#Warp speed calculator tos to tng how to#
#Warp speed calculator tos to tng manual#

A problem we have with this is that the presence of either or both of not-yet-formed or formed-but-eventually-evaporating black holes makes a complete calculation of some far future values-surface impossible in principle, as far as we know, which means in the absence some new fundamental theory of quantum gravity that has yet to be discovered. Let's turn this on its head: we can in principle construct a spacelike values-surface at time today and let it evolve. You could put Alcubierre bubbles everywhere during Cosmic Inflation, for instance, but you have to very quickly and aggressively suppress their observables.

#Warp speed calculator tos to tng how to#

The Alcubierre solution is eternal, and offers no way to be stitched into our apparently non-eternal universe (it sure seems to have a beginning, or at least an early hot/dense boundary close to which the presence of an Alcubierre bubble seems even less physically plausible than today).Īlthough it is safe to describe really fantastical configurations of matter very near that early boundary, one has to settle things down in far less than seconds, in order to match several different lines of evidence of about the distribution of the first free-streaming photons (and the earlier free-streaming neutrinos, when we figure out how to build observatories to study them in detail). Notably, this is backwards from the Alcubierre drive's formulation, which starts with a desired final field configuration, and is trapped by having no 'before the bubble existed' initial values surface. 'we would then insist that the final field configuration is, not what the observer wills it to be, but rather what follows, evolving these data via ' it is highly technical, but has this as the kicker: Geroch (a very well known and highly cited relativist) takes a shot at this in a short paper considering a 'democracy of causal cones' rather than simply the one that matches light: 'All systems, and their cones, are on an equal footing: No one set of fields, or one set of causal cones, has priority over any others.' Geroch's argument is that one can still do initial-value-formulation physics even in the presence of causal cones whose width is different - including wider - than that of light. Specific writers for specific episodes may have, but I wouldn't say there was 'a' lore to argue so firmly about.Ĭausality violations probably aren't really that much of a problem for mathematical physics. Honestly, people's fuzzy ideas about how warp drives work are probably pretty accurate because I don't think there's a lot of reason to believe that the show in general had anything other than an equally fuzzy idea. Some things it claims can do things we never, ever see in the show (hand phasers are spec'd out a great deal more powerful than 'usually throw some sparks, occasionally vaporize a person', ship weapons are spec'd to work at a great deal longer than the point-blank range we almost always see), some limits it claims exist are broken fairly routinely (I think it wasn't until Voyager that you got a serious attempt at spec'ing a ship's speed in terms that match the show, and even they were still fuzzy on the implications at times).Īnd the show's own correspondence with itself is also quite loose.

#Warp speed calculator tos to tng manual#

I was given the ST:TNG technical manual a while back, which is nominally derived from the show's bible, and while interesting and amusing in its own way, its correspondence with the show itself is. I'd argue there isn't 'a' lore of Star Trek.