The space ship Enterprise Star Trek fabricated on a one-billionth scale

zyvexlabs.com

12 pointshabs5 comments

And when you carry it at a walking speed you achieve a scale velocity of warp 2!

Let’s see if we can calculate that:

The Enterprise D is about 650 m long, the scale model 8.8 µm. If you move the model 1 m you move it about 114,000 times its length. If the real thing were to move 114,000 times its length, it would move 74.1 million m. If your walking speed is 1 m/s, the speed of the real thing comes out to one quarter c. Not nearly enough. (Wikipedia says that warp 2 is about 10 c.)

Calculating how fast you would have to walk if you wanted to reach a scale velocity of warp 2 is left as a exercise to the reader.

(I’m not really that good at math so please feel free to correct me :)

Note that this uses the "new" warp tables, which are controversial to some folks.

I used the "one billionth" in the headline. Your size numbers come up to about 74 million instead of 1 billion. I think the headline writer was wrong. You will have to hop in a car and hit the open road to get to warp 2.

It looks like the Borg got to it first...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com