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| Date | Episode | Title |
|---|---|---|
| 08-28 | SNW 3x08 | "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans" |
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The thing I freeze framed on was the close-up of the helm console. Here we see the warp speed control and the impulse and weapons controls.
What’s interesting at the warp speed control is that it indicates the speed at Warp Factor 6.25, but that seems to be less than half speed. If the dots at the bottom of the throttle circle are correct, 6.25 is about two-fifths the top speed of the ship, which means theoretically they have a top speed of about Warp 15.6, which is just a bit higher than the Warp 14.1 we saw Kirk's Enterprise achieve in TOS: “That Which Survives”, although Scotty said there that the ship wasn’t structured to even take Warp 11 for any length of time. The Kelvans did modify Enterprise to take that speed in TOS: “By Any other Name”, though. That being said, the specifications of the TOS-era Enterprise usually indicate a cruising speed of Warp 6 and a maximum speed of Warp 8.
On the other side, the impulse throttle circle and the dots at the bottom seem to indicate that they are also at two-fifths impulse power (which may be different from speed), and there appears to be a speed limiter next to the circle, although the speed indicator on the inside goes about a third higher than that. That’s actually consistent with the idea that full impulse isn’t the top impulse setting but there’s a limit placed on it (traditionally 0.25c) so as to avoid time dilation issues.
But I could be wrong and for all you know those dots are just to swipe left or right to get other controls visible.
Another interesting bit is the weapons controls. SNW: “What is Starfleet?” stated that Enterprise had six phaser banks and two torpedo tubes. The buttons here indicate two forward phaser controls - one ready to fire and one ready to charge. There are also two photon torpedo buttons, one ready to fire and one ready to load. Does that mean a single button fires three phaser banks?
There’s also a bunch of indicators above the impulse control (where Ortegas dismisses the warning pop-up alert) which seem to be communications or sensor indicators because they talk about band limits and Rx levels (received signal strengths).
In Voyager and TNG it has been established that warp 10 is infinite velocity, that means the warp scale is not linear (the differencr between warp 9 and 8 must be higher than the difference between 8 and 7). After all, Voyager's max speed of 9.975 is faster than Enterprise D's 9.6.
Then again, warp speed has always been quite inconsistent, so who knows which scale they are using...
That's correct as far as the TNG-era scale is concerned. In the TOS/SNW era it was a simple speed = warp factor^3^ equation, meaning Warp 6.25 is about 244c.
While not stated explicitly on screen, it was clear in behind-the-scenes documentation, and it was also clear that Enterprise in TOS exceeded Warp 10 in a handful of episodes, which I cited in my original comment. How fast a particular Warp Factor is may have been inconsistent, but the scale itself definitely changed between the two eras.
Didn't know about that formula. Is it used behind the scene but never mentioned, or just used retroactively to explain the difference between the different series?
It was in the TOS Writer's Guide as far back as April 17, 1967, where it was stated (page 8):
It was subsequently mentioned in the behind-the-scenes book The Making of Star Trek in 1968 and Franz Joseph's Star Fleet Technical Manual. The TOS scale was finally made canonical when it appeared in on a viewscreen in ENT: "First Flight".
The TNG scale was established in the series' Writer's Guide in 1987 establishing Warp 10 as the absolute limit (and infinite speed), so the scale had to be adjusted accordingly.