Federation Commander

[cnuzzi]

This is coming off of the Early Years question, but I thought it best to make it a new topic. What exactly is "Non-tactical warp"? Does it mean that the ships had a form of warp drive that could be used for travel only, not combat?

[Grimmshade]

I've been wondering the same thing!

[Steve Cole]

That is exactly what it means.

In TOS, it was noted that Romulan ships were "pure impulse, no warp drive" and if that meant sub-light, it would take thousands of years to get from a Romulan base to the border. As this was obviously not practical (and we were stuck with it by writers who never read a science book) the only way to explain it was that impulse engines could generate some kind of warp drive for strategic travel but could not use it in combat.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[djdood]

Franchise Trek later incorporated pretty much the same idea, as the TNG-era technical advisors/designers (Andrew Probert, Rick Sternbach, Mike Okuda, etc.) added "subspace driver coils" to the impulse enginesof the 1701-D and retroactively referenced them into the movie-era and ToS ships.

This answered a long-standing question of why a ship at high impulse speeds (significant fractions of the speed of light) didn't suffer from big relativistic time-dilation issues, as well as how small impulse engines could accelerate a large ship to such fantastic speeds - It doesn't; the driver coils drop the ship into subspace and reduce its apparent mass.

"Creating a subspace field" around the ship is the fundamental mechanism of Trek warp drive, so it's "warp drive" just at an order of magnitude less "subspace field power" due to being powered only by nuclear fusion impulse engines rather than a matter/anti-matter source.

The end result ended up in a similar place as the SFU, but developed independently (and the SFU got there first, by a good decade or so). The SFU version differs in using this low-power subspace field drive to achieve low warp speeds (still much faster than sub-light).

There's fluff in the SFU fiction and descriptions that describe how fussy non-tactical warp is and how combat was very different. Also about how there is somewhat of a barrier above SFB/FedCom speed 32, which is the transition to high "strategic warp" speeds and some quirk of the physics make weapons profoundly more dangerous (to the point where no one will risk getting shot at - a pop-gun weapon can destroy a battleship).
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[Sgt_G]

There's a bit of history with how Non-Tactical warp came about. Way back in the early or mid 1990s, I proposed adapters for Tugs so they could bring back separated Klingon booms and Federation saucers. SVC didn't care much for the idea. The Klingon version made sense, but the Fed one was downright awkward looking. SVC shut the conversation down by declaring that any ship, to include booms and saucers, with one working Impulse drive could limp itself home using what we now call Non-Tactical Warp. I forget who it was, but someone pounced on the idea and asked if that's how Romulans built their empire without having any Warp Drive technology. SVC replied, "Of course it is!" And there you have it.
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Garth L. Getgen

Master Sgt, US Air Force, Retired -- 1981-2007 -- 1W091A

[cnuzzi]

Thanks to everyone for the bevy of info. This answers my question - the supraluminal speeds necessary for interstellar travel were generated by the impulse engines during the "sublight" era. I had thought that perhaps there was some kind of "space warp generator" - not an engine per se, but something like the unit that needs to replaced on the Queen's starship in Star Wars Ep I, that isn't represented on an SSD. This actually makes more sense.

[Magnum357]

[djdood]

[cnuzzi]

My thought on this is that the energy is produced in the reactor in the Engineering section (this is where the dilithium comes into play, regulating the reaction like the control rods in a nuclear reactor), and that this energy is then channeled to the nacelles, which use it to generate the warp field.

[djdood]

That is pretty much the TMP/TNG franchise trek model and some SFU writings echo it.

Some other writings imply the nacelles being both the power source and main user of said power (with regulating happening in those crystals in engineering) - the original series was never clear, but seemed to imply this version in some dialog.
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[Mike]

Regarding ships being able to use impulse engines to travel at warp speeds (but not fight), where does the incident of the USS Hood enter into the discussion?
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Mike

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Sandpaper gets the job done, but makes for a lot of friction.

[Steve Cole]

That is how they got home in less than 5,000 years.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander

[djdood]

"Return of the Hood", in Captain's Log #25 tells the full tale (and it's quite a tale).
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[Sgt_G]