How does the warp metric go?  Is Warp 8 just 8 times lightspeed, or more?
I got the impression that high warp speeds got travel from planet to planet
down in a timeframe that fit into a few days, if not an episode, and *just*
8 x lightspeed wouldn't do that.  Or have I been at the bottom of this 
gravity well too long.

One of my favorite scifi stories hypothesized that an interplanetary freighter
had been abandoned and left idling in the solar system.  As its owners went
back to pick it up, they talked about the effect its force field would have
on local physics: "Can you imagine?  Sufficiently backward natives of this
solar system would think that the speed of light is finite!  Ho ho!"

B.