Warp drive was founded by Zefram Cochrane in 2061. The first ship to by fitted with a warp drive was named the Phoenix. On his first flight into the unknown he found a M-class planet in the Alpha Centarie system. On that same mission he also encountered an intelligent race who's culture was based on logic alone, this race was later named Valcuns. After warp drives became more widely used Cochrane settled down on Alpha Centarie. When he was 87, Cochrane set course away from Alpha Centarie disappeared.
In the year 2161 with the help of warp drive the Human and Vulcan people started the United Federation of Planets. An organization devoted to the peaceful co-existents of all life-forms.
In the year 2267 Capt. James T. Kirk, Com. Spock, Dr. Leonard H. McCoy, and Commissioner Nancy Hedford found Cochrane whit an energy creature known as "the Companion" on a planetoid in the Gamma Canaris region. They had this encounter after their shuttle craft, the Galileo 7, crashed on the planetoid. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy left and swore never to revile Cochrane's fate. Commissioner Hedford stayed behind and merged with the Companion fore if she didn't she would have died of Sakuro's disease.
In 2354(?) a new warp "speed limit" of warp 5 was imposed. This was the result of proof that warp fields cause damaged to areas were they are used often.
The principles behind warp drive are that you create a subspace fields around the ship that you want to travel at warp speed. This will encompass an area of space around the ship. Then as the pressure between fields increase it will propel the fields at warp speed. Since the ship and surrounding space is inside the fields it is propelled along as well.
The first one was posted in the Star Trek Technology Newsgroup under the title "Limits of Warp 10". It stated that Warp 10 IS NOT Infinite energy. In other words the amount of energy needed to go Warp 10 is some were between the amount of energy needed to go Warp 9.9997 and Infinite energy. The two facts that I base this on are that as you accelerate up the warp scale the difference in energy between get smaller but it become increasingly difficult to create each volt of electricity. Another fact is that they were using a single Warp Core in the ships that they were testing. Because of these facts it might be possible that any starship with a single Warp Core typical of a Galaxy Class Starship would not be able to travel to much faster than Warp 9.6 safely.
The other theory concerns the Voyager episode Threshold (which IMO was a good episode). The only problem I had was in how they calculated Warp 10 as infinite. I believe that Paris did get to infinite energy, but I also believe that there was a problem in the way they calculated Warp 10. It is my belief that when they were conducting the test they created a flaw in the program. They more then likely told the computers involved in the test how much energy it took for Voyager to go Warp 9.975, and that they thought that infinite energy was equal to Warp 10. From this information the computer extrapolated a Warp Curve to fit inside its data parameters. If Voyager had left out the line that stated infinite energy was equal to Warp 10 then Voyager might have found that infinite energy DOSE NOT equal Warp 10.
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