Warp Field Theory for Orbiter

[tgep]

OK.
I thought the warp drive for the QJBR was a bit pokey.
This has led me deeper into mathimatical terratory than I ever intended to go. But, since I have "boldly gone" , I thought I might as well share what I found and see how we can apply this to the Warp drive used by the WarpDrive MFD and to other similar types of stardrives in Orbiter.

The "Trek" way of doing things is to control the detonation of matter and anti-matter in a ratio of 1 to 1 inside an electro-magnetic field and then chanell the resulting energy through those magical Dylithium crystals which somehow magnify the output energy. The boosted power is sent to the Warp Engine nacells where the stable Warp field is created by passing the current through a series of coils.

But what is a Warp field ? Put simply, it's a local gravity distortation of the space/time continium. Space in front of the ship gets compressed and as the space behind the ship is stretched out. By manipulating the direction of the field ahead of you, you can change the direction of movement. It's like riding a sled down hill. To go faster, you just compress the space in front of you more. To slow down, you stretch it out or let it return to normal.

Now according to Trek cannon, warp factor 1 is equal to a speed of C. ( 186,000MilesPerSecond or 116,250KmPer second )
Since your speed effectively CUBES with each Warp factor rating, the following chart can be used.
W1 = C
W2 = C8
W3 = C27
W4 = C64
W5 = C125
W6 = C216
W7 = C343
W8 = C512
W9 = C729

I know. It seems fantasticly impossible. But consider this.
If you used a cold fusion reactor to power a series of highly efficient super colliders, you could produce the antimatter you need for the process. You would then need another reactor to power the "magnetic bottle" to contain and chanell the energy resulting from the detonation of matter and anti matter. The actual Warp coils in the nacells themselves are the simplest of all since they are just highly efficient,  super strong electro magnets.  The matter can be obtained by creating another EM field of lower power to scoop up freely availible Hydrogen atoms or by using a store of Hydrogen from the ship itself.

The REAL question is, how do we get these speeds in Orbiter ?
It seems to me that the only way of doing so is to write the code for the Warp Drive in such a way that it finds the cube of the Warp Factor number and multiplys it by the speed of light as expressed in Km per second.
Now if you go strictly by T.O.S. cannon, the fatest you can go is Warp 9.9 because at that time, they had not tied the Warp coils in with the truely "gee-whiz" impossible to do technology of the Transporters.

Transwarp Drive
Now I haven't bothered to check to deeply into this cannon wise because it really isn't that important as far as Orbiter coding is concened. All you really need to know is that the warp field generators are tied in to massive transporters to "beam" the ship foreward in a given direction to achieve a valocity higher than Warp 9.9
At this point in Trek cannon, the highest Warp factor is an emergancy speed of Warp 14 which can only be sustained for short periods of time before the engines are damaged.

To be Continued ...........

[Jon]

Trek style Warp drive is great if we had the ability to go from system to system but we don't.
I think we should setup the warp drive in a way that makes sense  for use within a system. We also have the FTL Jump capabilities which allow us to jump as far Orbiter allows. We can then use a combination of Warp and main thrust to make orbit. At the Trek warp speeds the moon is about 2 seconds away at warp one which I think just isn’t fun. I think we should calibrate it to give us a warp ten that is no more than light speed.

[tgep]

Trek style Warp drive is great if we had the ability to go from system to system but we don't.
I think we should setup the warp drive in a way that makes sense  for use within a system. We also have the FTL Jump capabilities which allow us to jump as far Orbiter allows. We can then use a combination of Warp and main thrust to make orbit. At the Trek warp speeds the mood is about 2 seconds away at warp one which I think just isn’t fun. I think we should calibrate it to give us a warp ten that is no more than light speed.

That is true if we go stictly by cannon. Since we're not hindered by that here, it's not really a problem. The chart was given mainly to give folks an idea of how the original game ( RPG ) system was set up. None but a madman would use warp engines for a trip to the moon anyhow ( can you say KER-SPLAT ?  ) but a trip to the outter planets, especialy if you have the Ort Cloud objects in your installed, can be made in a reasonably short period of time to allow the user to accurately use Orbital mechanics to get into a proper orbit on arivale.
For our purpose, I would recomend a much altered Warp factor setting where:
W1 = 1/2C
W2 = C
W3 = C.5
W4 = C2
Etc.

This would be fast enough to give us the best of both worlds, especialy if you've added other star systems to your Sol file by using the method of naming the second star as a planet and naming it's planets as moons as I have done before.

[Captain Rodolphus]

I use the warp mfd for 98% of my travels since the first one and its come a long way since then. And it's current "speed limit" of warp five is just fine for me. But I always fly through space with the keyboard so it's easier to control my speed. For those moon trips ya know . I also have a lot of different systems in my Orbiter and it's never really bothered me that I can't "warp" to one of them. Since you are to drop out of warp when you enter a system and then continue at lesser speeds into it anyway, loading up a new scn. kind of simulates that. Having the warp "built in" would be awesome, but I would love to see one animation and thats warp streaks . I hooked up one of the older warp for space shuttles meshes to dock or attach to the front of my QJFF to just entertain myself and give the look of "haulin' butt" but it's buggy and I can't shut down the animation. But with a scn. with one star and one planet at a distance of 80AU or so it looks like warp flight in deep space.   

[tgep]

Have you tried out the StarTrek Pheonix add on ? The warp drive effects for that one are frakking AWESOME ! You have to use the PheonixWarpdrive for it and it only works with the Pheonix add on though.

[Jon]

Have you tried out the StarTrek Pheonix add on ? The warp drive effects for that one are frakking AWESOME ! You have to use the PheonixWarpdrive for it and it only works with the Pheonix add on though.

I've seen them and they are nice and I would love to see the source for the effect. I'm not a programmer and everything I know about C++ is self taught for Orbiter. That is way I was always reluctant to try and teach anyone. I bearly know what I'm doing and have learned a lot just trying to do the training lessons.

[ChristopherT]

If anyone is interested in the internal layout and function of the TOS warp nacelles, I just updated my
Constitution Class Addendum addon on Orbithangar.  The file had gone missing but Vash was able to locate a copy on an old backup.  The file includes an internal layout based on Geoffery Mandel's Warp
Engine Chart and several documents that cover the history of Trek warp drives.

 I agree that in the framework of what Orbiter offers, Transwarp drive would be overkill.  I do think that the TOS scale for the early vessels and the new scale for the TMP era ships could still work inside the
solar system.

    Christopher


 

[tgep]

Many Thanks Chris !
It will be good to have the charts and drawings for a visual referance.
We really can have other star systems in Orbiter. I tried it before and it worked well enough on my PC but slower systems will definately have troubles. From what I've learned from trying out the BETA version of Orbiter 2008, it may no longer be a problem for slower systems. Granted, I only have Rag Tag ships loaded in it at the moment, but the responce times and frame rates are all in exceptible limits.

So long as you list the new star like this:

Planet19 = Sirius

And list its planets like this:

Sirius moon1 = Kibble
Sirius moon2 = Biscuit
Sirius moon3 = Snausage

It will work for Orbiter 2006. The trick is getting the data for the new star right as all its planet/moons base their positions around it.

[Captain Rodolphus]

A few months ago I was playing around with the Mad Hatter from Jon's Mirror-Mirror ships released by christopherT. I played with the textures a bit and then started making attachments for it. I attached the Phoenix to the middle of the ship for that reason-great warp streaks. As I recall the animations worked even when attached ie: on and off. I just had to select the ship and hit a button. But there are many parts to the Phoenix and it seems to be pretty complicated, so just when I thought I had it made...CTD :'( But to Jon I think you under estimate yourself a bit. Remember the Comet? Press K for shields, and you get a shield bubble that spins around the ship. Minus  this and that it's very close.

[Captain Rodolphus]

Well I've been playing around with the old warp for space shuttle add on and I got it to turn off and on . I removed the nacelles and its just box. When you press k the streaks start and stop. It needs to be a bigger radius though. It was made for a space shuttle after all. So if I dock it to any Trek ships it is too small. I am having trouble giving it att. points. I think I need to have it use spacecraft3 instead of the first spacecraft, but that is just a theory. Looks like it's time to start reading the tutorials on dll making a? I will try to post some pics.

[Captain Rodolphus]

As these frakkin' pics are just not bright enough to see the streaks, or the streaks aren't bright enough, I won't be posting any pics as of the moment. But I was thinking (dangerous I know) what if the weather mfd was modified? The way it does the rain effect coming toward the cockpit. If that could be changed to be like star streaks? Of course this mfd has it's limitations to this proposed change ie: It doesn't work if it does not have atmo and it is sized mainly for the deltaglider. Is the Master mfd maker Computerex out there? What do you think? By the way I am not trying to drift away from warp field theory, but as we all know we can warp in Orbiter I think adding to the event with a effect like warp streaks would bring it alive alot more. Nothing lamer than traveling faster than the speed of light and looking like your standing still.

[festivefire]

we could keep a largely up scaled warp and ftl system by simply expanding the orbiter realm with this add-on: http://www.orbithangar.com/searchauth.php?search=jedidia

the orbiter galaxy add-on simply generates a large amount of random planets stars and moons, thus giving us a reason for extremely fast travailing capabilities like trans-warp drives.

[tgep]

I was involved with that project early on in its initial stages ..... as exciting as the prospect is, it's still sadly lacking in certain aspects that make it unusable for what we wish to do in Orbiter.

[Jon]

Trek warp speeds are just to fast for our little system.
I'm interested in getting better speeds out of the built in drive but we would have to figure out how to time it. Right now you jump n meters every Orbiter time cycle. I would still like to use warp for going to the moon from earth and light speed is just to fast so Warp 1 can not be light speed. Even at light speed Saturn is only a few hours away. Now I'm not interested in sitting playing Orbiter for 3 hours just to get to Saturn so we have to figure a better warp scale. Maybe Pluto at warp 10 in 30 mins and we work our way backwards until we have earth to Moon at warp 1 in say 5 mins.

[Captain Rodolphus]

we could keep a largely up scaled warp and ftl system by simply expanding the orbiter realm with this add-on: http://www.orbithangar.com/searchauth.php?search=jedidia

the orbiter galaxy add-on simply generates a large amount of random planets stars and moons, thus giving us a reason for extremely fast travailing capabilities like trans-warp drives.

Trust me we know about that.  But that has nothing to do with the warp scale either way.  Both OG and Msss just shut down O and restart it with a different scenario.  So It wouldn't matter if you were in warp or not to make the "jump".  However I see what your saying and I am not a fan of (I think I'm the chief nay sayer on this)  Orbiter system appropriate warp which is as Jon describes it.  But I don't feel the need to justify going an extreme amount faster than I should be able to because I shouldn't be able to anyway lol.  But I'm on the same page because I do fly a lot of other systems and that's my main gig, I'm a system hopper with cargo to deliver.  I like the fact that I can zip out of the system to 190AU in 10 minutes and then start a new scn but that's my thing.  I want to leave the system quickly.   So 30 minutes to one of the outer planets is too slow for my taste.  I understand the reasoning.  And if I want to go to an outer planet I just slow down.  Of course some of the ships are faster than others.  The Stinger or the TriUFO, SGU, Firefly and the Blue are much faster than the TransU or some of the older ships.  So there is something for every taste.  And maybe the next few ships will have a slower warp I don't know but I still would have the ships that haul butt so I'm cool with that.  I just don't spend much time if any in Sol or any system to think about traveling to any planet at any speed really.  I mean that's relative to any system since they are all renamed restructured re textured versions of Sol.  I just like to go really really fast lol.