Or possible the ship's computer initiated the "SOS" when the suspended animation chambers began to fail. By the time the Enterprise found the ship, a dozen of Khan's people had perished. The Enterprise first detected the ship on it's scanners, it was only when the Botany Bay was just outside of visual range that Uhura picked up it's signal. The Botany Bay's radio signal might not have possessed much range. Well off the beaten trail, who would have pick up the signal? Depends, was the Botany Bay on a direct line between two destinations, I would imagine (imo) that most civilian traffic in the central Federation is point A to point B. The corridor linking Sol with Alpha Centauri would be frequently used, but move a quarter light year to one side and it gets empty and lonely. ")
Given that warp drive can reach even fairly distant stars in a matter of days or weeks, would there be any motivation to go from A to Z through all the letters of the alphabet? I'd imagine instead that every system A would be a node to separate, beeline-direct routes to B, C, D, E and so forth, with every part of the sky covered. Instead of limiting the traffic around A to specific spacelanes, the controllers would do their best to spread it out to alleviate congestion... Add to that people on pleasure cruises in short range vessels, various robots exploiting the Oort cloud, and the assets needed to shepherd the said. Any star system is likely to be an extremely busy place, if not in daily terms, then in terms of exposure over a couple of decades let alone centuries. Admittedly, though, not even Starfleet ships vigilantly scan their surroundings unless there's a specific reason. But I'd imagine some sort of a traffic control sensor at Earth does - and would know the exact positions of trillions of pieces of debris around Sol at any given moment, out to a range of the Oort cloud at least. Sorting out pieces that are on an outbound trajectory from Earth would be a breeze, and some student or other would already have run a search for such, tagging any ancient spacecraft for extra study credit. IMHO, hiding a spacecraft anywhere near Sol requires a cloaking device, not just basic passivity. Timo Saloniemi
Considering the size of the "hey look, it's a DY100" bubble, a warp ship would have to be basically on top of it, to encounter it. a non-Starfleet ship (lacking starfleet sensors) would be more likely to simply brush it aside with their deflectors. ")
Perhaps so - but such an explanation would not match the "Nobody goes through here any more" one given in the episode... Timo Saloniemi
It was out there two and a half centuries, but I would think it highly likely that no one had ever been near the Botany Bay. The Enterprise pick up a sublight ship with it's mid 23rd century sensors where none belonged. A few decades before a Starfleet ship might have been incapable of doing the same thing from the same distance.
Perhaps; I couldn't find any instance of a "b" that didn't also have an "a." Haven't found any guidelines online that explain the criteria for assigning the letter so maybe the assignment is arbitrary. As to what 2002-45a, it could be a lifter; could also be another probe that Nomad piggy-backed a ride on ala Cassini-Huygens. The real 202-45a was a Russian resupply to the ISS. Personally, I think it is beyond cool that they had the wherewithal to add such a detail to the diagram.
Trek is very forgiving to FTL. We saw with the bjoran sailing ship that it was somehow pushed into warp. I wondered at first if the Klingon BoP had a FTL impulse to it. Some method whereby superluminal effects could be had for a novel sublight drive that has something happen to it somehow.
One reason I'm fond of keeping DY-100 sublight but making her very high sublight is that some 270 years of high speed travel would then indeed only amount to 200 years of sleep for Khan, thanks to Einstein... If DY-100 was that good (0.45 times lightspeed attained early on is the minimum requirement for dropping 270 years to a figure that could be rounded down to 200), then NOMAD could have been a viable interstellar probe as well. One wonders about the size of NOMAD... The picture included no scale bar. Shorter or taller than DY-100? Bigger or smaller than the Enterprise? We similarly know next to nothing about the size of the later, warp-capable Friendship 1, save for some backstage art that makes her clearly ship-sized rather than thrash-can-sized. Bigger probes might be more plausible, I guess. Certainly Kirk and pals consider the teeny weeny neo-NOMAD an unlikely candidate for anything terrestrial, be it probe or ship - and the picture doesn't show any components we could identify with neo-NOMAD counterparts. Perhaps Tan Ru only managed to salvage a small core memory element of the massive original? Timo Saloniemi
But if a DY-100 was capable of obtaining such speeds, why then do they need sleepers just for inter-system travel between planets?
The answer may have been provided in the episode: Khan and Co. could have enhanced the BB's performance or endurance, making it an atypical DY-100.
The other factor is acceleration. It would suffice if Khan were to reach 0.45 c in five years - but such acceleration would not yet allow him to reach Mars in a week, like the later Ares era vessels did. We don't know how ships of those eras were propelled, but near-infinite endurance, that is, freedom from propellant expenditude, might have been a key characteristic. In Kirk's time, impulse travel will exhaust fuel very quickly ("The Doomsday Machine"), but warp travel won't; perhaps DY-100 and Ares propulsion indeed is more closely related to warp than impulse, despite probably being sublight? Timo Saloniemi
^^Depends on where you put the sleepers: BB could have discarded 10 fuel containers before the Enterprise found it. Perhaps in the ST universe, NERVA wasn't cancelled, with two additional decades of advances plus Khan's possible enhancements?
I'm of the opinion that the Botany Bay must have had non-Newtonian drive of some sort, given that the model is quite devoid of anything resembling a rocket exhaust. --Alex
Or she could have been the upper stage of a multi-stage rocket ten kilometers long. Even the photographs and models of just the onscreen model being launched from Earth with a cluster of boosters wouldn't contradict that interpretation: the ten-kilometer-long booster would be waiting in orbit for a rendezvous with the crew section. However, the more compact and mundane the Botany Bay, the more likely that she could slip through the cracks and escape with Khan aboard and nobody the wiser... Personally, I'm certain DY-100 even in its factory-specs version had fantastic non-Newtonian propulsion. After all, the Botany Bay had artificial gravity, a feature our heroes clearly found unsurprising. That technology really ought to give Newton a wallop. Timo Saloniemi
Hmm, but the Mars probe we saw during Voyager didn't have artificial gravity. And it was from thirty or forty years after Botany Bay. Couple of possibilities, the DY-100 was solely of Indian manufacture, and they weren't sharing artificial gravity technology. Or, for the Mars probe mission artificial gravity was considered a un-necessary "frill"
I am unconvinced that BB has any warp drive along with Nomad. BB could have dropped initial boosters snd/or fuel tanks and the Enterprise would have no clue visually.
We could say that primitive artificial gravity was the opposite of the better-known variant in that it was expensive to maintain. Thus, the Ares IV crew would turn it off whenever they could, and so would the Botany Bay folks - but AG would come back on automatically in certain situations, such as the awakening cycle that the proximity of the Enterprise triggered. That hits two bumps, though: AG elsewhere in Trek is inexpensive to maintain indefinitely, and the Botany Bay interior seems designed for constant gravity (no handles anywhere to facilitate zero-gee movement, no straps or velcroes in the cryochambers to keep the occupants from rattling about). I'd be happier arguing that Ares IV did in fact have full AG, and this was pressing Kelly to his seat as he was orbiting Mars. It was only after the "gravity ellipse" hit the ship that she lost AG and Kelly started floating around (making use of the handholds installed "just in case"). Timo Saloniemi