Transwarp vs Transwarp threshold / The Warp 10 Barrier

If memory serves. Warp versus Transwarp have been used for several different modes and scales of travel.

In the original Excelsior experiments, it was a speed thing based on the Warp Bubble. The old Warp drive made warp speed one way and the new TRANSwarp drive did so another, giving vastly greater speeds. Scotty didn’t have a lot of faith in it but he never explained why.

Warp in that instance was a function of speed. Warp 1 is light speed. Warp 2 is the square of light speed. Warp 3 is the square of warp 2. Warp 4 is the square of Warp 3. On up forever. The stallout is maximum ship speed. Transwarp was about going past that maximum capability of the old engines.

Later, they changed the Warp scale to reflect new understandings of physics and technology.

Instead of Warp being a function of Lightspeed, it was a function of the curvature of space around the warp bubble. 1 is the curvature that allows the ship to travel at light speed. 10 is infinite curvature, technically allowing the ship to be anywhere or everywhere. The ship’s engines don’t have a peak speed, they have a peak ability to curve space.

Transwarp then becomes ways to shortcut through space at speeds that can’t be achieved with equal curvature. Instead of curving space, it cuts through it.

It’s a similar difference to black holes and wormholes.

A black hole, inside the event horizon, exists at warp 10. Space is infinitely curved so nothing can get out and all of time plays out at once for those who get stuck inside. Everything happens at once because speed breaks time due to curvature.

A wormhole has two openings at separate points. You go through one end and emerge at the other in less time than it would take to go between the two points in space if you went via space instead of the wormhole. This isn’t speed or curvature, it’s a connection through other dimensions of spacetime beyond our own.

Black holes and wormholes aren’t mutually exclusive. Both can exist. It is even technically possible to have a wormhole as a way to cut through the space warped by a black hole.

In a ship, going to infinite curvature means a wormhole is pointless. You’re every place at once. But getting to 10, the place of infinite curvature is extremely difficult. So it’s often cheaper and easier to take a shortcut.

If your engine peaks at warp 9.8 and it’s a seventy five year journey from point A to point B at that curvature, you try and take a wormhole which doesn’t curve space but cuts through it so you pass over 60 years of the journey’s distance, having nothing to do with how much you have curved space time. That’s a Transwarp conduit or drive. A way to take a shortcut rather than bending two points together. Both work, they just work different ways.

Most wormholes are abysmally small. They connect inches apart with apertures so small that a single neutron is massive enough to collapse the connection. Dealing with those, you want to warp space instead. You’ll get where you’re going quicker. But when you’re so far away that even high warps are not sufficient to get you from A to B in reasonable times, it’s worth it to expend the energy to make artificial shortcuts through other dimensions, allowing for faster travel.

Somewhere there is a balance point where Warp and Transwarp are equally efficient. Where it’s the same speed and energy from A to B whether you fold space or cut through it. But that point is never described so who knows where it is or if it is simple or constant. It’s entirely probable that local space itself deforms Warp Bubbles and Transwarp Conduits to the extent that you pretty much have to calculate which is better every trip.

reddit.com/r/startrek/comments…

the tortoise had TRANSwarp capabilities.

A sleeper (American English) or Q-car (British English) is a car that boasts high performance while having an unassuming exterior.[1][2][3] Sleepers are usually developed on the platform of a non-athletic class of vehicle, most often that of an economy car. In addition to looking modest, a sleeper car may sometimes appear to be a "beater" — a car that is in a visibly poor condition due to seeming neglect and lack of maintenance on the owner's part — though this is intentional and commonly described as "all go and no show"; these cars are internally modified to achieve very competitive levels of performance while being presented as a standard or neglected car. The American name for this type of vehicle comes from the term sleeper agent,[citation needed] whereas the British name is derived from the Q-ships used by the Royal Navy.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeper_…

Q-ships were heavily armed decoy vessels used by the Royal Navy, made to appear like harmless merchant or fishing vessels. They were used to entice U-boats to the sea's surface and then attack them. As the U-boat drew near to assess the damage it had inflicted, the Lady Olive counter-attacked.

bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9vp7r…

Short for Queenstown in Ireland, as Haulbowline Dockyard in Cork Harbour was responsible for the conversion of many mercantile steamers to armed decoy ships in World War One, although the majority appear to have been converted in larger navy yards such as Devonport.

[3]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-ship

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