WARP PROPULSION FOR DUMMIES
For the "Star Trek" universe to work—or most any other sci-fi universe involving multiple races and planets, for that matter—some form of faster-than-light (FTL) travel has to be concocted. A lot of sci-fi and science buffs have often criticized Star Trek’s concept that the speed of light is a mere barrier to be broken, but since the days of TOS a handful of braniacs, including "official" Trek science consultants like Rick Sternbach, Naren Shankar and Andre Bormanis have further defined the concept of warp drive to give it scientific validity. Here’s my interpretation of how warp works:
Well, as everyone knows, nothing (that is, nothing with any mass at rest) is supposed to travel faster than the speed that light travels on in a vacuum; theoretically, it would take infinite energy to do so, and there’s a really tricky side effect: even at a fraction of the speed of light, the Theory of Relativity kicks in and time travels slower for those in the ship than those outside so that once you make a round trip to the next star and back, everyone you know will have passed on and their grandkids will be the ones to greet you.
Let’s draw an analogy between the speed of light and the real world; let’s pretend that some crazed lunatic becomes dicator of the world and declares that NO WHEELED VEHICLE CAN RUN DIRECTLY ON A SURFACE FASTER THAN 55 MILES PER HOUR.
So a car on a stretch of road can’t drive any more than 55 (sorry, Sammy).
But some smartass (probably a Trekker) sees a loophole through the strictly-worded law, and constructs an extremely long traveling platform (ELTP (tm)), a "road on wheels." Now, if the ELTP travels on the road at, say, 50 mph, and the Trekker drives his car on top of the ELTP at 50 mph, he wouldn’t be breaking the law, but he’d be traveling at a breezy 100 mph. If you stack up one ELTP on top of another, one can go even faster; layer a bunch of ELTPs, and you can travel ridiculously fast. Of course, the analogy falls apart since you only have so much platform on each ELTP and you’d run out before you know it, but if you never run out of room, you get an idea of what warp accomplishes.
So, here comes Zefram Cochrane and an exotic material called verterium cortenide which, if given the right amount of juice, warps space enough to form alternately nested bubbles of real space within subspace...our "ELTP’s" of four-dimensional space, our "warp fields." The nacelles, which house large coils of verterium cortenide, warp space unevenly, causing the bubbles to move forward within each other in a process akin to the waves you make when you paddle on water. Having multiple nacelles also facilitates changing the vessel’s heading at warp, by having one nacelle work differently from the other like oars on a rowboat. The starship doesn’t violate the laws of physics, since nothing is traveling in real space at anywhere near relativistic speeds. The ship goes faster not just by modifying the bubbles’ shapes to make the bubbles travel within each other faster, but by folding space and subspace further and adding more layers of space and subspace.
The actual process is a bit more involved than this (you can refer to the TNG Technical Manual), but I've tried to put together a simplified analogy.
RELATED TOPICS:
Warp 10,
Transwarp, and "Threshold"
Zefram
Cochrane of Alpha Centauri
Disappearing
Warp Speed Limits
Voyager's
Swinging Nacelles