this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2026
20 points (95.5% liked)

Daystrom Institute

4330 readers
61 users here now

Welcome to Daystrom Institute!

Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.

Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.

Rules

1. Explain your reasoning

All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.

2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.

This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.

3. Be diplomatic.

Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.

4. Assume good faith.

Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”

5. Tag spoilers.

Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.

6. Stay on-topic.

Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.

Episode Guides

The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

The U.S.S. Discovery Spore drive, is it complete nonsense or is there a scientific theory I'm unaware of?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Ikon@sh.itjust.works 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

I was not saying that the warp drive was based on the Alcubierre drive. My pont was that the warp drive was more grounded in physics than the spore drive, so much so that it inspired the Alcubierre drive.

[–] ValueSubtracted@startrek.website 4 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

That's circular reasoning, though.

The fact that Alcubierre was inspired by Star Trek to come up with something (theoretically) workable does not mean that the warp drive as originally conceived was somehow "grounded in physics." At the end of the day, the similarities are pretty superficial.

[–] Ikon@sh.itjust.works 1 points 8 hours ago

I'll go ahead and concede my point. I haven't watched enough original Star Trek and definitely dont have enough knowledge in physics to argue this further. My understanding was that the warp drive was kept just vague enough to be argued to be theoretically possible. But honestly, I'm not a physicist, so I am probably missing something obvious.