For example, the Federation’s founding members (Tellarites, Andorians, Vulcans, Humans) were the subject of fan theories and “fanon” for many years before the ENT writers made it official. One of the interesting (and fun) aspects of this recent wave of series has been seeing the writers increasingly add nods to fan theories and pieces of fanon lore over the years. What are some good examples of this?
And relatedly: what’s a fan theory, or piece of fanon, that you suspect the current writers believe, even if they haven’t explicitly stated it on-screen?
The use of “warp bubble” as a synonym for “warp field” is a piece of fanon that only popped up in a series with the first season of Strange New Worlds.
I find this one troublesome, as this tends to be a stepping stone to treating the warp drive as an Alcubierre drive, when historically it hasn’t really been portrayed that way.
Is that true? I could swear I have a memory of Geordi describing it as a bubble at some point on TNG. Then again I also spent a lot of time looking through Rick Sternbach and Dennis Okuda’s TNG Technical Manual back in the day, so maybe I just absorbed it and incorporated it from there.
I believe the only “warp bubble” that we see in TNG is the anomaly that Wesley creates, and Bev gets trapped in, in “Remember Me”.
Warp bubbles are named in “Interface” as a type of subspace deformation.
In both cases, they’re unique phenomena.
When the Dauntless is chasing the Protostar in PRO: “Mindwalk”, Tysess gives the order to merge the “warp bubbles” of both ships, the first time we hear the term being applied to a warp field.
When the Enterprise is unable to go to warp in SNW: “The Elysian Kingdom”, Spock theorizes the nebula may be affecting the ship’s ability to create a “static warp bubble”, and from context he’s talking about the warp field generated by the nacelles.
Prior to this, the terms “warp bubbles” and “warp fields” were not used interchangeably, the former being a “static warp bubble”, previously established as a toroidal, non-propulsive subspace field which once trapped Beverly Crusher in a pocket universe (TNG: “Remember Me”) rather than the field used to enable warp speed travel.
The warp effect in Beyond is the warp effect for the Alcubierre drive. Seeing as it’s basically the only plausible way to have an FTL system I’m fine with treating it that way since the ship practically moves at the speed of the plot so how it actually moves doesn’t really matter