What are Transwarp Conduits?
The first Transwarp travel we saw onscreen was in “Descent” [TNG], which has the Borg using TransWarp Conduits. They’re like custom-made wormholes that, once created, stay in place and can be used repeatedly. The conduits are used by broadcasting a tachyon signature which makes them open up and suck the ship in. They’re beyond the ability of the Federation to create, but the Enterprise was able to use them once it recorded the tachyon signature the Borg were using. Transfer through the conduits is 20 times faster than the fastest warp available to Federation science (Warp 9.7 or 9.8), covering light-years in a matter of seconds rather than hours – just like a wormhole. Chris Franklin points out: [When] they followed Data’s shuttle into the Conduit, Riker stated that they had covered 65 light years. I timed the trip with my stop watch and came up with about 9 seconds for their stay in the Conduit. This corresponds to about 227,911,132.04 times the speed of light. That’s a heck of a lot
