TNG Warp Drive (RELEASE)

[ChristTrekker]

I would think that attaining a speed greater than infinity would be a bit difficult, even for future (relative to the majority of the show) TNG captains.

They just recalibrated the warp scale. Again. Maybe they are using a new "warp" technology by then.

[ChristTrekker]

Geek that I am, I've often felt that the biggest thing Celestia was lacking was a WF mode for the velocity display.

Does this support old/TOS/cube warp factors too?

[t00fri]

Geek that I am, I've often felt that the biggest thing Celestia was lacking was a WF mode for the velocity display.

Does this support old/TOS/cube warp factors too?

How about convincing me that there is some real physics behind that stuff. You know that Celestia is NOT a relative of StarTrek and friends.

Bye Fridger

[Hungry4info]

How about convincing me that there is some real physics behind that stuff.

Star Trek's "warp drive" is kind-of modeled by the Alcubierre Drive, which you may have heard of. But then again, the alcubierre drive is only theoretical, and there are many problems to be worked out.

Does this support old/TOS/cube warp factors too?

tr00fri, please notice that this referrs to an add-on representing a ficticious setting. It's not really supposed to follow set physical theory. Lol

[Chuft-Captain]

How about convincing me that there is some real physics behind that stuff.

Travel / Navigation in Celestia has never been based on real physics... case in point: the G key

You know that Celestia is NOT a relative of StarTrek and friends.

It is now!

[t00fri]

...
How about convincing me that there is some real physics behind that stuff. You know that Celestia is NOT a relative of StarTrek and friends.

Bye Fridger

Travel / Navigation in Celestia has never been based on real physics... case in point: the G key

I must disagree here. Real physics does not always imply "Reality". Real physics however requires logical and algorithmical consistency!

That's what the G key has!

The observer in Celestia is a concept that is absolutely standard in theoretical physics: in more standard wording, the observer acts as a 'test particle' that --as usual-- is not considered to be part of the dynamical system itself. I.e. the 'test particle' is not really subject to the same laws as the dynamical system. It just probes what is going on. Not more not less.

How the 'test particle' is to be realized, depends on the dynamics under consideration. So for example, we can imagine our observer /massless/ in order to decouple her from the gravitational action that she is watching for us . In the same sense the Celestia observer is able to travel at a speed exceeding the speed of light. She is NOT an active part of this Universe or subject to it's physical laws. Etc...

According to the laws of Quantum Mechanics, we know of course that such a total decoupling of an observing device from the system of interest is strictly impossible. But in an approximate sense, this is very well a consistent approach.

Perhaps one simple example of the idea underlying all this:

Suppose we want to measure the temperature of the water in a /big/ container with a thermometer (our 'test particle'=observer) . Surely there will always be heat exchange between the thermometer and the system, once the device is entered into the water. But in this case it is /physically/ very well motivated to treat the thermometer as totally decoupled from the big pot of water...

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

tr00fri, please notice that this referrs to an add-on representing a ficticious setting. It's not really supposed to follow set physical theory.
Lol

That's of course fine and does not concern me then. But I rather reacted to the other statement that seemed to refer to Celestia rather than to an add-on for Celestia:

I've often felt that the biggest thing Celestia was lacking was a WF mode for the velocity display.

Bye Fridger

[t00fri]

...

You know that Celestia is NOT a relative of StarTrek and friends.

It is now!

Whatever your remark is supposed to mean...?

Perhaps more clearly speaking: the official distribution of Celestia will not incorporate any StarTrek or similar phantasy into it's core part.

What happens on the level of add-ons is entirely unconstrained.

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

The way I interpret Celestia's observer is the same as "virtual displacements" in classical mechanics. I already described this on the forum, a long time ago :

The Celestia universe is FULLY relativistic and ALL test particles (even the massless particles) can't travel faster than light. The observer himself is NEVER moving faster than light ! There is gravitation everywhere in Celestia, and planets motion is proving it. What the observer is actually doing is a VIRTUAL displacement along a *PRESELECTED PATH*. This explains why he never feel gravity and why he can *APPARENTLY* move faster than light. His camera is just actually making a movie of snapshots from different locations, one image at a time, while the camera was held *STATIC* relative to the *GLOBAL* reference frame of universal time (the frame in which the universe is looking homogeneous and isotropic).

What Celestia is really showing is the movie made by the observer, and NOT the actual motion of the observer.

This concept is very simple and solves ALL the apparent conceptual contradictions with relativity theory and the apparent absence of gravity in Celestia. It also explains why we don't see any Doppler effect in Celestia. What we see in Celestia is just a virtual displacement.

IMO, this interpretation is closer to the spirit of Celestia (since it's a virtual universe).

[t00fri]

The way I interpret Celestia's observer is the same as "virtual displacements" in classical mechanics. I already described this on the forum, a long time ago :

The Celestia universe is FULLY relativistic and ALL test particles (even the massless particles) can't travel faster than light. The observer himself is NEVER moving faster than light ! There is gravitation everywhere in Celestia, and planets motion is proving it. What the observer is actually doing is a VIRTUAL displacement along a *PRESELECTED PATH*. This explains why he never feel gravity and why he can *APPARENTLY* move faster than light. His camera is just actually making a movie of snapshots from different locations, one image at a time, while the camera was held *STATIC* relative to the *GLOBAL* reference frame of universal time (the frame in which the universe is looking homogeneous and isotropic).

What Celestia is really showing is the movie made by the observer, and NOT the actual motion of the observer.

This concept is very simple and solves ALL the apparent conceptual contradictions with relativity theory and the apparent absence of gravity in Celestia. It also explains why we don't see any Doppler effect in Celestia. What we see in Celestia is just a virtual displacement.

IMO, this interpretation is closer to the spirit of Celestia (since it's a virtual universe).

Cham,

I don't think there is any more content in what you are describing. Virtual displacements are usually infinitesimal and second, they are not macroscopic...In the latter case they would give rise to massive violations of energy-momentum conservation that is of course only tolerable at the level of small quantum fluctuations.

So I think it is conceptually much easier and for many also easier to visualize if we remain with the decoupled "test particle" interpetation. This interpretation I already have discussed here even before you were a member of this community

In any case it is important to realize -- and here we agree-- that the observer concept in Celestia has some more justification than just lack of "Realism".

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

I don't think there is any more content in what you are describing. Virtual displacements are usually infinitesimal and second, they are not macroscopic...In the latter case they would give rise to massive violations of energy-momentum conservation that is of course only tolerable at the level of small quantum fluctuations.

Fridger, the other way around violates things too ! An uncoupled observer which is still able to observe (and acquire information-energy) would violates lots of things too ! And a virtual displacement doesn't violates anything, by the way, since it's not occuring in real time. Virtual displacements (which DON'T have to be infinitesimal or microscopic, by the way) may be applied in classical mechanics and thermodynamics without any flow of time. A virtual displacement can be interpreted as a comparison between two static configurations. So I don't agree with you on this. This isn't the point, anyway. I just want to make my point clearly :

The real observer is standing on Earth (obviously !). He's unable to move in space (obviously), since the user is in front of his computer. However, he's using an infinite set of -fictional- probes standing AT REST everywhere in space, relative to the Earth's observer. Those probes are defining a complete reference frame (as in special relativity), and each of them has a ruler, a clock and a camera. They are all static (not moving). The observer (on Earth) just ask the probes to send a picture of what they see and he then build a movie along a particular path between the probes. What Celestia is showing is this movie, which is just a "virtual" displacement of the observer.

This is EXACTLY what Celestia is doing, since it's just integrating data about the whole universe.

So the observer don't feel gravity, there's no violation of the speed of light barrier, and no Doppler effect.

[t00fri]

Cham,

really that concept of yours seems besides the point.

As far as I now can trace from what you state, you are taking recourse to what's called

either the "action principle"

delta S =0 <=> eqs motion

or D'Alembert's principle in classical mechanics:

sum(F - dp/dt) ' delta r =0

with generalized forces F and momenta p. The latter being a formal method of dealing with constraint forces in a variational sense.

But in modern (field theoretic terms) these "virtual displacements" would be just interpreted as /functional derivatives/ and the above principles be called generalized stationarity conditions!

+++++++++++++++++++
In ALL certainty, these concepts are not meant to describe literally "virtual paths" as you want to suggest.
+++++++++++++++++++

Or is there another idea in your mind???

Oh yes, perhaps Bernoulli's principle of virtual displacement??

But come on, this is definitely infinitesimal!


Bye Fridger

[Cham]

No, I wasn't talking about virtual paths of Feynman approach. I was talking about the classical way of doing virtual displacements (Bernoulli). The infinitesimal displacements are just a convenience. They don't really need to be infinitesimal.

The virtual displacements used in the action principle (be it in CLASSICAL mechanics or classical fields theory) can be interpreted as a comparison between two distinct configurations "frozen" in time and don't need to be made in real time. There's a very similar thing in thermodynamics, when we defines the "time evolution" of a system at thermodynamic equilibrium (which can't evolve, by definition, since it's in equilibrium). We can define the slow adiabatic time evolution of a thermodynamic system as a virtual change of configuration in the "statistical ensemble space". But all this stuff is beside the point for my interpretation of the "observer" in Celestia. There's an analogy with the virtual displacements in mechanics (or thermodynamic), but we don't need to elaborate on this. It's just not worth it.

The advantage of my point of view is it explains in a very natural way why the observer never feels gravity in Celestia, and why there are no relativistic effects (Doppler effect, time dilatation, etc) and why he can apparently move faster than light. The observer actually NEVER move at all (he just sit in front of his computer). The observer is just shifting his point of view (in a virtual time) by using his infinite set of standing probes scattered everywhere in space. The observer is always staying in the same reference frame all the time. So no Doppler effect. No time dilatation.

I like this interpretation because of the connection with virtual displacements in mechanics (and thermodynamics), and because it solves all the apparent lacks of special relativistic effects, which your interpretation can't explain : even for a uncoupled, massless particle, there should be Doppler effects and time dilatation since these are about geometrical effects of space-time. And any particle (even if it's "massless") would travel backward in time if it moves faster than light. It would even feel gravity, since it has to move on the geodesics of space time (how can it be uncoupled to geometry ?).

Or else, the simplest way to interpret Celestia is it's just a newtonian universe which is unaware of special relativity.

[t00fri]

Cham,

but this argumentation of yours is fake.

What you seem to be after is to exploit that those generalized "equilibrium principles" reduce dynamical configurations to a comparison of static configurations. But to make sense, these neigboring static configurations MUST be infinitesimally close, which already the physical common sense dictates!

But I underwent the effort and looked it up once more and it is DEFINITELY as I say.

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

Cham,

but this argumentation of yours is fake.

What you seem to be after is to exploit that those generalized "equilibrium principles" reduce dynamical configurations to a comparison of static configurations. But to make sense, these neigboring static configurations MUST be infinitesimally close, which already the physical common sense dictates!

But I underwent the effort and looked it up once more and it is DEFINITELY as I say.

Well, I don't agree on this detail. You can build a finite sequence from an infinite set of infinitesimal displacements. But this is not important for the discussion here. Please, just forget the comparison with mechanics. Lets stay on the main subject : the observer in Celestia.

How can you justify that a "massless test-particle" could be decoupled from geometry itself, and move in some "parallel" newtonian geometry, while still able to obtain information from the other decoupled geometry ? This doesn't make sense to me. I think that my interpretation (static observer doing a virtual movie of static sequences) is more natural for Celestia.

[t00fri]

...
How can you justify that a "massless test-particle" could be decoupled from geometry itself, and move in some "parallel" newtonian geometry, while still able to obtain information from the other decoupled geometry ? This doesn't make sense to me. I think that my interpretation (static observer doing a virtual movie of static sequences) is more natural for Celestia.

We must clearly separate the idea of decoupled observing devices from the often HARD problem of explicitly realizing such non-interacting observers in concrete, highly complex systems.

Since Celestia is essentially a big stack of computer code, I propose we just adopt qualitatively the 'test particle' concept without really worrying about a dynamical model for such a decoupled observer. All I suppose we can hope for, is to export the observer concept as a familiar and intuitive analogy from other regimes in physics, without being able to dive too deeply into "constructional details" .

Bye Fridger

[Cham]

To me, there are only two simple and "natural" interpretations for Celestia's observer:

1- Celestia space is newtonian only. All relativistic effects are alien to it, and the observer is decoupled from gravity in some "mysterious" way. In this newtonian space, there is no limit on velocity, so the observer can move without any constraints.

2- Celestia space is fully special relativistic. The observer is static (wathever his location), and is using movies of static frames to produce his virtual motion.

[bh]

Hmmm... I think you're both correct.

[starfleetengineer]

This thread was only ever intended to release my **fictional** addon designed to allow Celestia to **simulate** a **fictional** feature of a TV show known for it's rather casual treatment of real physics. ( You'll note that I posted this in the addons forum, not the P&A forum )

If it serves any real purpose at all, this addon debunks features of the show anyway (such as stars streaming past the ship).
I'm sure Fridger that you would approve of this use of Celestia (to debunk Star Trek that is).

Perhaps all this discussion about real physics, "virtual displacements" , classical mechanics, relativistic and test particles, relativity theory, energy-momentum conservation, thermodynamics, blah blah blah... would be more appropriately located in either the Celestia Users, P&A or Purgatory forum. (Selden... split thread time?)

[Captain Picard]

although the speed in this script is 100% acurate, It still just doesent feel like the bridge of the enterprise, is there anyway the script could be modded to include the passing warp lines we see in TNG? if so how?