How does Picard choose a warp speed?

Question

How does Picard, or anyone for that matter, decide at what warp speed to travel? Obviously there are times when they need to get somewhere in a hurry and he says, warp 9 or maximum warp, but the rest of the time he just seems to pick a number at random. He rolls a warp 6.5 Is there some guide as to recommended speeds that he's following? Is there a speed that is the most efficient?

I've seen a number of episodes where it is suggested that various levels of warp can only be sustained for a given amounts of time. I can't think of any specifics off-hand, which is why this is not an answer. — Chad Levy, Oct 20 '11 at 18:22
TNG Season 6 Episode 20, The Chase. In a Captain's Log Picard says "Our frequent use of high warp over the last few days has overextended the propulsion systems. We are finishing minor repairs before returning to Federation space." Just watched it. Good episode. :D — , Nov 20 '13 at 16:06
I'm a bit late to the party here, but one more thing to consider: At one point during TNG, they discovered that travel at high warp factors was damaging the fabric of spacetime, and if the damage got too severe, extremely dangerous subspace rifts could form. To minimize any future damage, the Federation Council restricted warp travel within certain at-risk regions of space to essential travel only, and limited all warp travel to a maximum of warp factor 5, except in cases of extreme emergencies. Later R&D in warp theory and design included attempts to mitigate this problem, resulting first i — , Mar 22 '15 at 06:01
@SilverlightPony That was in the final season, and was pretty much immediately ignored within TNG itself (there were a few nominal references to it, all regarding how they're totally going to ignore it now). This was given a slapdash resolution in Voyager, where altering nacelle positions after warp field activation altered the warp field geometry in a way which made it non-damaging. There was also a minor story where they were accosted by a species living in a weak region of spacetime. — zibadawa timmy, Sep 15 '15 at 05:26

score 127 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 30 '15 at 21:28

127

One major consideration when determining the what warp factor to travel at is energy consumption: starships—even in the 24th century—did not have infinitely renewable sources of energy, requiring massive amounts of deuterium and antideuterium to power the matter/antimatter reaction assembly in the warp core.

A second consideration is the wear and tear on the warp drive: starships, for all their sophistication, are also fine-tuned instruments that will fail under stress, especially under the strain of sustained travel at high warp.

The final consideration, that you touched upon, is the urgency of the matter at hand. The captain must take the previous considerations into account and weigh them on the pressing urgency of the current mission.

So when a starship is commissioned, it's rated for different types of travel:

Normal cruising speed until fuel exhaustion. On a Galaxy-class starship like the Enterprise-D, this would be Warp 6.
Maximum cruising speed. Traveling at this speed would be tremendously inefficient, but should cause minimal wear-and-tear. For Galaxy-class starships, this is Warp 9.2.
Maximum top speed. Traveling at this speed would be inefficient and would not be sustainable after 12 hours due to the damage it would cause to the propulsion system. Warp 9.6 on a Galaxy-class starship.

So when Picard commands Warp 6.5, he's not picking a number at random: he's considered the urgency of the mission and decided that it's worth traveling faster than the normal speeds to get to the destination.

Notes

In "Force of Nature", it's determined that high warp speeds harm the fabric of subspace, and the Federation issues a speed limit of Warp 5 unless in the case of a dire emergency. Naturally, Enterprise-D often broke or ignored that limit (episodes are rarely if ever about the non-emergency missions). By the time Voyager was commissioned, Starfleet was able to develop a warp system that overcame this problem by creating a substantial warp field (the movement of the nacelles).
A good engineer always knows how to push the engines beyond their rated speeds: it wouldn't be unheard of for the Enterprise-D to run consistently a notch or two above the rated speeds due to La Forge's engineering skill.
Source for the speeds is from the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual.

edited Nov 30 '15 at 21:28

VirtualByte

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answered Oct 16 '11 at 09:55

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I don't have a link, but I remember reading in a few places that the reason for Voyager's nacelles shifting as it went into warp was part of the solution to the warp fields damaging subspace. – Tango Oct 16 '11 at 16:44
@TangoOversway It's not canon, but yes: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Variable_geometry_pylon – Brian Ortiz Oct 16 '11 at 18:29
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Important Note: When @Mark says "a little bit faster" we are talking hours or days, not minutes. Often the speed choice is deliberately slow to allow the crew R&R before the next mission. – DampeS8N Oct 16 '11 at 21:55
@DampeS8N: That makes sense and is an interesting idea. Is that a deduction, or is it stated anywhere in Trekdom? (Just curious, not trying to be snarky!) – Tango Oct 16 '11 at 23:51
@TangoOversway As the warp scale factor for TNG onward increases, speed increases exponentially. – Oct 17 '11 at 00:06
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@TangoOversway, not stated anywhere that he does it for the extra time. But I am a team lead and know how important having a rested team is, and it would be difficult to justify sitting around in orbit for a day before contacting the people you came to see. – DampeS8N Oct 17 '11 at 00:44
@MarkTrapp: I wasn't asking about speeds. I have a tech manual they sent me when they invited me in to pitch to them so I've got the tech info. I was asking first about confirmation on the engine alignment shift and if DampeS8N had a Trek resource for his other comment, just out of curiosity. – Tango Oct 17 '11 at 07:15
"it's determined that high warp speeds harm the fabric of subspace" - The green movement will continue even after we have saved the planent... or not. – Chad Oct 17 '11 at 17:20
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I've never considered this before; is there anything in the Technical Manual about how and where the Enterprise-D refuels and what the approximate operational range is? – Raven13 Oct 17 '11 at 17:59
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Voyager was able to cross the galaxy without access to a Starbase. Even in the present day, our naval fleet can go their entire rated lives on their original fuel supply. There's a LOT of energy inherent in matter-antimatter reactions. Problems usually occur when you are dumping fuel in to push the ship as fast as it'll go; no system is completely efficient, so I'd bet that while Warp 9 is three times faster than Warp 6, it would take significantly more than three times the energy to create a level 9 warp field than a level 6 – KeithS Oct 18 '11 at 23:22
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@KeithS Deuterium gathering (trading, extraction, etc.) doesn't make a very good episode, but it was featured on Voyager in a few episodes: "The Cloud" for example mentions Voyager runs out after only a few weeks. "Demon" uses this plot device as well. – Oct 19 '11 at 02:13
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“Deuterium gathering (trading, extraction, etc.) doesn't make a very good episode, but it was featured on Voyager in a few episodes” — well, Voyager was never shy about doing episodes about things that didn’t make good episodes! – Paul D. Waite Dec 07 '12 at 13:02
The Enterprise-D was given special permission for the rest of its mission to go above Warp 5 when warranted without special permission The danger was not from a select number of ships doing it, but from every ship traveling at those speeds. The Enterprise's mission was to be on the frontier, where "no one had gone before," so it wasn't such a danger out there, and might need to go faster to get back in time during an emergency. – trlkly Aug 14 '14 at 05:44
@trlkly Also, the one location where they had solid evidence of the damage was an area where for $plotreason all warp traffic went through the same narrow corridor, which exacerbated the problem and caused the subspace rift. Which would imply that in most long-distance voyages the problem would be limited, but it'd get riskier near commonly visited planets, and so until they have a better grasp of what's causing the damage they opt to play it as safe as possible. Presumably, by VOY they've figured out how to deal with it. – Shadur-don't-feed-the-AI May 20 '15 at 12:41
I recall seeing around the site that the Intrepid class ships nacelles moving upward somehow causes the warp field to not mess subspace around as much – IG_42 Nov 19 '15 at 17:57
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I can't drive warp 5.5! – Irishpanda Nov 30 '15 at 21:43
Why warp 6.5 and not 6.0 though? The energy needed (and presumably the wear on the engines) is lowest at whole number warp speeds, and increases non-linearly up to the next integer. – user Oct 15 '18 at 13:05
@user Looks like warp 6.5 is faster than warp 6.0 but still uses less energy than warp 7.0. It looks like the energy usage doesn't grow high enough to make rounding up to 7 better until warp 6.6 or 6.7 or so. Presumably Picard decided the little bit of extra speed was necessary for their mission and worth the extra energy-burn and wear-and-tear. – Gavin S. Yancey Apr 02 '21 at 23:12

score 27 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 18 '11 at 23:32

There are almost certainly guidelines laid down for each class of ship regarding energy usage versus travel speed.

As no system is 100% efficient, there will be a law of diminishing returns when picking a warp number to travel at. For instance, Warp 6 under the original scale (it's easier) is approximately 216c. Warp 9 is approximately 729c. So, Warp 9 is approximately 3.375x faster than Warp 6. A system with even, say, 80% thermodynamic efficiency (only 20% lost to entropy) would have to put roughly 25% more energy in than it saw in returns, so travelling at Warp 9 would cost approximately 4.2 times as much energy as travelling Warp 6, for only 3 times the gain. And that's if the system is equally efficient through its performance envelope; usually entropy becomes a larger percentage of input as the amount of energy in the system increases, meaning it might cost 10 or even 20 times as much energy to travel at maximum warp than at the ships "cruising speed" (typically the speed at which the engine is most efficient).

So, the consideration is between speed and efficiency. The faster the Enterprise travels, the more often it will have to refuel, on a disproportionate scale to the number of light-years traveled. Other maintenance will be required more often as well; in the episode where the Enterprise undergoes a baryon sweep, the base engineers state that the Enterprise has travelled more distance (and acquired more harmful subatomic particles) in one year than most ships do in five. However, sometimes you simply have to travel as fast as the ship can take you (such as to drop Deanna Troi's mother off at the nearest starbase).

+1 for "sometimes you simply have to travel as fast as the ship can take you (such as to drop Deanna Troi's mother off at the nearest starbase)"! — Dan Henderson, Sep 15 '15 at 06:16
@DanHenderson I was wondering who'd get that one; I remember an episode involving Tori's mother where the denumon has Picard instructing the helmsman to lay in a course to where they were taking her in the first place, and his speed instruction, somewhat reduced in volume, is "warp nine". — KeithS, Sep 18 '15 at 19:12

score 8 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 26 '14 at 00:05

I agree with the above answers, but I had a few other ideas of reasons not covered in the above that I thought I'd throw out there:

Sometimes they are on a specific schedule but understand that there can be delays. If they are meeting the Cardassian ambassador somewhere that takes 1 week to get to at warp 9 and 2 weeks to get to at warp 6, they can leave 2 weeks before the event and cruise at warp 6, then if something comes up en route make up time "in the air" by going at a faster speed.
They're a science vessel, so they're constantly running long-range and short-range scans, gathering data and looking for anomalies and such. It seems very likely to me that if they're just cruising around or they don't have to be anywhere any time soon, they just set the value at the fastest speed they can go while getting thorough scans of the area. Of course, maybe this is way off and you can't even run sensors from within a warp field.

Or even, combine them. I think I remember an episode where they are on their way somewhere, but stop to investigate an anomaly with the justification that they'll use a higher warp to arrive on time — Izkata, Feb 26 '14 at 00:17

How does Picard choose a warp speed?

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