Star trek transwarp drive manual#

So we now have a model of transwarp which is something like a railway - you build the tracks along a specific route, and they then allow high speed travel down that route and that route only. Pretty impressive stuff - at that speed a conduit could take you across the galaxy in under six hours! However, on this trip the ship covers 65 light years in a matter of eight to ten seconds, a speed of around 200,000,000 c. Geordi's 'twenty times our maximum warp' figure would give the conduit a speed of about 40,000 c. Later both a Federation shuttle and the Enterprise-D are able to open a transwarp conduit and travel through it. It seems as though the conduits are keyed to respond to tachyon transmissions of a specific frequency.' 'The borg ship emitted some kind of high energy tachyon pulse just before we saw the subspace distortion. But I'd say based on the distance we covered during our trip through the conduit the speed would have to be at least twenty times faster than our maximum warp.' Normal subspace limitations don't apply to transwarp variables. 'How fast would a ship travel through one of these conduits?' A ship when entering the conduit is immediately accelerated to an extremely high warp velocity, it's like falling into a fast moving river and being swept away by the current.' 'Our current theory is that the Borg have established several transwarp conduits through subspace. In 'Descent' the Enterprise followed a Borg ship into transwarp. To accept this, we have to believe that the Federation constructed an entire functional Starship with a brand new drive system that had never been successfully tested, something that beggars belief.Д«ut this is not the only problem. The official explanation, as suggested in the Chronology, is that the Excelsior transwarp drive had been a failure.

All hope of incorporating a successful transwarp technology into the Federation by manipulating the terminology vanished with this episode. This described the Borg as having a massive advantage over Starfleet due to their use of transwarp, a technology the Federation did not have. The clincher came in the sixth season episode 'Descent'.

Moreover, the times and distances quoted in TNG frequently pointed to speeds only modestly above the warp factor cubed formula generally assumed for TOS. So Kirk's trip to the core in a matter of hours was still not easy to explain. However, as TNG continued it became clear that the Federation had access to only a relatively small portion of the galaxy - only 19% of the galaxy had been charted according to 'The Dauphin'. When 'Star Trek V : The Final Frontier' aired in 1988 the argument gained even more support - transwarp would have served nicely to explain the Enterprise's journey to the centre of the galaxy, a trip which should really have taken decades. This argument made some sense - after all, the first Star Trek episode described the drive system as 'time warp', so the term was already an abbreviation. Undaunted, fans wondered if the word 'transwarp' had not simply been shortened to 'warp' in the hundred odd years between the film and the series. Unfortunately, when the Next Generation aired in 1987 - one year after ST IV was made - the Enterprise-D was continually described as using warp drive rather than transwarp.

Star trek transwarp drive manual#

'Mister Scott's Guide to the Enterprise', a reference book based around the Enterprise-A and similar in concept to the later technical manual for the Enterprise-D, claimed that Kirk's new ship had a transwarp drive. Subsequent to the film, much fandom material confidently predicted that transwarp had been a big success, and that future starships had been produced with this new drive. Fortunately Scotty has sabotaged the 'main transwarp computer drive' and the Excelsior is unable to pursue. Clearly he expects to pursue Kirk and the Enterprise using transwarp. Later in the film the Excelsior's Captain talks of breaking some of the Enterprise's speed records after the launch, and when he is ordered to give chase to the Enterprise he gives the order 'prepare for warp speed, stand by transwarp drive'. And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon!' 'She's supposed to have transwarp drive.' On arrival at Spacedock the crew of the Enterprise see the new USS Excelsior, ready for launch. The first mention of the term came in Star Trek IIIВ : The Search For Spock. The word 'transwarp' has a long and muddled history in Star Trek.