Assuming we’re talking about the original Enterprise…
Regular cruising speed: Warp 5
Maximum cruising speed: Warp 6
Maximum possible speed: Warp 9… for 4 hours.
Find your regular cruising speed and save your maximum speed for emergencies.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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The original spaceship Enterprise was a test orbiter without engines.
Are you calling yourself the OV-101?
In that case, glide at your own pace. :)
And after those 4 hours at warp 9, the ship would be halted for days for repairs.
If you're holding a speed for four hours, I'd call it cruising.
That generally my cruise time until I need to pull in for a leg stretch, more fuel and snacks, and a pee.
That’s because after four hours the engine is running so hot things start to break or malfunction, inviting a warp core breach that is guaranteed to ruin everyone’s day. Even without any unexpected failures, you’re going to be put into space dock for a refit several years before it was necessary.
Honestly, that just strengthens the allegory. Don’t run yourself hot, even if you can “handle it.” It still puts too much stress on your system. Even if you don’t give yourself a stroke, it will literally lead to an early death.
Damn, I'm the only person on the internet that never watched any Star Trek.
I literally started watching after a thread about warp speeds on reddit. Someone mentioned the TNG episode where the Enterprise hit Warp 10, watched it, liked it, watched all of TNG, decided I'm not gonna watch every show because there's just too many.
No I'm here with you. Literally dozens of us.
One of the main things that made me start was the prevalence of it on lemmy. Fast forward and I'm half-way through Voyager. You should totally give it a try, every series so far has been amazing in its own way!
Every series has at least one of the qualities that makes TNG the best series.
I watched Star Trek because of Lemmy as well.
I can't afford any streaming services, so that makes us at least two
Nah, if Big Media is so insistent on enforcement, I'd rather go without. Eyeballs are still a form of platforming anyways.
There's that one (TNG?) episode where they figured out high warp damages spacetime itself, right? So the Federation capped cruising to a safe speed.
Yeah, but the writers felt hogtied by that decision later on. So they just said that warp engine design changed so that it was no longer harmful.
It was a problem until it wasn’t.
Because it was a metaphor for the US speed limit being 55 for fuel efficiency standards after the 70s oil crisis, and they sort of extended that to be about climate change.
Then when it turned out to be too limiting (har har), they invented "cleaner burning' warp engines. Which would be an obvious next logical step anyway if old warp drives were literally ruining the universe.
In The Culture, one ship remarked that the other guy arrived "with the subspace equivalent of black smoke and loud bangs." That was a nice way to tell some engine designs were a tad outdated.
That's the difference between Star Trek and solar punk: star trek has a technical solution when something is inconvenient
Which episode? I need to watch it again. 🥰
TNG, season 7, episode 9 “Force of Nature”
I knew the internet would come through for me.
Thanks kind denizen of the web. Have a fish. 🐟
9.6 for no more than 12 hours or 9.2 max safe speed.
Jesus. Get your facts straight.
I like the idea that if I were to explode from exhaustion spontaneously, I'd kill everyone in the room with me.
Same!
I also like the idea that if we were to explode from exhaustion spontaneously, we wouldn't try to go above and beyond our own borders in order to meet unrealistic expectations.
Also: when you perform on a constant low, it's also your best since you never go any higher.
Like and subscribe for more inspirational insights
Well, it turns out that my norm is apparently not good enough for my family, so they expect me to, first, turn my best into my norm, then go somehow beyond my best. The result? Chronic burnout yesiree
Never mention numbers in regards to sci-fi, fantasy or comics. It will always lead to nerds deraling the conversation and debating the accuracy.
Case in point: The "Enterprise" is the name of multiple ships that have max warp capabilities ranging from ~7 or less to way above 9.9. (The warp scale is different depending on the setting, but in general it's logarithimic with 1 basically being light speed and 10 being instant travel to the point of seeming like teleportation. So once you go past 9.9 it starts getting exponetially faster, at alarming rates.)
But that's not logarithmic, that sounds like some kind of inverse scale with the asymptote at 10, meaning 10 can never be reached because that would mean actual infinite speed.
With a logarithmic scale, the speed is literally increasing exponentially, at every point, like getting 10 times faster for every point on the scale.
So yeah, I think you made the very mistake you tried warning people about ;D
Cunningham's law strikes again!
But seriously, thank you for the correction. Because the idea is exactly that, meaning it can't realistically ever reach 10. So the difference between 9.95 and 9.98 is a lot more than most people would think.
Never forget how Scotty checked "warp 1 to 15". That was before woke. See what they took away from us
What's the warp speed that turns you into lizards?
That would have been warp 10.
The Enterprise had fuel needs, plus the Federation imposed a speed limit of Warp 5 because high warp use was found to be damaging the fabric of spacetime. Ships had to ask permission, or just forgiveness later, to go over the speed limit.
The metaphor is literally a speed limit of 55 to increase fuel efficiency to lower pollution and therefore climate change. Because this was all stiff written by humans for dramatic effect.
Don't forget commentary that the only way to get people to listen is to do something dramatic. Dude had to blow himself up before anyone would take it seriously.
The neat part is that even my best is barely good enough.
That's a thing I needed to hear today, thanks!