How fast can we go - Ship Engines (Propulsion)

[evo4ever]

Hello all.

My first post here so here goes...

I dont whether this topic has already been discussed but ill raise it anyway. I know all ships in Star Trek have Warp Drive as standard but in STO will we be able to fit our ships with more advanced engines like Transwarp or Quantum Slipstream?

Let me give you a few examples:

Say you have a random skirmish with the borg (NPC) and you win will you be able to salvage the wrackage and intergrate their transwarp tech into your own ship given their transwarp drive is not completely destroyed.

OR

Through trade?

[THORN74]

aside from every ship having a different standard maximum warp speed, we arent even sure that will be implements yet.

as far as other means of propulsion.... no one knows that either, with the exception of the comments by the devs that there will be wormholes and transwarp conduits. but i doubt you will be able to "mount" those abillities.


the bigger question will be weather warp is handled as the shows & movies (diff adjustable warp speeds) or weather warp will be some constant speed like every other ST game before ?

[Burchenall]

I think they said that ships woludn't be abe to do thingslike that... And I hope it's true... I haven't seen Picard or any federation captain installing alien technology from enemies destroyed by themselves. Maybe klingons... but it doesn't look very trek.

Let's hope this doesn't become a 'ship-destroying' game where you look for enemies only for loot.

PD: Cryptic said that you will be able to use new tech discovered by yourself in your explorations, but I think they're talking about another thing.

[THORN74]

I think they said that ships woludn't be abe to do thingslike that... And I hope it's true... I haven't seen Picard or any federation captain installing alien technology from enemies destroyed by themselves. Maybe klingons... but it doesn't look very trek.

Let's hope this doesn't become a 'ship-destroying' game where you look for enemies only for loot.

PD: Cryptic said that you will be able to use new tech discovered by yourself in your explorations, but I think they're talking about another thing.

the nova class ship that voyager ran into in the delta quadrant was doing exactly that, and murdering aliens to power their new tech engine. but as a general rule u are correct ..... starfleet captians dont do that sort of thing.

[Burchenall]

the nova class ship that voyager ran into in the delta quadrant was doing exactly that, and murdering aliens to power their new tech engine. but as a general rule u are correct ..... starfleet captians dont do that sort of thing.
Yeah... it's true that there are a few examples, but the Equinox was hunt and destroyed by Janeway exactly because they were doing that, so it's a behaviour that the federation doesn't approve... And neither klingons, I bet.

Btw:
sorry im a little bored. im waiting at the hospital with my wife, doctors take forever. I hope nothing serious ^^

[ajaco3025]

Let's hope this doesn't become a 'ship-destroying' game where you look for enemies only for loot.


I'm Klingon. I'll destroy you for glory.... and then take your loot. :eek:

"The inertia of any system is the result of the interaction of that system and the rest of the universe. In other words, every particle in the universe ultimately has an effect on every other particle."

[marscentral]

I'm Klingon. I'll destroy you for glory.... and then take your loot. :eek:


I'm Starfleet, I'll destroy you to "defend the Federation" and then take your loot for "research purposes". :D

[ratman122]

You should definitely be able to change what warp speed you're going, and have the maximum for each ship class. I'll be sad if you can't :(

[ajaco3025]

I'm Starfleet, I'll destroy you to "defend the Federation" and then take your loot for "research purposes". :D

Whoa!!! My first challenge!! Oh, I stand corrected. To engage Starfleet in honorable combat, the Klingon warrior must wait for the Federation captain to call for reinforcements increasing the odds 10 to 1....just to be fair. :cool:

[Burchenall]

I hope it's a bit more complicated than just... 'hey, there's a battle wreckage over there... let's see if we find something useful to instal it in our ship and have some borg warpdrive or klingon disruptor or a romulan singularity-warp core or whatever...'

Starfleet (I won't tell anything about klingons...) is a military organization and their ships and captains should act in that way, so if a fed captain find something interesting in a ship's wreckage he should bring it back to a starbase or a federation headquarters to have it studied and, if useful, make it available to upgrade any federation ship with that 'whatever' found... not only to boldly loot where no ship has loot before... 'cause what's left in the other places it's almost all useless...

[PugPug]

From the FAQ:

Q: Will there be realistic travel times in space?
A: Travel times will be semi-realistic, with a focus on fun. Space is big, and it can take a very long time to travel great distances. That travel time can be impractically long. We will introduce transwarp conduit technology and worm holes to allow players to travel to distant sectors of the galaxy without needing days or weeks of gameplay to do so.

So it doesn't look like we'll be limited to Warp 9, no.

[Ontas]

From the FAQ:

(...)We will introduce transwarp conduit technology and worm holes to allow players to travel to distant sectors of the galaxy without needing days or weeks of gameplay to do so.

So it doesn't look like we'll be limited to Warp 9, no.

I may be totally wrong, but I saw this more as an indication of travel hubs. It was my impression that transwarp conduits and wormholes, which have (in previous canon) been stationary devices/phenomena, would link different sectors together so a player can get out into deep space without spending hours ferrying back and forth from Earth or wherever your safe harbor is.

Again, this is just my speculation, but I would imagine that warp speed will be the top cruising speed for lone starships (whether or not there will be different warp speeds remains an interesting question). Then transwarp conduits and wormholes can function as quick travel if you are done exploring one corner of space and want to move to the other side of the Federation. They might also be used in a way comparable to hearthstones, portals, or summoning spells in WoW, allowing players to quickly get somewhere when they are needed by their fleet or quickly return to their safe harbor before logging off.

[A-British-Ferengi]

It may not be a case of just looting perhaps you have to put some effort into it like at a minimum asign a team to it or fly a shuttle craft out.

[Burchenall]

I may be totally wrong, but I saw this more as an indication of travel hubs. It was my impression that transwarp conduits and wormholes, which have (in previous canon) been stationary devices/phenomena, would link different sectors together so a player can get out into deep space without spending hours ferrying back and forth from Earth or wherever your safe harbor is.

Again, this is just my speculation, but I would imagine that warp speed will be the top cruising speed for lone starships (whether or not there will be different warp speeds remains an interesting question). Then transwarp conduits and wormholes can function as quick travel if you are done exploring one corner of space and want to move to the other side of the Federation. They might also be used in a way comparable to hearthstones, portals, or summoning spells in WoW, allowing players to quickly get somewhere when they are needed by their fleet or quickly return to their safe harbor before logging off.
That's what I understood about ingame transwarp and that stuff... that's why I said that I think there won't be this kind of looting.
lol, king of looting.
Yeah... typing mistake xD

[cavilier210]

lol, king of looting.

what i'm wondering is if we have to like menu option choose a star to warp to, or if theres "free warp" between systems, so if i wanted i could get hopelessly lost in between some far off stars.... that would be funny if my sensors got knocked out in a battle so that i couldn't figure out which star was which

anyway, wouldn't it make sense to have a lower warp speed for in system fighting and strategy, and a faster one to go between systems. in combat, a short sprint of warp 1 would be enough to get you a good distance away from a threat.

[PugPug]

I may be totally wrong, but I saw this more as an indication of travel hubs.

Well worhholes are instantaneous travel, and transwarp is fast enough that you may be right about both.

What about a quantum slipstream? Was that higher than warp 9, or just a way to maintain high warp? As I recall, warp 10 is the "warp barrier," at which all travel becomes instantaneous. There could be a contradiction there in the Trek science.

[Markhottel]

transwarp would be so cool

[cavilier210]

slipstream creates something that seems to be a kighly compressed for of subspace in a tunnel. Voyager was able to fire phasers in the tunnel as it chased the dauntless, and was able to vear to the right to change coarse while still in the stream. It also was stable enough to take them a few hundred LY's closer to earth after dauntless and voyager parted ways

[PugPug]

slipstream creates something that seems to be a kighly compressed for of subspace in a tunnel. Voyager was able to fire phasers in the tunnel as it chased the dauntless, and was able to vear to the right to change coarse while still in the stream. It also was stable enough to take them a few hundred LY's closer to earth after dauntless and voyager parted ways

Here's the mem-alpha article on it:

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Quantum_slipstream_drive

So it goes faster than warp 10, but does not achieve infinite velocity -- a contradiction in Star Trek. Outlined here:

http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Warp_factor

[cavilier210]

i don't think its a contradiction, because slipstream creates a stable, user steered wormhole from what i've seen, but i'll take a look on the reference u posted

[cavilier210]

ya, pretty much the equivalant of an artificial, steerable wormhole from what memory alpha said


can we just say that a realistic speed would be about warp 9 or 729 times the speed of light, lol

i think that maybe cryptic should set in stone a warp factor system, that can be used solidly from now on. the ridiculousness of speed variances is insane

[Trekkie]

Obviously most of the information on this topic is just speculative at this point, but I have to say that personally I think that integrating alien technology into your own ship should be a fairly rare occurrence or else players will have ships that are only similar in structure and class to one another instead of being at least somewhat consistent overall.

[Banaticus]

Why would anyone choose to have their ship travel at slower than max speed? Why would you purposefully want to limit your ability to get somewhere? If you really like the blurred star effect of warp and want to be able to stare at it longer, after the first day of release I'll supply you with a looping screensaver of that effect that you can stare at as long as you'd like.

[GWay]

Hey, we're talking about alien technology!!

Reverse-engineering it should not be a so easy work...

...not mentioning that you should have defeated the enemy... so... I'm asking... what will remain of an alien shooted spacecraft???

Frequently... just a missing screw or a burned transistor make an entire device (computer or other...) partially or even totally unusable...

[Lateo]

Obviously most of the information on this topic is just speculative at this point, but I have to say that personally I think that integrating alien technology into your own ship should be a fairly rare occurrence or else players will have ships that are only similar in structure and class to one another instead of being at least somewhat consistent overall.

There are instances in the cannon (TV series) of equivalent components gained from another alien space ship -not- being usable with Fed tech (different powersource/requirements/etc), I suspect Cryptic will get round the "kill to loot" problem by such "physical restrictions" as you suggested (the phase coil from a Galaxy class/Warbird being physically too big/wrong design shape to put into a freighter/or such).

so as they said, only rare occurances of alien tech working with "normal" ships systems.
(Another thing for the possible Engineer/science position to do?)



Regarding ship speeds, at a -guess- Cryptic would probably stick to cannon (again) to a degree.

Q: Will there be realistic travel times in space?
A: Travel times will be semi-realistic, with a focus on fun. Space is big, and it can take a very long time to travel great distances. That travel time can be impractically long. We will introduce transwarp conduit technology and worm holes to allow players to travel to distant sectors of the galaxy without needing days or weeks of gameplay to do so.

Might be a case of Wing commander style again, meaning transwarp/worm holes acting like jumpgates (Babylon 5) so that -huge- distances can be crossed, and the shorter distances like between star systems can just be "coasted" at WarpX.

(Warp 5 = 7.2 days to travel from Earth to it's nearest neighbor (Alpha Centauri is 4.3 lightyears from Earth
Warp 9 = 1.0 days to travel from Earth to it's nearest neighbor (Alpha Centauri is 4.3 lightyears from Earth.)*


Like in many RPGs time scale (ingame hours - RL hours) will probably differ, (10 mins realtime = 12 hours ingame time?) along with alittle fiddling of ingame "distance" (a lightyear ending up procrastinated as 9.46 trillion kilometers but game mechanics wise being something -much- shorter).



*(Information from "Warp speed calculator" here (http://www.ussdragonstar.com/utilitycore/warpspeeds.asp))

[cavilier210]

Why would anyone choose to have their ship travel at slower than max speed? Why would you purposefully want to limit your ability to get somewhere? If you really like the blurred star effect of warp and want to be able to stare at it longer, after the first day of release I'll supply you with a looping screensaver of that effect that you can stare at as long as you'd like.


if you woulda read my posts, i already addressed why you would want a slower warp speed ability, because you don't need to go warp 9 while just trying to do a quick jump, in system, to another place. plus, if the warp is manually activated, deactivated, its easier to not overshoot your target by a large dstance

[PugPug]

Why would anyone choose to have their ship travel at slower than max speed? Why would you purposefully want to limit your ability to get somewhere? If you really like the blurred star effect of warp and want to be able to stare at it longer, after the first day of release I'll supply you with a looping screensaver of that effect that you can stare at as long as you'd like.

Well at least on the show, traveling at high warp for extended periods damages your ship. Furthermore, not all ships can reach warp 9.

Still, I suppose it's possible we won't be able to select a specific warp speed. It would be disappointing, but understandable.

[Silverspar]

Whoa!!! My first challenge!! Oh, I stand corrected. To engage Starfleet in honorable combat, the Klingon warrior must wait for the Federation captain to call for reinforcements increasing the odds 10 to 1....just to be fair. :cool:

:rolleyes: Verses the Klingon captain who won't engage unless he has twenty other ships watching hi back to begin with :p

[fireraven]

I just want to be able to go to plaid......:D