On a call this morning, I was feeling very focused on the matter at hand and ended up at our website, reading over our overview page for 2025 and it seemed like it might be important to verify this “warp factor figure.”

My initial recollection, and wow do I feel sheepish now, was that warp was simply some fraction of C. So we made a correction to the page and it got more incorrect.

After a few more calls, I came back to this and ended up at Memory Alpha on the Warp Factor page, which lead me to a subsection about “Variations in relative speed.” Apparently there was some amount of debate about what exactly a warp factor was and TOS vs TNG (to the extent that either of them have a consistent definition of warp factor) disagree about what the radicand is in a formula taking some root of v over c. TOS thinks warp factor is the cube root of V/C and TNG thinks that (up to warp 9) it is the 10/3rd root. There’s so much more information on the wiki, of course, and these numbers don’t always line up with the series.

Anyway, our initial figure STILL isn’t correct by any of these, but I can see more where it is coming from. My calculations put the NADM’s warp factor at either 0.0034485661410630294 or 0.006079595766096528011501 by the TOS and TNG methods, respectively. We’ve updated the site to reflect the TOS method in the interest of being the stodgiest nerds possible.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of work in postgres and falling in love with doing “real” math using numeric types rather than floating point. So you can see the query I used where these numbers come from… please comment on the gist if I’ve screwed things up massively!

Ahh…. finally, a number I feel comfortable “um actually”ing someone about: