Warp speed is weird

I'm just implementing Warp speeds into my Star Trek game - basically, for the plotting of courses to different star systems - to show the time it will take at whatever Warp speed and to actually achieve this passage of time in game (simulated).

It takes 365.25 days to travel at Warp 1 over a distance of 1 light year.

I assumed that to travel at Warp 2 over the same distance would be half the time - because it is twice the speed. It isn't - it takes 45.65625 days.

Warp 10 over the same distance is 0.36525 days.

When I first started to calculate them - I knew a base figure and did the old doubling and halving to achieve the various speeds and then realised this simply didn't work.

Anyway, I have it all sorted now - but it all seems a bit bent to me.

I don't understand the formulae, or how to implement it in Blitz; however, I can work it out based on faffing with a base number for each Warp speed:

warp 1 to a destination 1 light years away would take 365.25 days
warp 2 to a destination 1 light years away would take 45.65625 days
warp 3 to a destination 1 light years away would take 13.527777777777779 days
warp 4 to a destination 1 light years away would take 5.70703125 days
warp 5 to a destination 1 light years away would take 2.922 days
warp 6 to a destination 1 light years away would take 1.6909722222222223 days
warp 7 to a destination 1 light years away would take 1.064868804664723 days
warp 8 to a destination 1 light years away would take 0.71337890625 days
warp 9 to a destination 1 light years away would take 0.5010288065843621 days
warp 10 to a destination 1 light years away would take 0.36525 days

Seems to work.

How many miles in a distance of 1 light year?

5,865,696,000,000

The formula is probably exponential rather than linear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warp_speed#Warp_velocities

The speed of warp changed between TOS and the next generation. You're probably best off making up your own speeds. Exponential would make sense.

Is your game 3D?

I believe ships can't travel at warp 10. In an episode of voyager, they rigged the shuttle to travel at warp 10. Basically, it takes no time to get anywhere at warp 10. It's instant.

And you turn into a lizard

I forget the name, but in the original series warp works like this.

Warp Formula Speed
1 1x1x1 1
2 2x2x2 8
3 3x3x3 27
4 4x4x4 64
5 5x5x5 125
6 6x6x6 216

NextGen I though it was doing the multiplication 6 times instead of 3. I prefer the Babylon-5 jumpspace speed myself though, in that the creator of the show said "the ships go at the speed of the plot"

I hate that episode, the warp 10 one. It really just doesn't comply with the theory of evolution, which it makes out it does.

Your mistake is watching Voyager. Only 'The Next Generation' is worth its salt IMO.

This will give you a Next Gen type of warp speed, puki:

speed=9*speed of light*warp/(10-warp)

I love those stuff ... its totally useless as it isn't possible without using the curvature of space and time (-> most likely not the next 500+ years) to be faster than light but people seem to love to think about this stuff.

I personally like the slipstream from andromeda most ... especially in the episode where the girl is flying through it and does a time jump ^^

All series of Star Trek are great. The first series of Enterprise is a bit slow, but it does get better from series 2.

The speeds and rules of warp have been changed so many times just make up your own.

Depending upon the episode... may or may not be polynomial, exponential, even when there is a formula it isn't followed, warp 10 may or may not be the speed limit (in an TOS episode they went at warp 14 i think).

Yeah, i remember that episode.

so basically you're going to piss off a load of trekkies no matter what system you pick, just pick one and move on.

what period is your game based in? a game based around the enterprise period would be cool.

Light speed is relative, it changes depending on where you are in the universe and what spacial bodies are around you.

> so basically you're going to piss off a load of trekkies no matter what system you pick, just pick one and move on.


Just breathing will piss off some trekkie somewhere. Calling them Trekkies will too (I am a trekkie, not a treker btw...)

Not only does warp speed change during the show, so does the distance between points. In Enterprise it takes only a few days to get to the Klingon homeworld (I do not name it since that changes over time too...) while during the original show it was a good bit further away...

I am guessing when 'The Speed of Light' phrase is used for calculations its usually taken as the constant speed of light through a vacume. Which is constant (first line of wiki's entry on speed of light). But yea, it does speed down, even depending on the substance its going through, such as how the bending effect works in water.

But goign back to your original question, your going to hve to make up your own scale anyway. Even if you use real distances and the exact warp scale would still leave several days/weeks of traveling at a high warp between solor systems. Which is taken out of the show (you can work it out how long its been by the stardate given....if your that geeky)

The Enterprise D usualy cruises around at warp 7 if i rmember the sow rightly, which is a day for each lightyear. The nearest star to use is 4.2 lightyears, or at warp 7, around 4.5 days. which is about 4.5 days too long for anything a person wants to sit through :)

Remember to not travel faster than Warp 7 or you might create an unstable subspace phenomenon that can destroy star systems. I believe Star Fleet made it law (unless you're in a hurry) in TNG.

Yes, but the new nanacels in Voyager got around that.

My game is TOS - I'm using the TOS warp system. The Enterprise was capable of Warp 8 - however, they pushed the sucker higher than that at least once.

I'm just going to take the base calcs I have and multiply the relevent one by the number of light years.

So, Warp 5 over 56 ly = 56 * 2.922 days = 163.632 days.

I just don't like the fact that they don't double or halve as I would expect which makes me wonder if I am right.

Still, not like anyone is going to check - are they?

Wait a minute.

What is Blitz3D's floating point accuracy? Can it handle calculations with 16 decimal places? Blitz3D will surely round the answer - but does it calculate with 16 decimal place accuracy in the first place?

I don't see how you can assign any floating point precision.

Do you have to write your own function to retain the floating point accuracy? I don't particuarly want to have to faff about like a frog in custard.

skimmed a bit so i dont know if anyone has said this or not

the millenium falcon isnt the fastest ship in the galaxy its navicomp is
like han said "one wrong number and you could find yourself flying into a star" or something similar was never word perfect on starwars no matter how many times i saw it

so if you were traveling in a void it would be a straight line but given that we have suns and planets in orbit they kinda have to force detours

There isn't much point having a huge galaxy to explore.

At Warp 8, they can only travel 2,560 light years in a 5 year mission.

They could never reach the Gamma or Delta quadrants (without going through wormholes) - plus, there wouldn't be much point, considering the distance to the Bajoran wormhole.

So, there isn't much point in having an in-game galaxy section of more than 3,000 x 3,000 light years.

In the original series the Warp speeds where calculated differently. In one episode the enterprise got excellerated to Warp 14!
In the new series the creators decided to re-invent the Warp speed calculation so that Warp 10 was the theoretical maximum. Warp 10 is apparently unachievable as the energy required to reach it would be infinite. At warp 10 you would theoretically be in all places and the same time (sort of a quantum theory kind of thing)
That Voyager episode was a bit crap as it didn't hold to even Star Trek's rules.

Good luck with the game tho. :)

That sounds a bit unrealistic. Couldn't a cloaked Romulan warbird just zoom around the Federation at warp 8 and blow everything to bits?

Puki: Warp is a logarithmic scale.



Not theorethical maximum, but an un-attainable infinite speed. Of course they broke that one too, in Voyager.

But even in TNG they violated their new warp-scale again -- in the final episode, there's some (alternate?) future bits where riker calls for Warp 13.

(Let's just write that one up to dramatic effect)

Everything works okay though - my calculations seem to equate (based on the TOS system). I'm getting correct journey times - Blitz3D is probably (due to decimal places) killing my clinical accuracy though.

a# = 1000.005
Print a

WaitKey

It really depends on how many digits to the left of the decimal point your using. With the above, you only get 2 decimal places.

Single-Precision, which equates to a reasonable degree of accuracy with 7 digits ( including those on *both* sides of the floating point as Ross demonstrates above. )

If I recall correctly, there were some "unique qualities" to B3D's floating point precision which made it about 1 digit less accurate than the same code in other languages with single-precision floating point operations. So on second thoughts, make that six, not seven, unless those issues were fixed.

Yep, i make it 6.