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.
this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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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
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.
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It's the Vulcans. They actually respirate at 1000x the rate of humans. It's how they remain emotionless. They are too focused on breathing to get angry. The massive compression necessary to breathe that much is actually how they are constantly so full of hot air. They don't actually need to breathe that much to survive, but they are just too proud to give it up even in an emergency situation. It's all a weird power play. 🖖
Did you steal this from Dr mccoy's Facebook?
Oh I'm sorry, is a ship's head medical officer with decades of experience treating a dozen or more species of crewmen and guests not a good enough source for you? Don't let those pointy eared bastards fool you. They're devious.
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I think they might actually be in fluidic space and just really unobservant.
"It's like flying through soup, sir!"
"Mmm... Soup... 🤤"
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Except when they go into orbit and then things work as expected.
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!)
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In every ST series, they only ever say that in warp. And nobody has no idea how warp works.
I just know if you go faster than Warp 9 you're fucked
Warp 10. The Enterprise C regularly surpassed 9.5.
The D. We only saw The C once. That was the ship Tasha went to with Shooter McGavin.
IIRC the in universe reason for the E’s long ass nacelles was to allow it to achieve 9.95. I am pretty sure I remember part of the expanded universe going into experimental refits of the USS Sovereign that allowed it to hit 9.995.
Didn't rikers enterprise go to warp 13?
Rikers enterprise went to Warp 69
It did, but it also attacked the klingons from below rather than the standard head on so we know they writers were all high when they wrote that!
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Well, at minimum, fucking seems to be involved.
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But for some reason they keep dropping out of orbit around planets.
What else were they orbiting?
Stars, crystaline entities,...
Lady streamers at twitchcon
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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.
It doesn't the ship through the universe, but the universe around it!
It's a different kind of space. They're going faster than light.
It depends. Impulse engine? Sure. Warp? Nope. Also, you need shielding.
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Scotty knows that conservation of momentum actually doesn't happen over long distances in an expanding universe. Eventually you'll stop.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcjdwSY2AzM
But also you need a warp drive to maintain warp. As soon as you turn it off or damage the nacelles you're kicked out of the warp bubble. This happened in Into Darkness.
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.
What bothers me more is the crappy placement of these dialog bubbles. The order of them makes you read Kirk's dialog first.
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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.
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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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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.
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nah, thats movement relative to space time, warp suggests bending said space time in order to, relative to your destination, move faster than light, while essentially staying motionless in spacetime.
In this paradigm inertia is very much not a thing
Thank you. I read this thinking “yeah this is not simple Newtonian motion”.
Maybe it has something to do with active debris absorption 🤔
I am insufficiently versed in Star Trek to know whether there's a known reason why that isn't true at warp speed.
I'm not an expert, but I believe warp speed is theoretically achieved by warping two points in space so they're closer together, then traversing them, and releasing the warp (which allows FTL travel). So you would definitely need continuous power to maintain that.
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