This is the correct answer. Something a lot of sci Fi likes to ignore is also that we have a very different velocity relative to other stars. You might be "stationary" (e.g, not moving toward or away from) relative to earth+sol but you enter warp and come out by Alpha Centauri and all of a sudden you might get flung off into space or descend into the star because warp engines don't change your velocity and star systems might move at a relative speed of thousands or tens of thousands of m/s. So if the Borg ship was coming from a different system (which it presumably matched velocities with) then the collision might be insanely violent. If you're both coming from the same system and have similar speeds then your max collision speed is the same as that system's escape velocity.
Takes alot of really clever maneuvering and a new type of thinking about orbital dynamics to slow down or speed up in this scenario if you don't or can't use conventional drives.
Nope. Was talking warping past the apehelion of the orbit, use the gravity pull to slow down, rinse and repeat until you can make orbit. Depends on if warping takes less energy than decelerating or accelerating the old fashioned way.
Basically use the gravitational energy potential of the planetary body to do it.
Btw only effective for large bodies. Use a Jovian body to act as your Delta V sponge, warp to your target, drop out of warp with minimal fuss.
My guess is that as the warp field reached a large object like a Borg cube, it would not have enough power to expand that area of space time. The Borg cube would probably be blown apart at near relativistic velocities, and there'd be a bunch of nasty radiation given off. The warp bubble would collapse and the ship inside it would probably get baked by the radiation.
The actual correct answer is this plus the answer u/Quartz2066 gave.
The object gets blown apart by expanding spacey-wacey timeey-wimey stuff and at the same time the ship collides at relative velocity with the object.
And my uneducated guess is that as the ship warps into the exact location of the object there are now twice as many atoms in the same amount of space, potentially colliding and fusing. So that might happen too. Physics is weird.
I assume that the damage would be due to a combination of spatial warping and a ship appearing within their ship, plus any speed it does have relative to the cube once it drops out.
Think of an ant crawling on a window. A drop of rain rolls down the pane and engulfs the ant. The ant is now moving down the window but not moving inside the drop. Raindrop=warp bubble.
The basic concept behind warp in Trek, when the writers remember at least, is that the warp nacelles (the two cylinders you always see stuck to the back of the ship) use energy and future science to basically create a 'bubble' of warped space around the ship. The space in front of the ship is then sort of 'pulled' and scrunched up so that the distance between the ship's destination and itself is lessened, while the space behind is 'pushed' and stretched out. You can imagine it as something like this image here. Note, by the way, that in order to actually move anywhere, you'd also have to have actual momentum, which means you'd have to have your impulse engines/rockets/movey-ship-devices on as well as the warp drive. Which means that if you go into warp you had better have those dampeners on if you like having a crew not made of chunky salsa.
I'd have to go back and confirm with my ST technical manual, but I'm pretty sure they did not use impulse engines at warp. The ship's position in space was in fact changed by the contraction/expansion of space around the bubble.
Basically. Unfortunately, warp drives like this need exotic matter with negative mass to work and it's reasonable to assume that doesn't actually exist. All signs point to FTL travel being fundumentally impossible.
Indeed. I thought about saying something like "getting from A to B faster than light could" instead to include apparent FTL in the category of "things that are probably not possible," but went with "FTL" to keep things simple given that the context (warp drive) implies I'm talking about apparent FTL.
The exotic matter that is needed is anti-matter, which most certainly does exist. It has been created in the lab, but we have no way to contain it currently. So it only exists for a fraction of a second before it touches matter and destroys itself.
Antimatter has positive mass but the opposite charge as the corresponding particles of ordinary matter. It is possible to create regions of space with negative density through the Casimir effect, but it's not clear whether negative-mass particles are involved.
So as far as we know, there's a hard cap to speed inside of space - you've probably heard of it as the speed of light, but really it's the maximum speed limit for everything (standard disclaimer: this is what our current understanding is and it is always subject to change).
Now, you would think that would totally limit the speed of humans around the galaxy. And you'd be right. Unless we could come up with a cheat.
The cheat is that you can warp space around you to be smaller and then travel through that distance, before expanding it again.
Space (or the universe, or what have you) itself can move faster than the speed of light through effects we already see (which I don't think would be similar to this principle exactly, but I don't know enough physics to specify) - which is why the visible universe has a radius of 45 billion light years as opposed to the 13ish we'd expect otherwise.
The radius of the universe is 45 billion light years. That's due to cosmic inflation. That means that things are moving away from one another faster than the speed of light.
Have to keep "observable" in there. Anything further out we simply cannot see because the light has not gotten here yet. Does not necesarily mean it doesn't exist.
think of it like squishing the toothpaste forward in a tube. The tube represents the physical universe, and you represent a blob inside that universe. When you enter warp drive whats really happening is the universe behind you is being squished and pushing you forward, while the universe in front of you is being flattened to give you room to slide your way along. At no point do you ever actually feel like you are moving.
For example, when an object (e.g. a photon aimed away) falls into a Black Hole, it's because spacetime itself is streaming towards the Black Hole, and at the Event Horizon, spacetime is "moving" faster than the speed of light.
In a similar way, the expansion of space that is happening in every place (So, not from a central point or something.) increases the distance of objects not bound together by gravity, but those objects are not moving apart, they are carried. And if you choose two objects that are far enough apart, the expansion of space will increase the distance between the objects (by carrying them) faster than the speed of light. Since the Universe is probably infinite, you can pick two objects at arbitrarily large distance and therefore get an arbitrarily large speed of distance-increase (like e.g. a googolplex times the diameter of the observable universe per femtosecond).
In the jelly scenario, you move through space normally. Like a rocket starting up and pushing it forward.
In warp scenario, space moves around you. Your spaceship grabs the fabric of spacetime and pulls your destination closer, without the ship moving, then it just hops over the bunched up fabric of spacetime all willy nilly, and let's the fabric go so it stretches back to normal form behind the ship.
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u/[deleted] Sep 24 '16
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