INTRODUCTION TO WARP
THEORY

E=mc² + A₁ - A₁ + A₂ - A₂ + A₃ - A₃ + ...

Now it might seem peculiar that the equation involves terms that cancel each other off, but one must realize that the basic form of the equation is the "global effect," that is, that is the energy that comes out of the annihilation of matter and antimatter in the long term, over a wide area. Up close and personal with the annihilating items, usually protons, indicates that the situation is much more complicated than this, that particles carrying the higher energy terms form and then annihilate with each other. The secret of warp engineering is to develop a system that separates these higher-order terms and turns them into useful particles carrying energy. The process is called "decoupling the higher-order terms of the mass-energy equation." One might wonder why this sort of decoupling or this extrapolation of what is known must be done. However, to allow the faster-than-light travel that is seen in "Star Trek" (and other science fiction that uses the concept), the laws of physics as they are now known must be somehow modified, and the modification could come from changes in theory, or to attempt to explain the results of experiments that appear to go against known theory.
      An analogy of this exists in late twentieth-century physics, where Stephen Hawking has postulated the existence of virtual particles, pairs of particles (matter and the corresponding antimatter particle) that appear out of nothing and then return to nothing within the time limit specified by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Now, if one of these particles appears on one side of a black hole event horizon and the other appears on the other side, they cannot annihilate with each other. The particle becomes real. Energy must come from somewhere, and that is usually the mass of the black hole. In the same way, matter-antimatter annihilations produce a whole cascade of virtual energy quanta (called "motons") each of higher energy levels and shorter half-lives and all of which exist within the Heisenberg uncertainty principle time frame. All that is necessary is something that can interact with these virtual energy particles and make them real. This substance is either hypermatter (perhaps like dilithium) or other virtual energy particles. Extremely high energy experiments can produce motons and these can be detected, and this in fact was the "Great Experiment of 2039" mentioned in "The Ripples of Time."
      Once the higher-order terms of the mass-energy equation are decoupled, there is now a large amount of positive energy, and a corresponding amount of negative. The motons are faster-than-light particles, and each moton has an "order" that describes its speed. In fact, the photon can be called the zeroth-order moton, since it appears because the mass-energy equation is unbalanced; that is, there is one term left and one moton, the zeroth-order moton or photon. And this has a fixed speed (in a vacuum) that we call the speed of light. The first-order moton has a higher fixed speed, the second-order moton has a still higher fixed speed, and so on. Each moton has a series of other physical properties, and degree of susceptibility to various forces of nature, electromagnetic and subetheromagnetic.
      Hypermatter is the material that interacts with motons higher than the zeroth order. Hypermatter is basically like regular matter in that it has protons, neutrons and electrons, and the first two of these are composed of quarks. However, the subquarks of the hypermatter is different from the subquarks of the regular matter, and it is this property that fundamentally alters the properties of the hypermatter. At normal temperatures, hyperhydrogen or hyperhelium (which can be called dihydrogen and dihelium as well, but those are poor choices of names) have low enough densities to be called gases, while all other hypermatter consists of crystals. The highest-known hypermatter is hyperneon, but this is extremely rare. Hypermatter above hydrogen can only be created in a Big Bang or simulated Big Bang explosion, and perhaps in very powerful supernovas or other events. Hyperhydrogen can be created in the lab, and is the byproduct of the high-energy experiments. Hyperhydrogen can be used in a primitive warp engine (which answers the question on how Zefrem Cochrane was able to stage the first flight of a warp-capable ship without dilithium; he had hyperhydrogen only, and so did not go very far or very fast). Dilithium is the heaviest hyperelement commonly available, and so it is the most common substance used in a warp converter.
      Dilithium is defined not by the atomic structure of its nucleus, but by the degree of interaction with motons. Dilithium will interact only with motons of order three or less. Hyperoxygen, the eighth element and the key component to the Odonans' tam-ulk-yr material, interacts with motons of order eight or less. By allowing the annihilation of matter and antimatter to occur in the vicinity of or within the hypermatter, the motons produced will interact more readily with the hypermatter than with each other, at least up to the order of the hypermatter. At higher orders, the motons interact more with each other, and they annihilate and basically end the sequence. The motons that are "made real" now come in negative and positive pairs, and these are separated by magnetic effects within the warp core. Plasmas, positive and negative, conduct the energy of the motons away from the core to where they are used.
      Motons can almost be described as having miniature warpfields in the sense that they display properties that allows them to interact with the universe at large as a point mass and travel at a fixed speed faster than light. The idea of warp engineering is to create around a starship a similar field having similar effects on the universe at large. Of course, a starship can hardly be termed as a point mass when viewed up close, but when one considered the size of a simple star system, a starship within, in terms of the gravitational fields of the star and the planets, a starship can well be labelled as a point mass. Of course, the warpfield created will not be a pure motonic warp field, since the effect is created by generating lines of force around the ship and guiding the motons through that. The result is a "merged motonic field," in which a mixture of motons of various orders creates a blended speed. There is nothing in the universe that suggests motons must travel at discrete, fixed speeds. It happens because on the atomic scale, quantum effects and energy levels and all of that demands it. On the larger scale of starships, quantum effects do not apply so readily, so a merged field allows for variable speeds.
      However, the motonic field does suggest there is a maximum speed that the starship can travel at. Because the order of motons is limited by the substance in the warp converter, the speed of the highest-order moton that converter can handle is the theoretical top speed. For example, with dilithium, the substance can easily pull out the first two orders of motons, so the top speed easily sustained by the ship (the "safe cruising speed" of the original series) is the speed of the second-order motons. This speed is often called (at least by the Odonans) the H-factor speed (H as in hyperlight), so the safe cruising speed would be H-factor two. By increasing various effects on the engines (in particular, particle acceleration and injection angles and other technical details), some of the third-order motons can be created and directed to the warpfield, forcing the ship to accelerate (or, as the equations actually describe, the ship maintains the sublight speed it had before going to warp, but the universe accelerates more quickly around it) to speeds above H-factor two. However, doing this increases the strain on the engines and so is a riskier move not often undertaken. Improvements in warp technology allow more of the third-order motons to be used on a regular bases, so speeds above H-factor two can be sustained more readily. With dilithium, however, H-factor three is the maximum speed that in theory cannot be broken by a dilithium warp converter because no fourth-order motons can be used.
      When "The Next Generation" appeared along with the idea that warp ten was the theoretical top speed, the model developed here suggested that warp ten represented H-factor three, and was unachievable because in theory it would be virtually impossible for dilithium to recover every possible third-order moton. The idea of "transwarp" supported this, since transwarp involved alternate technologies that could push a starship beyond H-factor three, and this in turn was supported by the idea of transwarp conduits and other subspace and quantum-tunnelling effects as seen first in "Descent." However, the "Voyager" episode "Threshold" trashed all of that-but then again, the author does not consider "Threshold" to be a valid episode and so it does not exist in the continuity of "Star Trek: Athena."
      The Odonans have access to more powerful materials than dilithium. Tam-ulk-yr in fact is a mixture of hyperboron (element five) and hyperoxygen (element eight), with samples strong in hyperoxygen being favoured as starship warp converters. A converter that consists of pure hyperoxygen would have as a theoretical top speed H-factor eight, which is 1,326,533.729 times the speed of light. Even with hyperboron in the mix, thus limiting the speed, Odonan starships clearly are much faster than the Federation starships. Originally, Odonan starships used a warp scale to measure speed, calibrated so that the lower warp values corresponded to a similar speed to the values of the Federation warp scale (or at least the twenty-third century version of it). Warp speed is easy to measure, since it is based on a formula that takes into account input energies, moton production rates and ratios and so on, all things that can be easily measured from within the ship. Put it all together, and it gives a value for speed that is used on a relative basis (that is, saying "warp six is faster than warp five") without giving an absolute value of the scale. The absolute value comes from determining the time it takes to travel between destinations. However, with the Odonans, this convention produced the result that Odonan ships travelled too much at warp two hundred and warp three hundred and so on. The revised Federation scale was even worse, and so the Odonans have gone to simply measuring the true speed of their ships. They, therefore, talk of ships travelling at a certain number of "kilocees" (or thousands of times the speed of light) and if the ship is fast enough, "megacees" (millions of times the speed of light). At extremely high speeds, the speed could be reported as the percentage of the H-factor of the converter.
      The Athena is equipped with an Odonan warp drive system with an Odonan warp converter using tam-ulk-yr, so one can get the impression that the speed it can achieve is very great. One can imagine that the Athena can hit at least one million times the speed of light and basically outrace anything that might be chasing it. There are limits to the speed of the ship, however. The first limit is that the shape of the ship is not very efficient. The most efficient shape for an Odonan warp drive is a thin disk (or other shape that produces a very narrow cross-section, but the disk is best for the shape of the warpfield), but a thin disk does not make a very practical starship. The thin disk is necessary because when travelling extremely fast, the navigational deflector must probe far into space to push aside the gas atoms and dust and so on. With a thin disk, and a very narrow cross-section overall, the distance to push the material is not great. Starship design is thus a compromise between a thin disk and creating useful space on board, but the effect can be seen in that for most ships (Borg ships excluded), when seen head on, the profile is very slender, with lots of narrow shapes). The Odonans solved the problem of speed limitations on their Epic-class ships by creating very large thin disk ships and equipping them with many more than one warp converter. In fact, the Epic-class ships have two hundred and fifty-six of them around the edge of the ship, and with this design, the ship can sustain speeds at 1.3 megacees-at least within the limits of the second constraint. The faster the ship goes, the more fuel it consumes. The warpfield interacts with space around it, and the faster it travels through the positive-energy expanse of space, the more it erodes. The field must be replenished as the ship travels, so a ship at warp must continue to have its engines run, as inertia is not enough to maintain a constant speed. The higher the speed, the more the warp engines must run and the more fuel that it consumes and the greater the long-term wear and tear on the engines. Because of the fuel demands, the Athena has something like twenty times the fuel capacity of a typical Nebula-class ship. This need for fuel would seem to force the ship to a refueling installation more often, but the way around this problem is to equip the ship with a remote refuel and resupply system along with a system that converts matter into antimatter on the fly. Afterall, the only fuel needed is protons, and hydrogen will do just fine. Taking the ship through the atmosphere of a gas-giant planet with the remote resupply system active will accomplish the trick.
      This article provides a brief description on how the warp drive system on the Athena works, without getting into too much technical detail (the equations would be extremely hard to reproduce in this document). Forming the theory beforehand has the useful feature of not allowing the stories to fall into technobabble. That usually results from the fact that the science can be invented on the fly to suit the story rather than the other way around, and then the crew explains things away with the technobabble. However, with "Athena," this is not so much possible because it is already known by the author what is possible and what is not possible. This extends to all areas of the starship operations, including the shields, weapons, sensors and communications systems. Even the limitations of the computer system and medical technology is understood. The stories have to be told within the limits of the science as set out in the theory. There is much more than can be said about the technology behind the Athena, but that would be beyond the scope of this introductory article.