Warp five engine The warp five engine was a type of warp reactor developed by Human s in the 22nd century in the Warp Five program and the NX Project . The starships of the mid - 22nd century were the first Earth ship s to utilize the reactor . Warp five technology allowed Humans to travel a hundred times faster than had been possible with the previous generation of warp engines that were limited by the warp 2 barrier . ( ) Specifications . The engine was officially called a gravimetric field displacement manifold . ( ) The reactor had eight major components . ( ) Magnetic constrictor s were used to align the positron stream to the dilithium matrix . ( ) The dilithium matrix had to be aligned to within 0 . 3 micron s . In the warp matrix , antimatter flow regulator s controlled the plasma pressure in the intermix chamber . ( ) Another important component of the reactor was the primary warp coil . ( ) When the reactor was restarted from an off - line state , the reactor output had to be confined to within 300 and 312 to prevent fusion of the dilithium matrix , unless the spatial compression index was greater than 5 . 62 percent , or the ship was within two parsec s of a class C gravimetric field distortion . ( ) If the antimatter flow regulators were locked open , plasma pressure within the chamber would rise , threatening to destroy the ship . In order to reduce the pressure , the ship had to maintain high warp until the damage was repaired . Such an event occurred in November 2154 , due to Klingon sabotage of . Moments before the engine was shut down and cold started , intermix pressure had risen to 1527 and the field variance had risen to eighty - seven millicochranes . ( ) Even when the warp five engine was newly introduced and the only one in Starfleet was being used by " Enterprise " , warp five engines were expected to be installed in the next generation of freighter s . ( ) In the original configuration , warp factor five was the maximum speed that could be maintained by a ship using the warp five engine for fifty - three minutes only . This speed was first tested in 2152 . ( ) By 2153 , warp five had become a sustainable cruising velocity that could be maintained for long periods of time . The speed of warp five corresponded roughly to a velocity of 200 times the speed of light . ( ) " In the mirror universe , the warp five engine was used by the Terran Empire , though it was known to leak delta rays . The radiation caused severe disfigurement to the engineer s who worked on them . It was said that , for every year an engineer spent next to one , he lost a decade of his life expectancy . " ( ) Upgrades . The plasma injector assembly of the reactor was upgraded in 2154 , to allow a ship to maintain the speed of warp 5 . 06 . ( ) After the upgrade , the speed of warp 5 . 2 could also be reached for short periods of time . ( ) The injector assembly could also be easily modified , based on Haradin schematics , to allow a ship to reach the speed of warp 6 . 9 for short intervals using the warp five engine . The structural integrity also needed to be reinforced on the NX - class ships for this to be possible . It was , however , determined that , using the Haradin modification , the injectors might overload at speeds over warp factor 5 . 6 . Due to the risk , these speeds were not used by " Enterprise " . ( ) 24th century . While the technology to go beyond warp five was achieved by Humans with the upgrades in the mid - 2150s and by other future Federation member races such as the Vulcan s much earlier , ( ) over two centuries later , some smaller Federation starships , such as runabout s still utilized a warp engine design with the maximum speed of only warp factor five . ( , " et al . " )