Warp vs Impulse Drive
May 30, 2019 13:08:59 GMT -5
Post by Radrook Admin on May 30, 2019 13:08:59 GMT -5
Warp Drive vs Impulse Drive
We have all seen the star Trek episodes where the captain orders the navigator to accelerate to warp one, two, and up to warp nine. We also hear the captain mention impulse drive. So what is he referring to and what is the difference between them?
Impluse Drive
The difference is that impulse depends on thrust in order to move the ship while warp drive doesn't. The more forceful the thrust, the faster the ship travels. Jet aircraft are a good example as are rockets. The engine combusts material, ejects the byproduct from the rear, and the ship moves forward. Propellers move air backwards producing thrust in the same manner.
www.explainthatstuff.com/how-propellers-work.html
Allows slower than light interplanetary travel
'In the fictional Star Trek universe, the impulse drive is the method of propulsion that starships and other spacecraft use when they are traveling below the speed of light. Typically powered by deuterium fusion reactors, impulse engines let ships travel interplanetary distances readily. For example, Starfleet Academy cadets use impulse engines when flying from Earth to Saturn and back. Unlike the warp engines, impulse engines work on principles used in today's rocketry, throwing mass out the back as fast as possible to drive the ship forward.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_drive
So when Kirk speaks of impulse power, he is merely referring the moving through space by action reaction method.
Speed Limit
The critical term here is moving through space. Why? Simple! It's because there is a speed limit on how fast things can move through space. That speed limit is called the speed of light which is 186,000 miles per second. Nothing can move faster. That means the far reaches of the universe will be forever out of reach if mankind depends on that kind of method.
What is Warp Drive?
In contrast, a warp drive neither pushes nor pulls the spaceship. What a warp drive does is to warp space in such a way that the ship is carried along like a surfer on a wave. In short, the ship is not moving THROUGH space, but space in relation to the ship itself is moving and that movement can exceed the speed of light.
Evidence?
When astronomers peer at the far-reaches of the observable universe, they find it is expanding at an increasingly greater rate the farther it is from us. In short, the farther away the faster it expands at a predictable rate called the Hubble Constant. Calculations based on this constant indicate that the regions that are no observable must be expanding at far beyond the speed of light causing the light emitted in those areas to never reach us. So assuming that the constant increase of velocity remains constant, then space itself can indeed do so. The trick is if indeed so, then how do we harness that characteristic to enable a ship to do the same. In Star Trek that is exactly what they pretend to be doing.
Addendum:
One very significant advantage of warp drive over impulse drive is that the crew doesn suffer the effects of time-dilation. That is time passing slower for the crew than for those on Earth when traveling at a significant percentage of the speed of light. You don't see Kirk complaining about finding people much older or dead when he returns to planets he's visited before, do you? Spock is shown returning to Vulcan and everything is as he left it. Kirk regular retiurns to Earth and no problems there either. So that would be one very significant thing not to worry about if we ever invent a warp drive.