The existence of the Neutral zone, TNG's Romulan Blockade, the Significance of the Bajoran Wormhole and the nature of the Federation and Starfleet itself are all built on the idea that you need to travel directly from A-B with no shortcuts (hence why the wormhole is such a big deal). The whole setting is shaped by the nature of warp drive. There’s a myriad of examples of the Enterprise(A/D), Voyager or Defiant simply stumbling across something interesting in space which doesn’t happen anywhere near as much in other settings. When we talk of ships Charting space it’s not all that much of a metaphor with all the potential mysteries and monsters in-between the stars, planets, asteroids and nebula which make up the milky way. In contrast with a Warp drive we have to Voyage across the galaxy. as a result of this almost all action or settings are anchored around known positions or locations, there's less chance of stumbling across the unknown on your way to your destination. what matters is where you start and where you finish, not the journey in-between. This creates a situation where the space between systems and stars is broadly meaningless. In almost all other sci-fi settings we “Jump” directly to our destination or step into another reality to permit FTL travel. In fact it’s taken away what I would argue as Trek’s one significant “sci-fi tech” difference compared to almost all other popular modern science fiction properties: the Warp Drive.Ĭompared to Star Wars, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Halo, Mass Effect and Babylon 5 the Warp Drive is unique as a means of FTL movement within today’s Science Fiction thanks to one major difference: You need to travel in real space to your destination. So as I’m working my way through Discovery WELL after the fact (got rather turned off early on and went off to watch the expanse instead) a little thought jumped into my head regarding the Spore Drive and the Warp drive.ĭespite it’s inherent mechanism being that of following the “hypershroom” pathways throughout the universe to preform superluminal travel (which is novel in its conception I’ll admit) I can’t help but feel that the entire concept of the drive is not all that unique.
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