Lucky wrote:What a Carddi runabout can do has no relevance to what a Federation Runabout is designed to do. Just look at the real world, cars of similar sizes and masses can have very different capabilities.
In the absence of evidence to the contrary, rough parity among contemporary near-equal regimes is the best presumption. If you show me an American and Soviet fighter from the 1960s, it does not make sense to assume that one can do Mach 6 and the other Mach 2.
In the case of Cardassia, however, the situation is worse, since we know that their technology was somewhat behind that of the Federation before the war, though evidence suggests they were catching up.
This doesn't say a Federation Runabout can reach warp 8, and we know Federation AI do some wonky things if I recall correctly.
Here's the revised version of that paragraph from my
reactivated blog:
Also, most interestingly, in "The Jem'Hadar"[DSN2], Jake Sisko orders the Rio Grande computer to set a course for DS9 at warp eight. The computer doesn't reject his command on the grounds of velocity correction, but simply notes that the autopilot is not functional. Of course, it might've reacted the same way if he'd ordered warp 13, but the interesting part to ponder is that Jake ordered it at all. You see, a plot point with this episode (and indeed, the early part of the series . . . see "Civil Defense") is that Jake had been assisting Chief O'Brien with assorted maintenance duties, and in this episode we are told that he'd been assisting with runabout maintenance.
Warp eight is a very odd figure to choose if you are desperately asking for a fast speed and unclear on the vessel's maximum velocity. Why not nine, or 9.9 even? Put simply, Jake wouldn't exactly be my go-to guy for tech questions, but he's not completely ignorant, and I think that particular order to the computer is indicative of what he knew of the vessel's velocity capabilities.
Personally, I find this to be fair evidence for warp eight as an attainable velocity for runabouts. It is not absolute proof, but like the Kira search I don't think it is disproof, either.
We do now have a likely upper limit, however. In "The Maquis, Pt. II" we have Dukat noting that the Xepolite freighter they were parked alongside was capable of warp 9.8, so that if it made a run for it at warp the runabout would never catch up. So, the runabout is probably capable of warp eight but almost certainly not capable of 9.8.