To Boldly Go... Atmospheric

I grew up watching Jim Kirk and crew on TV, speculating about the Trek universe was my favorite intellectual hobby, the Star Trek Classic movies were touchstones of my adolescence, and at the time I really wanted to make my own low-budget sci-film with whatever FX I could manage. So I couldn't help getting a big geeky grin from the attached image and the accompanying analysis on this site. It's like a scene from a missing adventure, and a real thriller from the looks of the full-size image!

A group of advanced Australian physics students put a model of the Enterprise (NCC-1701A, the movie version) through a wind-tunnel simulation of atmospheric re-entry, and confirmed that it's surprisingly aerodynamic. So that scene in the episode "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", in which the Enterprise is chased by a late-20th-century fighter jet, was actually possible! Their attempt to justify equating Mach 5 with Warp 5, and the speculative implications of accelerating to Warp 10 is a bit of a stretch, but if subspace bow-shock waves are really an issue, it would explain why Scotty always got so frantic whenever they went over Warp 8. And that snapshot of the result from a collission... {shudder}

"Shields up! Ahead, Warp factor 3, Mister Sulu!"