117 "What's TransWarp?" (Warp and Subspace - Star Trek)
Description
This article is from the Star Trek Tech FAQ, by Joshua Bell inexorabletash@hotmail.com with numerous contributions by others.
117 "What's TransWarp?" (Warp and Subspace - Star Trek)
According to the Star Trek Chronology, the Excelsior was commissioned
as NX-2000 in 2284 as a test bed for the new TransWarp technology. By
2287, the TransWarp Development Project was deemed unsuccessful by
Starfleet Command, and experiments were halted. "...The attempt to
surpass the primary warp field efficiency barrier with the TransWarp
Development Project in the early 2280s proved unsuccessful...." [TNG
Tech Manual, p14]
It seems as though the designers were trying to get around the energy
limits traditional warp entailed, after passing Warp 9. But what what
is it? Is Transwarp just any "faster than warp travel" or is it a
specific technology or natural occurrence?
In an IRC discussion with Boris S., Michael Okuda had this to say:
We were never clear on transwarp as seen in ST:III, but "Threshold"
makes it clear that transwarp is the mysterious Warp 10 alluded to
in earlier episodes. We assume that it is some kind of "deeper
subspace domain" just as subspace presumably coexists with our own
time-space continuum. In other words, we're not really sure.
If X is to transwarp as subspace is to warp, then perhaps X has the
same relationship to subspace that subspace has to normal space?
Trans-subspace? Is it turtles all the way down?
"What are Transwarp Conduits?"
The first Transwarp travel we saw onscreen was in "Descent" [TNG],
which has the Borg using TransWarp Conduits. They're like custom-made
wormholes that, once created, stay in place and can be used
repeatedly. The conduits are used by broadcasting a tachyon signature
which makes them open up and suck the ship in. They're beyond the
ability of the Federation to create, but the Enterprise was able to
use them once it recorded the tachyon signature the Borg were using.
Transfer through the conduits is 20 times faster than the fastest warp
available to Federation science (Warp 9.7 or 9.8), covering
light-years in a matter of seconds rather than hours - just like a
wormhole.
Chris Franklin points out:
[When] they followed Data's shuttle into the Conduit, Riker stated
that they had covered 65 light years. I timed the trip with my stop
watch and came up with about 9 seconds for their stay in the
Conduit. This corresponds to about 227,911,132.04 times the speed
of light.
That's a heck of a lot faster than speeds quoted above for Warp 9.9,
even, far more than 20 times, so something is awry. Mike Brown reminds
me that any attempt to measure the duration of some event on screen is
misleading - "television shows are always a compressed,
highlights-only telling of a story that typically spans several days"
- even if the action seems continuous, so take any hard-and-fast
numbers with a grain of salt.
Transwarp conduits appear to be tunnels through subspace (analogous to
wormholes being tunnels through normal space?), bypassing the
limitations of warp entirely.
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