What TL is the original Star Trek?

[maximara]

Originally Posted by whswhs

In The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original version!), at one point, Klaatu says that he has come so many million miles to bring his message to Earth. I don't remember the distance he gave, but it was on the order of the difference between Earth's orbital radius and Mars's. Of course, back then the idea that Mars was inhabited still hadn't been totally ruled out even in print sf.

Found the script: "About 250 million of your miles."

According to the IMDB FAQ "For the date of July 11, 1951, Mars was nearly in opposition or very close to 250 million miles away from Earth."

This is supported by Klaatu saying he is "From another planet. Let's just say that we're neighbors."

A newspaper later says 'Man From Mars Escapes.'

So unlike the writers of Twilight Zone's "Elegy" who put a twin star system only 655 million miles from Earth...closer then Saturn, everything lines up.

[dataweaver]

I remember in the pilot episode for Enterprise, they made a big deal about the ship being the first Warp 5 design, and have a figure for the travel time from Earth to one of our gas giants — Neptune, I think? — that did in fact match up to the W³c scale that Star Trek supposedly uses. (Even the revised TNG scale that turns humans into lizards at Warp 10 isn't too different from the original at Warp 5.)

Then they gave a travel time to the Klingon homeworld. I remember running the numbers and deciding that it had to be located within the outer reaches of our own solar system, as a Warp 5 drive wouldn't be able to make it into interstellar space, let alone to any other star system, in the time allotted.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Yes, I have often read science fiction stories where they think 100,000 miles per hour is impressive. At best, it gets you to Mars in a few weeks.

Happens in rpg books too. The numbers in Tales of he Solar Patrol nagged at me until I finally sat down and isolated what's wrong with the numbers.

The speed limit foir their Tesla-drive/etheric spaceships is given as 0.1c when it's actually about 100x slower than that IIRC. 600,000 miles per hour anyway. Sliding or floating decimal points just isn't intuitive for some people.

When I used a hyperdynamic drive for my Gloria Monday camapign merchant ships were doing 2 millon miles hour leting you go c. 1 AU in 2 days.

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by dataweaver

Even the revised TNG scale that turns humans into lizards at Warp 10 isn't too different from the original at Warp 5.

Now, now. The Next Generation warp scale is asymptotic at Warp 10. It was the ridiculous writing of Voyager that said, "Can't go Warp 10? Let's break the sound... I mean, warp barrier! Those are basically the same thing, right?"

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Happens in rpg books too. The numbers in Tales of he Solar Patrol nagged at me until I finally sat down and isolated what's wrong with the numbers.

The speed limit foir their Tesla-drive/etheric spaceships is given as 0.1c when it's actually about 100x slower than that IIRC. 600,000 miles per hour anyway. Sliding or floating decimal points just isn't intuitive for some people.

I finally noticed this too one day and revised my own tables. Now "running hot" at the maximum of 32× normal cruising speed makes sense.

On the other hand, the table also lists most ships' acceleration as 2G, but we hear that "a ship can reach full cruising speed in an hour and brake in less than five minutes" and that the ships can perform "hairpin turns." This is just not possible at 2G. Even granting some kind of selective "etheric resistance" allowing quick stops and hairpin turns in space, 2G for 1 hour only reaches 157,945 miles per hour.

[Boomerang]

I haven't crunched the numbers, maybe warp works better as an acceleration rather than a velocity.

[dataweaver]

Not really. Making it an acceleration doesn't really help in the short term, when we need the help the most; but in the long run, it's too much of a help: any acceleration-based system that allows local systems to be reached in days or weeks puts the Andromeda Galaxy within reach in far too little time.

[Boomerang]

Fair enough.

[maximara]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

Yes, I have often read science fiction stories where they think 100,000 miles per hour is impressive. At best, it gets you to Mars in a few weeks.

Velocity is tricky as there is Earth-relative velocity and then there is heliocentric velocity. For example, New Horizons (2006) had only a 36,000 miles per hour Earth-relative velocity but because it was able to use the Earth's orbital motion was able to achieve heliocentric speed of almost 100,000 miles per hour at launch.

But, here is the thing. The planets continue to move. Mars for example moves at 53 686.47 mph.

IIRC in science fiction spacecraft simply lift out unconcerned with all that or the speed is presented without a reference.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by maximara

IIRC in science fiction spacecraft simply lift out unconcerned with all that or the speed is presented without a reference.

If you are talking about SF in visual media, that's generally true. In print SF, it may not be so. Robert Heinlein told the story of a time when he was writing Space Cadet, and he and his wife got out sheets of butcher paper and each spent several days figuring out the dynamics of a particular orbital maneuver by numerical integration. By hand, because this was in the 1940s. I've read other SF that gets specific about orbital dynamics, though perhaps not at the same depth.

[DocRailgun]

One of the Star Trek books I had (I thought it was the Starfleet TNG Technical Manual by Okuda) claimed that the way warp drive (or at least transwarp/ultrawarp) worked was by tricking reality.
"As early as 2061, Cochrane's team succeeded in producing a prototype
field device of massive proportions. Described as a fluctuation
superimpeller, it finally allowed an unmanned flight test
vehicle to straddle the speed of light (c) "wall," alternating
between two velocity states while remaining at neither for
longer than Planck time, 1.3 x 10~43 second, the smallest
possible unit of measurable time. This had the net effect of
maintaining velocities at the previously unattainable speed of
light, while avoiding the theoretically infinite energy expenditure
which would otherwise have been required.

The key to the creation of subsequent non-Newtonian
methods, i.e., propulsion not dependent upon exhausting
reaction products, lay in the concept of nesting many layers of
warp field energy, each layer exerting a controlled amount of
force against its next-outermost neighbor. The cumulative
effect of the force applied drives the vehicle forward and is
known as asymmetrical peristaltic field manipulation (APFM).
Warp field coils in the engine nacelles are energized in
sequential order, fore to aft. The firing frequency determines
the number of field layers, a greater number of layers per unit
time being required at higher warp factors. Each new field
layer expands outward from the nacelles, experiences a rapid
force coupling and decoupling at variable distances from the
nacelles, simultaneously transferring energy and separating
from the previous layer at velocities between 0.5c and 0.9c.
This is well within the bounds of traditional physics, effectively
circumventing the limits of General, Special, and Transformational
Relativity. During force coupling the radiated energy
makes the necessary transition into subspace, applying an
apparent mass reduction effect to the spacecraft. This
facilitates the slippage of the spacecraft through the sequencing
layers of warp field energy."

Further, since the travel is in "subspace" there's no time dialation in the "real" universe.

Originally Posted by Boomerang

I haven't crunched the numbers, maybe warp works better as an acceleration rather than a velocity.