Technology in Star Trek
Episodes often contain technologies named after or inspired by real-world scientific concepts, such as tachyon beams, baryon sweeps, quantum slipstream drives, and photon torpedoes.
For instance, the transporter was created because the limited budget of Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) in the 1960s did not allow expensive shots of spaceships landing on planets.
[1][page needed] Discovery Channel Magazine stated that cloaking devices, faster-than-light travel, and dematerialized transport were only dreams at the time TOS was made, but physicist Michio Kaku believes all these things are possible.
[2] William Shatner, who portrayed James T. Kirk in TOS, believes this as well, and went on to co-write the book I'm Working on That,[3] in which he investigates how Star Trek technology is becoming feasible.
In the Star Trek fictional universe, subspace is a feature of space-time that facilitates faster-than-light transit, in the form of interstellar travel or the transmission of information.
In most Star Trek series, subspace communications are a means to establish nearly instantaneous contact with people who are light years away.
In the Star Trek universe subspace signals do not degrade with the square of the distance as do other methods of communication utilizing conventional bands of the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e. radio waves), so signals sent from a great distance can be expected to reach their destination at a predictable time and with little relative degradation (barring any random subspace interference or spatial anomalies).
[citation needed] Warp drive is one of the fundamental features of the Star Trek franchise; in the first pilot episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, "The Cage", it is referred to as a "hyperdrive", with Captain Pike stating the speed to reach planet Talos IV as "time warp, factor 7".
Later in the pilot, when Spock is faced with the only action of escaping, he announces to the crew they have no choice but to leave, stating "Our time warp factor ..." before the ship's systems start failing.
It was originally conceived of by a strong energy source, usually called a warp core or sometimes intermix chamber, generates a high-energy plasma.
This necessitates the existence of fictional deflector shields that protect the spacecraft from damage from collisions with interstellar dust particles and asteroids.
The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "By Inferno's Light" indicates that flying at warp speed inside a planetary system is not recommended.
However, the velocity (in present dimensional units) of any given warp factor is rarely the subject of explicit expression, and travel times for specific interstellar distances are not consistent through the various series.
[20] Later on, a prequel series titled Star Trek: Enterprise describes the warp engine technology as a "Gravimetric Field Displacement Manifold" (Commander Tucker's tour, "Cold Front") and describes the device as being powered by a matter/anti-matter reaction which powers the two separate nacelles (one on each side of the ship) to create a displacement field.
Upon further modification, the Enterprise-D was thrown over a billion light years into an uncharted place in the universe in a matter of seconds with a warp factor that is, according to Data, no greater than 1.5.
In the book Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual the authors describe the idea of transwarp: Finally, we had to provide some loophole for various powerful aliens like Q, who have a knack for tossing the ship million of light years in the time of a commercial break.
