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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Daystrom Institute
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That the warp drive functions through the expansion and contraction of space.
There were many possible fan explanations for how TOS' warp drive would work, with Miguel Alcubierre developing the Alcubierre drive as his own attempt at making warp drive real, but the in-show explanations never really delved beyond a "the warp engines make the ship go fast to a certain point, but too much, and they fly off the ship".
TNG's explanation only amounted to saying they worked by pushing on subspace, which pushed back and propelled the ship, like a detergent-powered paper boat being dragged along, and can be responsible for subspace funkiness depending on how you use it.
DS9 seemed to imply that they altered the mass of the ship in some way, in conjunction with the deflector systems. TNG only implied that the warp field could alter the laws of physics within its area of effect.
But at some point the "contraction and expansion of space" explanation for how a warp field works seems to have stuck, sometime after Enterprise(?). Ask any random Star Trek person about how warp drive works, and they'll give a similar explanation. The writers almost certainly operate under similar beliefs.
I don't think so. Nothing in the new series explicitly contradicts the idea that warp drive functions by lowering the inertial mass of the ship. You may ask fans and they may answer, but that doesn't make them right. And until they come right out and say that it's the Alcubierre Drive, I don't buy it because we still see inertial effects being felt, which we wouldn't if it was an Alcubierre metric driving the ship.
I wrote a post in old Daystrom aying out the evidence why the two drives are different. I'll repost it here to see what comes out of it.
Having Dr Erin MacDonald a Voyager fan and astrophysicist as the franchise’s science consultant is locking in the Alcubierre-like warp theory as a backdrop across the franchise at this point.
I find it interesting, going back to the warp-like FTL of MGM’s Forbidden Planet, that each of the crew had to stand in a columnar a suspension device to survive the transit. Given how much Roddenberry pulled from Forbidden Planet for TOS, it’s interesting that he decided that we had to be able to see the crew functional during FTL travel. George Lucas, who also drew heavily on Forbidden Planet for Star Wars, went the opposite direction and just had the hyperdrive act as a kind of jump.