A coaxial warp drive was a propulsion system hypothesized by
Starfleet engineers in the 24th century, with the theoretic
capability of folding the fabric of space, allowing a ship to
travel instantaneously across extremely large distances. Such a
propulsion system was encountered in the Delta Quadrant by the
crew of the USS Voyager in 2374, when they came across a ship
piloted by a Benthan named Steth. Emerging from coaxial space in
an unstable condition, the vessel threatened to explode and
collapse space within a radius of a billion kilometers. Such a
catastrophe was averted, however, when Tom Paris, Voyager's
helmsman, managed to generate a symmetric warp field around
Steth's ship, containing the instabilities in the space-folding
core. The coaxial induction drive functioned by drawing in
subatomic particles and reconfiguring their internal geometries.
The drive was imperfect, however, as particle instabilities
tended to overload the engines. To correct for this flaw, Paris
conceived of the idea of using a