Federation Commander

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?

I've been wondering the same thing!

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.

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).

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.

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.

cnuzzi wrote: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.

Interesting theory. "Non-tactical" warp drive always made more sense to me. But this is just my opinon.

cnuzzi wrote: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.

The SFU pretty much matches franchise trek, in this regard (no shock, since they both originate from the original series).

How it is done varies for each empire, but the Fed have coils in the engine nacelles that produce the subspace field that allows supraluminal travel, by warping space around the craft.

The energy to power those coils is produced with the oft mentioned matter/anti-matter reaction (where that actually occurs seems to vary, depending on the writer; some things say in the nacelles themselves, some things imply a TMP/TNG-like central reactor core), regulated by the dilithium crystals in the main engineering compartment.

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.

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.

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?

That is how they got home in less than 5,000 years.

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

Mike wrote: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?

The HOOD is the type of situation I intended the recovery adapter for, so a tug could hard-dock to a saucer and bring it home. That's where the whole discussion started. Steve invented NTW and made my invention null and void.