I noticed something weird when I watched the movie again last weekend:
when Zefram Cochrane's ship does its short warp ride,
you see the surrounding stars blur into bright lines
(supposedly because of the enormous FTL* speed of the ship).

But then the ship stops, turns around,
and they can still see Earth through their cockpit window.
And it looks a lot closer than e.g. Venus looks from Earth

That shouldn't be possible, right?
(at least not without extreme magnification...)

If you move for 30 seconds so fast that the background stars start to blur*,
you should have moved way out of sight of planet Earth...

*let's suppose for a moment faster-than-light warp travel is possible, I was just wondering about the distances...

Yes, that's a big goof. There was no way they'd see the Earth like that unless they turned around and came back at warp speed.

[waves hands]The blurred-stars effect is not from their speed, but is a side effect of the warp drive itself. Even if you went at warp 0.0001 or less, you'd still see blurred stars.[/waves hands]

It's just a doubletalk drive powered by handwavium physics. Nothing in the ST universe stands up long to scientific examination.

Fred

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I don't think it's a goof. The Phoenix was only supposed to be capable of warp-factor one: the speed of light. The star-blur doesn't mean you're wooshing past those stars (which would be really bad astronomy!), but is an optical effect caused by the warp drive. Think how gravity warps light, e.g. Einstein rings.

That's what I figure, anyway. Don't know if that's Star Trek canon or not.

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I agree.

They seemed to be at warp only long enough to say that they were at warp.
It never said how far away they went.

The famous Pale Blue Dot photo is Earth at the distance of Saturn.
So, if light takes 8 minutes to reach Earth from the surface of the sun, and they were at warp only a minute or so, they wouldn't be very far from Earth at all, much less outside of any other planets orbit in the solar system.

Ok, Not Far At All considering they are moving in a warp capable vessel...

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Even at that speed, they would have gotten much farther away than they were shown. Light's speed is more than 24 Earth-diameters per second.

Of course, it's not as bad as claiming that a collective consciousness can have a queen...

i am so confused when I watched it

I'll take the few scientific gaffs as opposed to the utterly-bad storytelling in "Insurrection" and "Nemesis"
(I actually saw people CRYING coming out of Nemesis because it was so bad.....)

Time to crank the geek drive to maximum: I'm pretty sure that even in the old TNG technical manual (pre-first contact) it explains the star trails as being a side effect of the warp bubble effect, rather than an actual representation of stars passing by the spaceship. The writers knew that if the enterprise were really wooshing by that many stars that fast they could be outside the galaxy in a matter of hours (or minutes in some of those "we're in a hurry" shots).

I looked in my TNG technical manual last night to see if I could find anything about the star streaks, and didn't see it. Maybe I need to look harder.

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The queen in an ant colony or bee hive doesn't actually control the other ants or bees - she is merely their egg layer. She doesn't give orders or make decisions for the colony/hive.

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I agree with NGCHunter, in the TNG Technical Manual I think it says the apparent star-streaks are an artifact of warp-drive, NOT the stars wooshing past. It might be micrometeroids interracting with the warp fields for example.

Also, warp factors don't necessarily correspond to exact multiples of light speed, "depending on conditions in the sub-space domain and other factors". Perhaps warp 1 in the Pheonix was actually substantially less than light speed because of these effects.

Given that Warp 1 is supposed to be c and they were at warp for only a few seconds, the distance from the Earth wouldn't be all that great. The return time quite likely would be pretty long.

From the Bad Astronomer's review of the pilot episode of "Star Trek: Enterprise":

Bad: In the beginning of the show, the captain and one of his crew are talking about the ship. Captain Archer says it can go to Neptune and back in just six minutes at warp 4.5. Later in the show, Archer mentions that warp 4.4 is 30 million kilometers per second.

Good: Sometimes this Good/Bad format fails me. Those numbers work out! Neptune is about 4.4 billion kilometers from the Earth. Getting there and back in six minutes means moving at about 80 times the speed of light, or 24 million kilometers per second. The difference between that number and 30 million is negligible, given that Captain Archer may have been using a rough number. They aren't equal, but neither are they off by much. Again, this is pretty close.

Having said that, there was a misstep later in the show. It was said that the Klingon home world is four days travel away. That comes out to about 8 trillion kilometers (just less than one light year) away from Earth at 80 times lightspeed. The nearest known star to us, Proxima Centauri, is about 40 trillion kilometers away (more than 4 light years), or 20 days travel time. I'm not sure how this inconsistency slipped past the Trek writers, to be honest, but late rewrites are usually the culprit. Again, I'll note that while this is an error, it's not a terribly big one. I would be remiss to ignore it though.

However, I should also note that in several scenes, we see stars streaming past the window as the Enterprise warps past them. If it takes 20 days to get to the nearest star, then it should take roughly that long on average for just one star to flash by. I have heard some fans say that those aren't stars we see going past, but pieces of space dust. That explanation doesn't work; when the ship slow to subwarp, the streaks of light clearly coalesce into stars. So really, we should see the stars something like we do now: not streaking past, but moving verrrry sloooowly, like distant mountains on a long drive.

I've hand-waved it as a purely optical effect caused by the warp field. You're seeing the same 50 or so stars "woosh" by over and over again as the warp field flings the ship along.

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Its a little known fact that Star Fleet Engineering added the effect because of complaints from many ships' Captains that the lack of star movement was demoralizing to the crew, who felt like they were spending all this time and weren't getting anywhere.

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I might also be getting it confused with one of the other technical manuals, or perhaps even the ST encyclopedia. It's been years since I touched any of them, but I really thought it was in there.

LMAO! Ensign, set viewscreen to screensaver #5!

Its a little known fact that Star Fleet Engineering added the effect because of complaints from many ships' Captains that the lack of star movement was demoralizing to the crew, who felt like they were spending all this time and weren't getting anywhere.

The Captains were tired of hearing the Ensigns whine, "Are we there yet?"

Flying Tribbles?

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New! It combines the power of science with the gentleness of your mother's best intentions!
A new miracle technique, we apply homeopathic methods to achieve scientific efficaciousness
for dilutions WAY beyond Avogadro's Limit. It's New! It's Fresh!
It's Placebo^[tm] Brand Power Drink! *[Use as directed. May increase kidney function.]