Speed of light vs warp 5

Bunkermaster

Situation
A spacecraft (named Alpha for our study) is traveling at speed warp 5 (more than speed of light).
It is chased by a spacecraft (named Beta for our study) cruising at warp 6 (obviously faster than warp 5) gaining on Alpha.

Question
What do the people in Alpha see when looking back to Beta (concidering that they are traveling faster than the speed of light)? doesn't the doppler effect make them sorta blind?

PS : You guessed right, I am watching enterprise's latest episode. Got me thinking

[EDIT]FYI : http://archive.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Cyberia/Bima/doppler.html[/EDIT]

epimeth

assuming that they travel in regular space, not hyperspace (I'm still not sure how it works in the star trek universe. It can't be regular space (throws theory of relativity out the window if it is [can't accelerate past the speed of light, yet they do], yet they come out of warp speed whenever they feel like it which couldn't happen if they were in hyperspace since they would have no way of knowing where they are and would most likely kill themselves) then if time and space are continuous (not discrete...), and if ship alpha is emmiting some form as energy, then ship beta will see the remenants of that energy, but at an accelerated speed, and it will get faster exponentially until they catch up to the ship. Once ship B overcomes ship A, ship A will disappear from ship B's sensors since the energy can't "catch up" to ship B.

Bunkermaster

would require this energy to travel faster than light speed though (and as they are capable of seeing the stars up front they ARE in normal space).

What ifs always got me thinking 😃

eclipce

Ok, my first post here, but I am a Treker.

In a nut shell warp drive cheats to get around the infinite amount of power that would be needed to get to the speed of light. What warp does is create a subspace buble around the ship that pulls the ship out of normal space and time, which allows for faster than light travel. This has the added effect of sidesteping the theory of relitivity.

Eclipce

epimeth

so how come they can step in and out whenever they want to? if they are in subspace, the outer shell of real space could be pretty far away...

Bunkermaster

much less fire weapons...

what is juisprudence? 😃

epimeth

the prudency of juris, duh...

eclipce

Straight from Dictionary.com

jurisprudence

The philosophy or science of law.
A division or department of law: medical jurisprudence.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=jurisprudence&r=2

BuzzLY

Ah, but that wasn't the question... the question was

what is juisprudence? 😃

As for the "sidestepping" issue... Star Trek has sidestepped many times. The best example is teleportation. Gene Roddenberry came up with that because their TV budget wouldn't cover the special effects required to create planetside landings with spacecraft. "Beaming" down the actors was a much cheaper solution.

Bunkermaster

\o/ Buzz got it!!! Nice to see you back Buzz 🙂

ok in clear english now, eclipce fix your sig dude 😃

hermand

The doppler effect just shifts the wavelength though. If I could be arsed I'd work it out with some formulae, but I can't be.

epimeth

funny thing is, teleportation is feasible... but requires a computer with terrabytes upon terrabytes of really really fast memory.

even at the rate we're going now, I doubt we'll see something like that anywhere near the near future ...

now why does Buzz get it??? he never answered the question!

I WANT A MARGARITA AS WELL!!!!!!

eclipce

My sig is a quote from one of Joseph Story's writings. It would not be proper for me to change it.

BuzzLY

Ok... for the slow people in the room...

I'll speak slowly...

eclipce, you misspelled "Jurisprudence" in your sig. You spelled it without the R: J-u-i-s-p-r-u-d-e-n-c-e

Hence the smartass question,

What is juisprudence?

Was that clear enough for all y'all??? :p

dar-k

Durn episode's still downloading. :mad:

Weedpacket

Originally posted by epimeth
funny thing is, teleportation is feasible... but requires a computer with terrabytes upon terrabytes of really really fast memory.

Of course, if you only want to teleport something really simple you don't need such capacity; at Australia National Univeristy a team is already realiably teleporting lasers, and hope to have their apparatus weaned onto solid food (like single atoms) within a few years. After that, I guess the next challenge would be a water molecule..

Now the real challenge is teleportation without a receiver - like on Star Trek ... all the existing methods rely on having one handy.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go out and recalibrate the main sensor array or I'll never get decent reception.

Bunkermaster

and I got to change some gelpacks on deck 4 section 12.

epimeth

I did a quick google search.. couldn't find any mention of how they did it. Do you have any information on the experiment itself?

eclipce

Oh well, one little "r". 😛

Bunkermaster

\o/ Eclipce!

I think that the details of the teleportation thing are quite secret at the moment for most universities in the world are in some kind of a race...