Wow...We've uncovered why Laforge went from the Helm to Engineering....Who'd have known..?

I always chalked that up to the whole "blind guy flying the ship" problem.

Could have been worse. Could have been Brains.

~~Lostoyannaya

Being Blind in the Star Trek universe (like being dead) never seems to faze anyone.
"Blind you say? Here be Chief Engineer!" and
"Can't see Mr Tuvok? Well, please be the Tatical Officer! What's that you say? You won't be able to hit any ships? My dear man this is Voyager! We don't shoot back at people! And when we do, we certainly don't aim!

Sorry to point this out, but Tuvok isn't blind.

lol. I was talking about 'Year of hell', He got blinded by a Chronoton Torpedo Explosion. Somehow he stayed on as Tatical officer. Interesting idea!

Nah.. Tuvy just learned brail really really fast. Must be a Vulcan thing. They're good with their hands. ;)

The question is: at which point does warp speed match R17?

Yeah, as Celeste said (sort of), he was using something called a "tactile interface." It's a pity his magical third eyelid didn't kick in like Spock's did....

On this whole issue of full impulse of interstellar travel, I think the creators imply that the old theory is being obeyed.

You see, going directly into warp from planetary orbit (or even within what I'd call inner stellar systems) creates a great deal of messy gravitational and subspace effects. I got the impression that impulse will be maintained at least past where we'd generally put the asteroid belt, at which point the gravtitational effects of the star start to fall off drastically. Once you start to pass the gas giants you can then kick into warp. That was sort of my impression. They don't intend to stay on impulse the whole distance, just far enough that they're not going to create subspace tidal effects throughout the system whent they warp away. That's what makes these near-warp transports so dangerous, with no margin for error. You have to know PRECISELY where you're going to land and where all the planets are relative to your warpout point as well as their tragectories. In addition, when you warp out after having stopped for only the five seconds of transport, you have to be going such that you're perpendicular to the gravitational field of the planet in question.

I seem to recall getting that impression from somewhere (ie, the Enterprise chasing the Borg ship in BOBW, dropping out of warp somewhere around Saturn and spending the next half hour crawling towards Earth), but it wasn't treated consistently (blasting into warp from orbit in the Schizoid Man, Kirk's BOP kicking into warp in the *atmosphere*, etc.)

No, it's not consistent. Warp within a solar system is sometimes treated as dangerous to add a little tension, but more often it's not (how many times have we seen characters on a planet's surface watch a ship go off into warp?). However, even if full impulse is only 1/4 lightspeed, that's still pretty fast for intrasystem travel. It would get you from the Earth to the Sun and back in just over an hour. That would be more than fast enough except in emergency situations -- it's sure a lot faster than we can manage now.

If I recall correctly, the two series that made the most use of this no-warp-in-solar-systems rule are TOS and Enterprise. If that's true, then another explanation is that warp technology, like any form of transportation, is continually being improved to reduce dangers like this.

My technological pet peeve is intraship transporting, which is supposed to be more dangerous than regular transporting. Why? It should be much safer -- the computer knows the ship's precise layout already.

Well, for the shooting-star warping ship, I have no response. In theory I shouldn't think any "normal" size ship should be visible from the surface to begin with. I assume "standard orbit" would be a lot higher than the International Space Station, for example.

Of course, for that matter, maybe all of those warping ships we think we see are in fact VERY coincidental shooting stars. :wink:

It's a good point. We keep seeing this whole "full impulse=0.25c" in the official Paramount reference material, yet they keep being contradictory on what is canon or not. For example, I enjoy my copy of Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise, but it's got too many holes in it. Where do we draw the line at what is canon and what isn't. I'd suggest that the true heirarchy is more along the lines of what follows. The higher sources trumps the lower sources in the case of a conflict.

1. The televised version of the episodes and the theatrical version of the movies.
2. Any other version of the episodes or the movies. (i.e. if the missing scenes from all those middle Voyager episodes have conflicting information, they lose to the televised stuff)
3. Official Paramount literature starting with the NextGen Tech Manual.
4. Older Paramount literature.
5. Semi-canon like TAS and the more recent "main-stream" novels like New Frontier and the DS9 Relaunch.
6. Anything else. Sadly this includes the Shatnerverse and the novel Star Trek Federation, both of which I greatly enjoy.

Now use the heirarchy for deciding if warping from orbit is okay. Episodes say they can, so it must be safe in theory, at least from well-known planets. "Impulse=0.25c" is in level three, but nothing in levels one or two states otherwise except "less than c," so we accept it as reality.

P.S. I'd like to add as a proviso that anything in Star Trek: Enterprise should be pushed down the heirarchy to level three at least. I hate those contiuity errors!

I was always under the impression that it isn't less safe, it's just more energy consuming, because you use the 'long range effects' of the transporter (i.e. not being directly on the pad) twice...in dematerialization and rematerialization. So it just took more energy, and in emergency situations, you might not have that to spare.

Picard: Oh, man! What's that awful smell?
Data: I believe Commander Riker just passed the gas giant.
All: WILL!

(Sorry for the juvenile humor, but it was there.)

What about people? That's another problem. Not a big one, with internal scanners, but still a problem.

Yeah, that's a valid question. Theoretically any beaming to and from planet surfaces must use a LOT more energy getting the targeting right than non-transporter pad intraship beaming. And the point is quite valid in that A. the computer should know exactly where all of the occupied volume is within the ship at all times and B. the transporter does "clear out" anything where the person is going to be landing.

I hope that when we beam to a planet all of the air in the volume we're about to occupy is moved somewhere. Maybe it's a sort of unspoken rule that entire cylinders of air/matter/etc. are exchanged within the space of less than a few seconds. That would explain the "starfleet officer inside snow globe" effect. They're actually surrounded by ships air, and the ship has just been contaminated by evil alien spores :lol: .

Of course, for that matter, we have to think about the issue Krauss raised in The Physics of Star Trek. Do transporters really move each and every atom of our bodies thousands of miles to a planets' surface, or does it "clone" us a new body with local material? Moving the complete genetic pattern without worrying about shunting billions of atoms at close to the speed of light would be a lot more cost effective, right?

Then why do they have to worry about a "matter stream"?

Something's got to kill a couple of hundred Redshirts a season.

~~Lostoyannaya :wink:

The thing is, I don't believe it does move the atoms. It turns them in to Energy, or if you like a kinda of digital signal. Yes I know that the idea of having the whole human body along with all the DNA and everything else turned in to digital format would take...just a huge amount of computer space. But they seem to be able to do it. I guess they don't use XP. But this is why they have a pattern buffer and matter stream.
Maybe thats why inter-ship beaming can be a problem. The computer has to take you apart, move you in energy form, then put you back together again. If you're sent to another ship or transporter pad, the other ship's computer does almost half the work, i.e putting you back together again. Maybe that uses less energy for us... Doesn't explain why beaming to planets never worries them, though. Cos the same ship is doing all the beaming.....