it's faster. Anyone know for sure, and also what is impulse speed?

Answer 1

The speed of light is not fast enough to travel between stars as demonstrated by Star Trek. Actually it would be relativistically - the crew could experience an arbitrarily short voyage, but anybody outside of the space craft would have aged by years. Warp drive circumvents the speed limit of light by warping space itself.

Answer 2

Warp 1 is light speed. Every warp number is two times as fast. So, warp 10 would be 1024 times light speed. They often made references to top speed being about 1000 times light speed, but the show was very inconsistant. Sometimes they'd go hundreds of light years in a few hours, but they said it would take 70 years to go the 70,000 light years from the far side of the galaxy.

Answer 3

I read about this years ago.  Warp one is not the speed of light. According to a book about Star Trek, warp one is the speed of light squared. Warp 6 is the speed of light times itself six times or to the sixth power.

The speed of light is expressed as mc, as in e=mc2.

warp 8 would be c 8

Any way you think about it that's fast.

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Answer 4

From the web:Warp drive is a form of faster-than-light propulsion in the fictional universe of Star Trek, capable of propelling spacecraft or objects to many multiples of the speed of light but avoiding the problems of time dilation. It is also featured in the computer games Stars!, StarCraft, Eve Online, and Darkspace, the Starship Troopers universe, and other television shows including Red Dwarf. Warp drive, called 'FTL' in the Titan novels, isn't capable of instant travel between points at infinite speed, unlike the other fictional propulsion technologies hyper-, jump, and infinite improbability drives. Ships using warp drive differ from those using hyperdrive by traveling within a small created bubble of normal spacetime, rather than by entering a separate realm or dimension like hyperspace. Spacecraft at warp can interact with objects in normal space.

Answer 5

Warp drive is the warp "factor" cubed (multiplied by itself three times) times the speed of light:

Warp 1 - speed of light.

Warp 2 - 8 times the speed of light.

Warp 3 - 27 times the speed of light etc.

Impulse speed is below the speed of light.

Answer 6

warp drive is indeed faster than light speed, the concept is it "cuts" through the fabric of space which somehow allows it to go super fast. (later star trek introduces "quantum drive, which "folds" the fabric of space and is supposed to be like ridiculous speeds) impulse speed uses the impulse drive which i believe they actually measured in knots, that's just going as fast as a space ship can go without s******g around with space fabric :) unfortunatley i couldn't tell you what the different knotical measurements were for defferent impulse speeds, i'm not that big of a trekkie

Answer 7

From the web:Warp drive is a form of faster-than-light propulsion in the fictional universe of Star Trek, capable of propelling spacecraft or objects to many multiples of the speed of light but avoiding the problems of time dilation. It is also featured in the computer games Stars!, StarCraft, Eve Online, and Darkspace, the Starship Troopers universe, and other television shows including Red Dwarf. Warp drive, called 'FTL' in the Titan novels, isn't capable of instant travel between points at infinite speed, unlike the other fictional propulsion technologies hyper-, jump, and infinite improbability drives. Ships using warp drive differ from those using hyperdrive by traveling within a small created bubble of normal spacetime, rather than by entering a separate realm or dimension like hyperspace. Spacecraft at warp can interact with objects in normal space

Impulse speed is anything below the speed of light.

Answer 8

Warp 1 is the speed of light.  After that, it goes up exponentially, without ever reaching Warp 10 (since the speed of Warp 10 is infinite - you would simultaneously occupy every point in the universe - they actually reached it once in Voyager, but as usual, there were terrible side-effects).

The original series had a different scale, in which there were speeds above Warp 10.  According to the backstory, they re-calculated the warp scale sometime between Kirk and Picard.

Answer 9

impulse speed is how long it takes you to decide to buy a candy bar while waiting in line at the grocery store.

Answer 10

Yeah, much faster - otherwise it would take years to travel between planets.  That would make a very boring TV show about space explorers.  The light speed thing is used in a few movies, like Aliens, where everyone gets frozen for the trip.  In the Star Trek Universe, Impluse drive is just a different engine, but I think it can only reach light speed.  Warp Factor 1 is light speed, and every level after that doubles like the Richter scale.

Other examples are Star Wars "hyperdrive" or Battlestar Gallacticas "FTL drive" (Faster Than Light) or Isaac Asimov's hyperspace.