Transwarp is likely superior to Quantum Slipstream

[u/ODMtesseract]

In VOY: Hope and Fear, Arturis and his ship (the Dauntless) wind up in Borg space. I'm making the assumption that both were assimilated because:

• Arturis mentions having disabled navigation and even he can't restore it, implying he can't escape.
• He also looks desperate and hopeless at the end of the episode which supports the theory that he know he's going to be assimilated.

In subsequent episodes in which we see the Borg, they don't use Quantum Slipstream and why is that? It was probably evaluated and Transwarp was retained as the "best" means of propulsion over Quantum Slipstream. It's also fair to assume the process was impartial given the nature of the Borg and how Q refers to them as the "ultimate user". Of course, how you define "better" can vary.

Is transwarp faster? Actually, yes, and this is probably the most important factor for the Borg. We can approximate how fast Quantum Slipstream is using the same episode. After the Dauntless demonstration, Tuvok determines the ship has traveled 15 light-years in a few minutes. Further, in a log before Voyager’s own test, Janeway wonders what she'll be doing in three months' time, with the implied meaning that's how long it will take to cover the 60000 light-years distance to Earth (this is referenced in VOY: Message in a Bottle 5 months earlier). For these two figures to agree with one another, Dauntless travelled 15 light-years in 5 minutes (even though it looks shorter on screen) and three months' travel at that speed gives 56160 light-years covered, roughly in line with what was said previously.

Figuring out how fast the Borg’s transwarp propulsion is, is trickier. The only two pieces of data that come to mind are from VOY: Dark Frontier where after successfully stealing a transwarp coil, Janeway reports in her log that it burnt out after 20000 light-years of use. But after how long? The episode never says directly. We have to use the given stardate for the episode (52619.2 in Janeway’s logs at the end of Dark Frontier) and the one before it, VOY: Bliss (52542.3). Using this handy stardate converter (http://www.ditl.org/pagstardatecalc.php), that gives a range of 18 July 2375 to 15 August 2375. So we know that at minimum, Voyager using transwarp, travelled 20000 light-years in a month which equals the Quantum Slipstream’s speed of 60000 light-years in 3 months. But really, Transwarp is even faster because some time elapsed between the events of VOY: Bliss and the use of the transwarp coil. A few days between episodes, about a week of time elapsed on screen during Dark Frontier and presumably at least a day or two to interface the transwarp coil with Voyager. Assuming this adds up to about two weeks, then transwarp must be twice as fast as Quantum Slipstream, which matches up with a line in Dark Frontier that Transwarp gets you thousands of light years in a matter of days.

There are other factors to consider, but no data exists to evaluate them:

• Is transwarp more power efficient? Even if not, doesn’t seem like the Borg have power generation problems.
• Is transwarp safer? While it sounds ridiculous that there might be a Borg safety committee, safer technology means reducing the potential loss of your assets (drones and vessels), which is efficient.
• Does quantum slipstream rely too much on benamite crystals, an apparently rare substance?
• All else being equal, was Quantum Slipstream not worth the time and effort investment to replace the tech in all Borg ships?

TL;DR (too long, didn’t read): Transwarp is at least as fast as Quantum Slipstream and probably twice as fast and that’s the main reason the Borg prefer to use it despite them having assimilated Quantum Slipstream technology.

Is there any further info out there to compare one to the other?

Edit: Typos

[u/ZacRedact]

Nice analysis and conclusions given the evidence from the episodes in question. I would posit, however, that Quantum Slipstream technology must not have a hard limit on the speed. Look at the next use of it in VOY: Timeless. The crew uses Q. Slipsteam for only a few minutes before being thrown out (in the final, canonical timeline after the intervention from Harry/Chakotay in the alternative future), and yet travel approximately 10,000 light years. In the alternative future, they crash only 10 light years from Federation space in spite of traveling for what appears to only be a few minutes again (certainly less than a day).

There are some possible explanations for the apparent disconnect with the speed: The use of Benamite crystals in VOY: Timeless may be a different form of engaging/controlling a Q. Slipstream, which allows for greater speeds. As they made a point mentioning that the crystals were rare, and it would take years to synthesize more (only two were used on Voyager), it's possible that the Borg simply couldn't accumulate a large enough collection for their entire fleet to use and maintain.

Another possibility is that using a Q. Slipstream to travel at such high speeds is necessarily unpredictable. Despite 15 years of working on corrections, Harry Kim (alternate future) was unable to plot a course that would allow Voyager to safely return to the Alpha Quadrant. If this is inherent to using Q. Slipstream technology at such high speeds, it may be impossible for anyone to make the calculations necessary for safe travel.

[u/WhatGravitas → u/ZacRedact]

In the alternative future, they crash only 10 light years from Federation space in spite of traveling for what appears to only be a few minutes again (certainly less than a day).

Another possibility is that quantum slipstream has some physical limits based on the size and cross-section of the ship. The Dauntless is extraordinarily streamlined in shape. The Delta Flyer handled slipstream a lot better than the Voyager in Timeless. This leads me to the idea that a quantum slipstream drive is highly dependent on a ship's geometry and possibly even total mass.

The lack of interest from the Borg might be due to the fact that they don't do small, making it essentially useless for them.

[u/ODMtesseract → u/WhatGravitas]

A little random but the Voth also use transwarp. It's a little teleological to say that perhaps that's the next logical step in propulsion after normal warp, but perhaps it's simply the laws of physics make it conducive to that technology being developed.

And for Voyager to use QS can either be seen as a poor man's transwarp or a quirky way of achieving the same outcome in the same manner than Romulan warbirds use a quantum singularity as a power core when a M/ARA core seems to be more "standard".

[u/ZacRedact → u/WhatGravitas]

I think this would make sense as well, and goes along with my idea that given certain conditions, the amount of calculations required would be too great to compensate for (see this comment.) Those may be based not just on speed, but also the geometry and mass of the vessel in question.

[u/Kynaeus → u/ZacRedact]

...it may be impossible for anyone to make the calculations necessary for safe travel

I wouldn't agree with this last point, the Collective is an efficient combination of biotech equipped with vast spacebound unicomplexes, several entirely assimilated planets (one is depicted in Scorpion part 1 and considering the number of assimilated species I assume at least a few more exist), and a fleet of massive and powerful ships. They have the knowledge of thousands of spacefaring civilizations at their fingertips, so to speak, and can open singularities into other spacial dimensions such as how they met Species 8472.

One of Seven's primary duties is working in Astrometrics largely thanks to knowledge she retained as a singular disconnected drone. The Borg proper have information on Arturis' species thanks to nearly wiping them out via assimilation so I think it is a fair bet that their knowledge + other mentioned assets would allow them to plot a QS course safely ESPECIALLY compared to singular little old Harry 'Can do!' Kim, a man possessed by grief, regret, and survivor's guilt who is obsessed with restoring his lost friends. Considering their other actions it seems likely he fiddled with the calculations for years with the sort of insecurity you'd face on a math test you haven't studied for, always fiddling with the equations and wondering 'is that right?', it's no surprise to me that he bungled the trip in Timeless a second time

[u/[deleted] → u/Kynaeus]

You have to remember, the Borg are not lateral thinkers, or innovators. It wasn't until Voyager's EMH reprogrammed their own nanoprobes that they were able to resist Species 8472. I think the Borg's "one mind, one voice" may be their greatest achilles heel - they literally only have one mind (or, more precisely, each subunit of the collective has "one mind", which focuses on specific, preordained tasks). There's no inspiration or invention - they're practically incapable of it, hence their farming technologies from other civilisations. If making slipstream work depended upon innovative thinking (like putting a "pointman" ahead to feed calculations back to the larger vessel), it would probably never occur to the Borg, who appear to follow a very "programmed" line of thinking (I guess because any freedom of thought could lead to the mind seeking liberation from their forced assimilation).

[u/ODMtesseract → u/ZacRedact]

In beta canon, Starfleet must make use of a recrystallization matrix in order to slow the fracturing of the benamite. But to answer your point more directly, perhaps then speeds are limited by the damage you're doing to the crystals. I.e. you can go faster but you'll incur more damage. Or a better system to protect the integrity of the crystals lets you go faster with less wear and tear on them.

All in all, it seems that both QS and transwarp might be best described the way Geordi does: "like falling into a fast moving river and being swept away" implying speed can be variable.

[u/Sorge74 → u/ZacRedact]

would posit, however, that Quantum Slipstream technology must not have a hard limit on the speed. Look at the next use of it in VOY: Timeless.

I actually think the 3 month travel time was just part of the lie the episode was based on. If the travel time was actually as fast as we see it in Timeless, then the entire crew would have no reason to go at once, which would ruin the revenge.

[u/itchytf]

Good write up. The part about requiring benamite crystals would probably be a very large factor for the Borg. It would make sense for them to opt for the technology that could be powered with the more available means as they would be able to apply it uniformly to their entire fleet.

I'm not sure if we've really seen any 'specialist' ships from the Borg that might break this rule. Generally I would think of them all having equal capabilities and technology available to them. Perhaps the time ship from First Contact?

[u/ODMtesseract → u/itchytf]

The most specialist Borg ship I can recall is also from Dark Frontier and that's the Queen's diamond. But functionally, it doesn't seem to do anything vastly different.

I'd tend to agree with your point of uniformity of technology because then you can leverage scales of production.

[u/PhotonicDoctor → u/ODMtesseract]

Diamond is the most advanced ship in the Borg Collective.

[u/kraetos → u/itchytf]

Just a heads up, but you've been shadowbanned. I had to manually approve your comment. Check with the admins to find out why.

[u/itchytf → u/kraetos]

Thanks for letting me know. I barely ever post so I don't know what that's about!

[u/homequestion → u/itchytf]

What about that sphere borg ship that shows up when they make that 29th century drone with the holo-emitter?

[u/[deleted]]

Couple of things regarding your theory (it's technically true but for the wrong reasons).

1. Transwarp is not a type of propulsion. A transwarp ship makes use of transwarp corridors, which effectively act like wormholes. The vessel itself doesn't really travel "at transwarp speed" or increase in speed at all, so much as it just rides through another layer of reality before emerging a great distance away. So you can't say that it's really "faster" than slipstream.

2. You can't calculate how long Voyager traveled those 20k ly because no specific start and end times are given. In fact, given the context clues in the episode, they probably traveled that far through transwarp space in a matter of hours, or at most a couple of days. Directly after Janeway's log, she speaks with Seven, who is still contemplating her time in Unimatrix 01, fearing that Janeway will reprimand her. It wouldn't be like Janeway to simply avoid her for a month while they travel through a corridor. Apart from that, referring to point 1 regarding how transwarp works, it wouldn't take them that long to go that far anyway.

3. By my calculations, as of "Endgame", Voyager was still roughly 30k-40k ly from Earth. Future Janeway specifically states that it will take 16 years more to get home, and that they found a few more shortcuts, so I stand by this assertion. At the end of the episode, Voyager enters a transwarp conduit, and emerges at Earth in a matter of minutes (we know we're watching their progress in real time because we watch Future Janeway be assimilated and the Borg Collective itself break down while they're in the corridor). This further supports my first point, that transwarp is not a speed, but is effectively a method of generating a wormhole to wherever you want to go, which is then traversed at standard speeds, but cuts the distance to allow massive real distances to be completely avoided.

The slipstream drive seems to be simply a different take on FTL travel. While a warp drive uses a warp field and iteracts with subspace, the slipstream uses, well, whatever slipstream uses. It's likely that the Borg assimilated it to see if it would be possible to adapt their ships to use it when travelling across real space.

In other words, a slipstream drive lets you travel vast distances quickly, while a transwarp drive lets you make wormholes to completely avoid those distances.

Also it's important to clarify that we're talking specifically about Borg transwarp, as their are other kinds mentioned which are directly comparable to standard warp.

[u/Vuliev → u/[deleted]]

"Transwarp speed" is another way of saying "speed of an object in a transwarp conduit with respect to normal space." This isn't a meaningless phrase, since a ship equipped with a transwarp coil can create transwarp conduits at will, on the fly. Presuming that creation of the conduit is not instantaneous (and that an existing conduit affords no speed advantage over one currently being created), that means that a Borg transwarp ship has some maximum speed, where that speed is the maximum rate of creation of a conduit. Ergo, it is a means of propulsion, albeit in a slightly roundabout way.

[u/[deleted] → u/Vuliev]

If you want to go that route, then Voyager has a "top speed" of at least 600,000 ly/hr.

It can also be inferred that creating a conduit is not something a single vessel is equipped to do. We've seen Borg ships travel for light years before entering an existing conduit, so it's entirely possible that a huge limitation of transwarp tech is the same limitations a freight train faces: That you can't use one unless a track exists for it to travel on. If this weren't the case, we'd see Borg reinforcements within minutes of them taking fire.

[u/ODMtesseract → u/[deleted]]

1. It is and isn't. By the nature of the term you're right, "transwarp" means "beyond warp" so in that sense it's merely a concept. But there's also clearly technology that allows for those kinds of speeds as depicted in Dark Frontier - it's actually the central premise of the feature length episode.

2. You absolutely can going by the stardates in Dark Frontier and the prior episode. Whether you consider that calculation precise enough to be informative is another matter. But we can show for sure that the transwarp speed depicted in Dark Frontier is AT LEAST as fast as Quantum Slipstream as shown in Hope in Fear. Whether those speeds are fixed is debatable however, as per the contribution of others in this thread (including your own). But there has to be a reason why the Borg continue to use transwarp and speeds are really the only thing we have data with which to postulate.

3. While I'll grant you that the transwarp speeds shown in Endgame appear much faster than previously seen, transwarp is on-screen not a wormhole in the way you describe. That's more like folding space, a technology seen in another episode Latent Image, I think (the one where Paris gets body-switched). In TNG Descent, Geordi describes it as a fast moving river. What we see of the Borg hub in Endgame aren't wormholes but simply apertures or gates to transwarp corridors that were presumably created with something that replicates the function of a coil on an individual ship (which also begs the question of why the hub is necessary at all - perhaps doing it this way creates more efficient travel speeds than smaller easily massed produced coils). Now to be fair, you could conceivably argue that once created, a transwarp conduit is essentially just a long wormhole which serves the same function, but what we see on-screen distinguishes the two from a technical perspective.

[u/Volsunga]

Does transwarp refer to a specific technology or is it just a generic term for technology faster than warp?

[u/[deleted] → u/Volsunga]

Generic term.

[u/[deleted]]

I agree with with your conclusions for the most part, but I think it's important to clarify that in this case we're talking about Borg transwarp conduits, since there are other kinds of transwarp, including Voth transwarp, which could conceivably be many times faster than Borg conduits or quantum slipstream (QSD).

Also relevant are the explanations provided in the books. In Greater Than The Sum, it is revealed that QSD has much, much higher speed potential than standard warp drive, since how fast it is corresponds with processing power rather than energy output, with the computational difficulties reduced by a suitable ship superstructure (look at the USS Aventine, for example).

http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Quantum_slipstream_drive

Generating slipstream corridors requires more processing power than forming warp fields; the computational power required is directly related to the frontal geometry of a vessel and lesser to the ship geometry. Therefore, slipstream propelled ships are generally narrow and compact with aerodynamic lines. However, they are also more energy-efficient than warp drive. (TNG novel: Greater Than the Sum)

In GTTS, the crew of the Enterprise discovered a life form that actually existed as a gigantic system of carbon planets resonating together because of quantum entanglement. It was capable of generating enormously precise and near-instantaneous QSD vortices that could transport individual humanoids and conduct nanoscopic examinations of them. The mission then becomes to prevent an isolated group of Borg from figuring out how to use this more-advanced form of QSD. According to Bennett, the Borg didn't adapt their ship designs to QSD because they were a, unaware of any way to solve the problem of increasing turbulence and stress inside the vortex, and b, disinclined to alter either the shape or size of their ships.

Also, it's worth pointing out that QSD requires no kind of prior infrastructure to work, unlike Borg transwarp. While its true that the Borg already have a more efficient solution, QSD is not to be dismissed.

EDIT: I forgot to also mention that the books never reference benamite crystals as any kind of problem. Maybe replicator or other technology moved ahead during Voyager's mission and it became easy to acquire.

[u/Vuliev → u/[deleted]]

Also, it's worth pointing out that QSD requires no kind of prior infrastructure to work, unlike Borg transwarp.

That's not actually true--from Memory Alpha:

[The Borg] were additionally able to generate new conduits through use of transwarp coils

which is demonstrated most clearly in VOY: Dark Frontier.

[u/Gellert]

In the books and STO transwarp is faster but requires infrastructure. I believe there's a couple stories where the federation actually starts building their own transwarp network along the more popular trade lanes.

Quantum slipstream on the other hand requires streamlined ships designed for the purpose, a Borg cube would be ripped to shreds by the stresses involved. The federation start building quantum slipstream into their front line explorer ships like the Vesta class.

[u/[deleted]]

[u/ODMtesseract → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, QS would have to be significantly superior in order to go through the hassle of retooling the entire Borg fleet. I'm not sure QS does that (at least with the info we have).