Star Trek: 10 Episodes That Wasted An Incredible Premise

In the 24th century edition of the dictionary of 'Federation Standard,' under the entry for 'incredible,' meaning 'too extraordinary to be believed,' Tom Paris' Warp 10 record and the silliness that followed will be cited as an example. Nonetheless, deep down in the fantastical of Threshold, there is, somewhere, a fantastic premise (see also 'wasted') — Go fast!

It made perfect sense that the crew of Voyager would begin experimenting with even the craziest ideas in their efforts to get back home, just so long as it was all in line with Starfleet and Federation principles (ish) — not risking a Sikarian-type mess again! At some point, they were bound to try to beef up their maximum warp speed.

The problem with Threshold is that they went straight to Warp 10, which, as the episode itself states, is a theoretical impossibility. Between Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation (although with some exceptions), changes were made to the warp scale to put in place an upper speed limit. As the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual states,

Our solution was to redraw the warp curve so that the exponent of the warp factor increases gradually, then sharply [after Warp 9] as you approach Warp 10. At Warp 10, the exponent (and the speed) would be infinite, so you could never reach this value.

However, if we do assume Warp 10 is achievable but has side-effects, why didn't Voyager just use the new form of dilithium they'd found to supercharge the warp engines? You don't need Warp 10 if you're actually capable of it. Every decimal point you can add past Warp 9 already represents a vast increase in speed, and Warp 9.9999999999 (recurring) would have had them back to Earth in a jiffy!

Of course, the power requirements would have been enormous (although the Cochrane seemed to handle those all right), and they'd probably just have run out of the new dilithium. Back to the salamander babies, after all!