h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

How fast is warp 9?

1,516 times the speed of light, or 1,637,280,000,000 kilometres (1,016,750,900,000 miles) per hour.

Scary that I know that off of the top of my head, no?



Triv

Unless that IS just off the top of your head. How do you calculate that?

TTFN

Freddie. (The collector of inane trivia. Somewhat nerdy I suspect).

Is that all? It'd take four or five hours to reach Alpha Centauri... and aren't most star systems a fair bit further apart than that?

I always thought warp nine was supposed to be *fast*

26199

OK, so I lied. The numbers are accurate but I pulled out a copy of the Next Gen tech manual. <>

That's aother thing--those figures are calbrated with Warp 10 as the top of the scale a la the Next Generation. I'm not sure about how it'd work in the original series.

Strange

I thought in the original series Warp 1 was the speed of light in the same way as Mach 1 is the speed of sound.

Thats just the way I remember it, so I could well be wrong

*sigh*
Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that it's _very_ fast.
I mean, do you really think the writers of Star Trek had any idea precisely how fast it is?
I rekon they just made it up as they went along, and then made up the details afterwards for the manuals etc.
At least, that's what I'd do.

Remember folks: don't spolik the tranthlektron before 86 neutro-haunds!

You're absolutely right. It was just **Fast** but there's a problem--it couldn't be too fast. The thing that made the ST universe work was that it was a VERY large place and that it took time to get places. It'd be ridiculous if you could get from the center of the galactic core to, say, the unfashonable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy in a few months. It'd constrict what could happen. There's be no seeking out of new lifeforms and whatnot if the entire friggin' galaxt was mapped.



Those silly treker people.

Triv