When moving at a high speed through the galaxy you potential may change. This must be paid and paid quickly too.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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Not quite. The warp drive doesn't actually provide any thrust, its purpose is to create the warp bubble and then "squish" the space in front of the starship.
Thus the "warp engines" do actually need to get constantly fed energy in order to work. Feed more energy equals get more squish equals go faster.
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.
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.
It depends. Impulse engine? Sure. Warp? Nope. Also, you need shielding.
What about hyperdrive?
have they reverse the polarity of the shields?
This is something that always bothered me when watching some sci-fi space shows. A space walk occurs, but there is only so much thrust that can be used. Once the thrust stops, the person stops.
Thats.....not how vacuums work.
It's not how atmospheres work either
What bothers me more is the crappy placement of these dialog bubbles. The order of them makes you read Kirk's dialog first.
These are Laverne and Shirley speech bubbles, designed to ensure that neither speech bubble can complain about not getting top billing.
This sort of thing is really common in video games where you're able to move in zero G.
In the few games that have accurate zero G movement people get really confused. They'll hold a movement key the entire way to a destination then smack into it because they didn't realize they'd have to hold the opposite key for an equal amount of time to stop. Or they'll fly a certain distance like that, then want to make a 90° turn, only to keep careening off in the direction of their initial travel with a slight bend to it.
Play hardspace shipbreaker, it's qn entire game about manipulating objects and yourself in a zero g environment
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Pretty sure the warp drives need continuous power to contract space in front of the ship and expand it behind the ship to allow faster than light travel
The ship isn't actually moving during faster than light travel, it just bends space around it
They can only move at impulse speed without engine output due to their being no friction and gravity in space
There is definitely gravity in space! It just doesn't feel that way because there's no ground so you're mostly in free fall which to you is indistinguishable from being in no gravity. (fun fact: this indistinguishability is actually the crux of General Relativity!)
Yep, everything is in freefall orbit of something bigger.
What if you are in the gravity center of the universe?
Let me know if you ever go.
Even when the impulse drives are down, the ship always just stops 🤷♂️
My favorite bit is how when life support goes offline, it's like they're running out of oxygen within seconds. I once saw the math referencing the actual canon dimensions of the Enterprise D and its canon crew complement. It's comically large for the number of people in it. You could shut off all the CO2 scrubbers in a space that cavernous, and it would be months before the crew began noticing any ill effects. The Enterprises are god-damn ginormous.
The Enterprises are god-damn ginormous.
It's all those bowling alleys and home theatres they installed in the lower decks.
I recently saw a DS9 episode where O'Brien said life support is down and it's going to be a problem in a day or sth, was pleasantly surprised at that.
Might still not be accurate, but at least it was not a "oh shit we'll die now" kind of thing.
It depends. Lack of air circulation can cause problems in minutes as people can end up breathing stagnant air. Less of a problem if you have artificial gravity as then you have convection and/or the coriolis effect to help keep the air moving. As for actually running out: less of an issue.
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It's a different kind of space. They're going faster than light.
Yeah, at impulse they would still want the deflector shields, but at warp they can only remain faster than light due to power creating the warp bubble/field. Like a rubber band, you need to constantly exert force to repell the elastic forces.
Like a rubber band
A true Trekkie
So what you're saying is, we need more rubber bands
There’s never a time when you don’t.
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Another consideration outside of the warp field maintenance is how incredibly destructive a collision with even nanograms of mass can be at relativistic velocities and shielding against those takes a lot of power itself
I always thought that's exactly what the deflector dish was for. is this not the case?
i believe they’re saying that the deflector shield requires constant power, so that’s part of why the engine is required while moving rather than just while accelerating
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Unrelated but in the expanse they really nailed those aspects. When there's a pursuit, it's always an acceleration pursuit, which is limited by how much G the characters can tolerate, and for how long.
The only magic tech they introduce is a super efficient fusion core engine, but they use it to improve realism rather than destroy it. It's great.
And they accelerate through the first 50% of a journey, flip, and decelerate the remaining 50%. I can't name another sci-fi tackle space journeys in a realistic way like that. Everything else just treats it like air travel - pushing your way through something with drag.
When I saw the engines in front of the ships... I got so confused lol... like: wtf, why is it moving forward when the engines should be pushing it backwards? I had to google it and then I was like: aaaahhhhhh that makes so much sense now
My favorite touch is how the rooms are stacked vertically in the ships so the gravity is provided by the acceleration. Also how pouring drinks always happens differently depending on the gravity and spin off the body they're on. Man I love this show!
Man I love this show!
WHERE SEASON 7? 😭
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