The Speed of Voyager

[Anwar]

Seeing, how the shows themselves (including TOS) can't even be bothered to be consistent with how fast warp is I don't see why VOY can't stay as it was.

[BillJ]

Anwar wrote:

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Seeing, how the shows themselves (including TOS) can't even be bothered to be consistent with how fast warp is I don't see why VOY can't stay as it was.

The problem with Voyager is the fact that they gave you two hard numbers. How far they were from home (75,000 light years) and how fast the ship could go (4 billion miles per second).

[Anwar]

Yeah, but TOS+ do things like have the Enterprise to to the edge of the Galaxy and then later have "We won't make it there in time!" stories.

So it's the same problen, inverted.

[Deks]

Anwar wrote:

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Yeah, but TOS+ do things like have the Enterprise to to the edge of the Galaxy and then later have "We won't make it there in time!" stories.

So it's the same problen, inverted.

That's just stupid writing.
Had the writers actually cared, they could have easily made some quick calculations and at the very least make the distances involved consistent with the Warp speed required to traverse it in the designated time-frame.

Using speed of the plot is idiotic at best because you are using one speed that's faster than anything you previously used, and on another, you are so slow to the point where it's taking you 10 seconds to traverse several hundred thousand km's at Warp 4 (when realistically, it would take you a fraction of a milisecond at THAT speed - more or less).

[JarodRussell]

I think the distances traversed in TOS a more idiotic than in the later shows. WNMHGB is always cited as a prime example that the Enterprise went to the edge of the galaxy in very short time. But it's more an exception rather than the rule.

But Speed of plot is indeed a lame excuse made by lame writers.

[BillJ]

Anwar wrote:

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Yeah, but TOS+ do things like have the Enterprise to to the edge of the Galaxy and then later have "We won't make it there in time!" stories.

So it's the same problen, inverted.

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.

[Anwar]

BillJ wrote:

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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!"?

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?

[BillJ]

Anwar wrote:

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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.

[King Daniel]

"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?

[JarodRussell]

KingDaniel wrote:

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"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.

[Marten]

JarodRussell wrote:

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That's what annoyed me the most about 24. They have this great "real time" premise, and then they totally ignore it.

The traffic runs away from Jack Bauer.

[Kai Winn]

culleyb wrote:

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So I downloaded the entire Star trek Voyager series, and I have just finished the first episode of the second season. In it Paris says to Amelia Earheart that voyager can travel "warp 9.9, in your terms thats about 4 billion miles per second"

I am a mechanical engineer and could not help myself checking to see if it would actually take you 75 years as is stated at the begining of the series to cross the galaxy.

The milky way is approx 100,000 ly across, at 5.87849981*10^12 miles per ly this is 587,849,981,000,000,000 miles. A truely massive number.

The problem is that at 4 billion miles per second, or 126,144,000,000,000,000 miles per year it would take you only 4.66 YEARS ( not 75 years) to cross the entire diameter of the galaxy.

This seems like a gross miscalculation. Am I missing something?

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.

[Saquist]

Anwar wrote:

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It's a miscalculation, mainly because Warp Speed factors were never meant to mean anything. Going at whatever is considered the average warp speed would take you 1000 LY in 1 year according to VOY. So 75,000 LY is supposed to be a 75 year journey at maintainable speeds (since they can't keep going at maximum warp for that long, they have to slow down sometimes).

So the only concrete thing is the 1 year = 1000 LY, and even that was sort of inconsistent with prior TOS/TNG stories.

Bingo

Timo wrote:

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Starships, like most vehicles, are probably capable of short dashes at high speed, but incapable of sustaining that speed for any significant length of time.

All right, so on two other occasions it was claimed that the ship could sustain warp 9.975 (or at least this speed was called "sustainable cruising speed"), which would be even faster than warp 9.9. But another episode clearly established that even one minute at warp 9.7 would tear the ship apart - so apparently "sustainable" is typical military-industrial bullshitspeak and means "sustainable for a few seconds"...

Timo Saloniemi

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.