In ENT episode āDivergenceā parts go flying off the ship during warp 5. What would happen to something at that speed without the protection of the field? Would it stay in high speed motion until interacted upon by something else (meteoroids/dust/gravitational fields)? Or would it disintegrate under this kind of speed?
Would it stay in high speed motion until interacted upon by something else (meteoroids/dust/gravitational fields)?
No, weāve seen that warp field/engine failures will cause the ship to drop to sublight, if they donāt slow to stop, rather than maintaining their current speed.
Or would it disintegrate under this kind of speed?
If it crosses the boundary of the warp field, it might be disintegrated by the resulting stresses, since warp field boundaries can be pretty rough.
I certainly donāt think theyād continue to move at a high speed. Inertia wouldnāt really apply, because the objects were never really āmovingā at all. Space was moving around them, but they were stationary relative to the space inside the bubble.
So Iād say that if they survived crossing the threshold from the space inside the bubble to the space outside the bubble, theyād basically instantly become stationary.
The question is can you survive exiting the bubble like that, or would the bubbleās edge tear you apart. But I think we might actually have an answer to this, from Discoveryās last season. Didnāt Burnham survive exiting that enemy shipās bubble in that first episode, before Discovery beamed her back aboard?
Disintegrate or just stop and drop out of warp just like the ship does when they disengage warp normally. The ship doesnāt travel faster than the speed of light. It just warps space around the ship. Thatās why they donāt have relativistic speeds like the warping of time like time dilation on the ship doesnāt happen.
I just revisited the scene from āRed Directiveā in which Burnham is riding on the top of Moll and Lāakās ship - at the end of the sequence, she leaps from the shipās hull as the warp field collapses. When she and the ship enter ānormalā space, they both seem fairly stationary. Burnham is tumbling a bit in her EV suit, but she doesnāt seem to have a lot of velocity.
I think weāve seen enough to safely say it would fall out of FTL in fairly short order.
I donāt think weāve seen enough to say exactly what its sublight velocity would be - no examples are coming to mind.
Edit: as is often the case when the warp drive comes up, its worth pointing out that ships at warp pretty definitely have momentum/inertia.
Itās arguable that it would stop completely, if it survived falling out of the warp field.
The times weāve seen ships fall out of warp for one reason or another, they typically slow to a stop, rather than keeping all the inertia like we would expect them to, or stopping instantly like they would if the warp field was doing all the work.
I would think that any object (including the ship) is traveling at a sub-light speed within the warp bubble and therefore would only keep that same velocity when (catastrophically) exiting the warp bubble. Unless by exiting the warp bubble in an uncontrolled manner creates some other force which slows the object somehow.
My understanding is that the warp bubble is moving space around the object (including the ship) rather than accelerating the object to FTL (faster-than-light) speeds, thus we really only have to consider the relative velocities within the warp bubble.
Edit to add: Oh, also, I should add that (IMO) the object cannot continue to travel at FTL speed since it has no warp drive of its own to maintain the warp field.
In the ārealā world, Alcubierre drives have really interesting (read ādevastatingā) affects on random matter interacting with the warp bubble. The bubble compresses matter in the front and creates micro singularities (which donāt necessarily go away when you drop the bubble).
In ST, Iām sure the debris does whatever the writers decide it does. I have no trouble imagining a DS9 episode in which the station gets pelted by warp velocity debris.
The question is āstupidā as warp as described by Star Trek is somewhat unphysical.
Warp drives work by bending space and hence shortening the distance (in āmetersā) between you and your destination. Hence you can fly at a leisurely pace to get there. It is very much unclear how the space around objects changes. If they do not evade they would change āshapeā as they approach your warp bubble. When they are inside I would expect you to collide at your leisurely pace, not effective warp speed.
Similar to warp fields in fiction gravitational waves do this space bending in real life. But their amplitudes are extremely small (10^-21).
Because of the extremely common parlance ādrop out of warpā I want to say it implies that the ship keeps moving afterward.
When I run and carry my coffee it is āat warpā but when I stumble and drop it then it is no longer āat warpā but yet it still falls away from the point I dropped it.
But when you drop an abstract there is no implication of movement; when I drop a bad habit it just ceases to exist.
But since the ship still exists after dropping from warp, this is unlikely to be the intended meaning.
Ergo ships drop from warp and that dropping imparts momentum/inertia to ships.