this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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For the curious, OA has a pretty extensive, physically plausible theoretical writeups on warp bubbles:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/493f29cc472f0
They’re the STL kind, but still, they do seem to require power.
AFIAIK the impulse drives are sub relativistic in Star Trek, right? Or maybe they aren’t, but that seems.
There's a writeup from a few years ago by a NASA scientist talking about the Alcubierre drive if you want something that's closer to Star Trek engines. Although spoiler alert, they conceded that a ship would already need to be moving at SOME sub-luminal speed towards the destination first in order to control direction. Can't just fire up ye olde warp engines from a standstill like they do in the show, apparently.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20110015936/downloads/20110015936.pdf
Exactly! This is what OA is using, albiet a modified version that doesn't violate causality like the original Albecurie. See the original link and: https://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-faq&topic=FTL+in+OA
Star Trek engines are something between displacement and halo drives, though with the bubble technically being "internal" and the ship following all relatavistic limitations:
Only wormholes are "FTL," with the catch that they have to be created and transported very carefully with respect to their light horizons (lest a configuration creates closed timelike curves and makes them explode)
Okay cool, I didn't put that together while reading the first post. Although my understanding is that Trek warp drives would fall into the Void Drive category based on these descriptions. The bubble completely encases the ship while at warp and effectively shortens the world line they're following, at least from the ship's perspective. In the famous "Neelix almost kills the ship with cheese episode" they create a "static" warp bubble and invert it towards the ship in order to heat up all of the biogel packs on Voyager. Also I looked up the impulse engine thing and they arent relativistic but they are capable of accelerating a ship to 1/4C which is surely enough to cause some time dilation issues.
they just throwin redshirts out the back thats why impulse drives are red
They’re specifically soft when it comes using impulse vs warp for both subliminal and superliminal speeds. It’s whatever the writers needed at the time. It makes sense that they can use warp to go almost any speed, but it’s a whole lot of power to warp space just to cruise around a solar system. I think there was at least one episode of TNG where they went light speed or close to it with impulse, but I may be misremembering, I just remember thinking that’s not how their own science works.
ST doesn’t seem to respect relatively anyway, so I guess it doesn’t matter, heh. The physics are different.
They do and they don’t, again, depends on the writer, but relativity is a really hard concept for the average show watcher. Sci-fi doesn’t really exist without relativistic breaking tech of some sort. ST has warp and subspace communication. They have reasons those break relativity, and they kind of stick to them. Then they have beings like the Q that might as well be gods. And sometimes actual gods in TOS. As a whole, the series is nonsense. But they try to make it less so over time and that just makes it retconned nonsense.
For example, impulse engines can not accelerate a ship to anywhere near the speed of light. But they can accelerate it to enough of a fraction of C that things like time dilation become problematic. No breaking of physics but surprise surprise now your crew is 3 minutes younger than they should be, relative to Earth. Add that up over time and you'd potentially have to start swapping out crew members so that they don't end up younger than their children when they retire. The Star Trek Voyager Technical Manual lists "full impulse" as 1/4C, or nearly 75,000 kilometers per second, which is probably why you hardly ever see it in use unless it's a life or death situation.