10 is the limit for the “current” engines. There seems to be a weird scale, every generation, where it gets reset back to 1, but by a factor of the previous warp.
So, warp 5 in Enterprise is possibly Warp 1 in TOS.
I think Warp 1 always stays anchored to lightspeed, it’s just that as engines improve each century, they rescale it. By the TNG era, they’ve clearly made it logarithmic (as opposed what was probably linear in ENT & TOS), with Warp 10 being infinite speed.
It makes sense, I’d imagine originally warp 5 would have been 5x light speed, then as things got faster 1 was the slowest warp we can go and 10 became the fastest theoretical with the current technology.
10 is the limit for the “current” engines. There seems to be a weird scale, every generation, where it gets reset back to 1, but by a factor of the previous warp.
So, warp 5 in Enterprise is possibly Warp 1 in TOS.
I think Warp 1 always stays anchored to lightspeed, it’s just that as engines improve each century, they rescale it. By the TNG era, they’ve clearly made it logarithmic (as opposed what was probably linear in ENT & TOS), with Warp 10 being infinite speed.
It makes sense, I’d imagine originally warp 5 would have been 5x light speed, then as things got faster 1 was the slowest warp we can go and 10 became the fastest theoretical with the current technology.