But they didn't lay out the numbers for the audience to calculate like Voyager did (or had the ability to). Would it have hurt the writer of 'The 37's' to take a few seconds to do a calculation before blurting we go "four billion miles a second!"? The episode "That Which Survives" is the only episode that makes the mistake claiming the Enterprise can travel 997.4 light years in 11.37 solar hours (whatever that is). But the premise of Star Trek didn't hinge on those numbers making sense like Voyager's did.
Well, pretty much any usage of real distance units would muck it up since it's all "speed of plot" anyways. Should they have just said "It'll take us 75 years to get home" and left it at that without saying how far away they were in LY units?
Believe it or not... 'speed of plot' is not an insult, to any of the series. The writers and producers deliberately left a lot of things vague when working on the original Star Trek (how fast warp speed was, how things worked, when the show took place). In hindsight, it was a brilliant thing to do. Probably one of the reasons we're still talking about it forty-one years after it was canceled. Plus it made it easier to gloss over the inevitable contradictions that would come up as you added more and more material to the Star Trek universe.
"Speed of plot" is an issue television-wide, not just in Trek or sci-fi. How many times to people get across town in the space of an establishing shot, immune to things like traffic?
That's what annoyed me the most about 24. They have this great "real time" premise, and then they totally ignore it.
i think of it as power output like our horsepower, not the way per time unit. we say that light crosses some 300,000 km per second, but at this speed, a second is not the same anymore. the more i think about it, the more confusing it gets.
Bingo Voyager by the Threshold episode time had already operated at high warp for a Year and according to TNG extended trips at high warp require nacelle maintaince. Intrepid is a short range craft not meant to operate far from support. But yeah the calculations were wrong.