TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name

nah, thats movement relative to space time, warp suggests bending said space time in order to, relative to your destination, move faster than light, while essentially staying motionless in spacetime.

In this paradigm inertia is very much not a thing

To suspend disbelief, when any non-hard sci-fi show says "speed" I subconsciously translate it to "acceleration." If the ship they're chasing (or being chased by) is pushing their engines to the max then the enterprise also needs to push its engines to the max to match the speed. If they just free-float at constant velocity then they'll fall behind very quickly.

Not quite. The warp drive doesn't actually provide any thrust, its purpose is to create the warp bubble and then "squish" the space in front of the starship.

Thus the "warp engines" do actually need to get constantly fed energy in order to work. Feed more energy equals get more squish equals go faster.

For the curious, OA has a pretty extensive, physically plausible theoretical writeups on warp bubbles:

https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/493f29cc472f0

They’re the STL kind, but still, they do seem to require power.

AFIAIK the impulse drives are sub relativistic in Star Trek, right? Or maybe they aren’t, but that seems.

When moving at a high speed through the galaxy you potential may change. This must be paid and paid quickly too.

It depends. Impulse engine? Sure. Warp? Nope. Also, you need shielding.

have they reverse the polarity of the shields?

Pretty sure the warp drives need continuous power to contract space in front of the ship and expand it behind the ship to allow faster than light travel

The ship isn't actually moving during faster than light travel, it just bends space around it

They can only move at impulse speed without engine output due to their being no friction and gravity in space

Yeah, at impulse they would still want the deflector shields, but at warp they can only remain faster than light due to power creating the warp bubble/field. Like a rubber band, you need to constantly exert force to repell the elastic forces.

It's a different kind of space. They're going faster than light.

This is something that always bothered me when watching some sci-fi space shows. A space walk occurs, but there is only so much thrust that can be used. Once the thrust stops, the person stops.

Thats.....not how vacuums work.

Unrelated but in the expanse they really nailed those aspects. When there's a pursuit, it's always an acceleration pursuit, which is limited by how much G the characters can tolerate, and for how long.

The only magic tech they introduce is a super efficient fusion core engine, but they use it to improve realism rather than destroy it. It's great.

Another consideration outside of the warp field maintenance is how incredibly destructive a collision with even nanograms of mass can be at relativistic velocities and shielding against those takes a lot of power itself

In every ST series, they only ever say that in warp. And nobody has no idea how warp works.