I'm working on an Excel spreadsheet that'll calculate the years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds it'll take to travel a given distance in light years. What I have so far only works for warp 1, and I can't seem to find out why it doesn't work for anything higher. So far, I enter a warp speed (TOS scale), it gives me the multiple of light, then m/s, kps, kph. warp: 2 c: =b6^3 m/s: =B7*299792458 (definition of light speed) kps: =B8/1000 kph: =B9*3600 light year: 9460730472580800 meters ly (km): =B12/1000 so, Alpha Centauri is 4.37 ly. time to travel at warp 2: =(F8*$B$13)/$B$9 or: (4.37*9460730472580.8)/2398339.66 which gives: 17,238,339 seconds That is a little over half a year, with a year being 31,557,600 seconds. now how would I convert that reliably to years, days, hours, minutes, seconds, so that I see: 0 years 150 days 4 hours 8 minutes 10 seconds when I enter a given warp speed? I've got the distance in light years to the closest 20 stars entered, so it'll calculate the time to travel automatically for all those stars, or at least, that's the hope anyhow. If anyone's good with Excel, I'd appreciate any help.
I don't mean to discourage you at all if number crunching is your thing, but... travel time in Trek is a highly variable concept dependent on the needs of the plot.
Depending on the story, going from Point A to Point B might take 3 days, 7 hours, 47 minutes at Warp 5 in an episode. In another episode, we might learn the actual distance is 14.3 lightyears. Then in a third story, it might take twice as long at Warp 6 to go that same distance.
http://www.anycalculator.com/warpcalculator.htm There's a website with a working calculator. But even that's flawed. I checked Voyager's 75,000 LY to get home at their max cruising speed of 9.975 and it showed me a bit over 5 years. Maybe they knew Janeway would stop to inspect every spec of space dust in between here and there when they cited the 70 year number.
Blame Janeway for wasting so much power on the holodecks, when they could have gotten home in season five!
I absolutely know the warp speed is as fast as the needs of the plot. But, I'm trying to avoid that in my story, so if it says it's a 12 day, 8 hour, 12 minute trip at warp 4, that's how long it'll take.
There are probably dozens of warp factor scales worked out by fans over the last 40 years for every series. Find one appropriate for ENT, perhaps one that's commonly accepted by those who explore such things (like the guys in the Trek Tech forum), and use it as your model. After you write the story, someone will eventually pop up and say "but such-and-such says..." and you can say "I used this particular scale here."
I'm working on the warp^3 formula. My question's more along the lines of 'how do I get Excel to show years, days, hours, minutes, seconds the right way?'
Take a look at mine Spoiler: Google Drive XLSX on Google Drive But the problem is what do you consider a year: 365 days or 365.25 or 365.2425 or some more correct...
What about the theory that they changed the Warp scale between TOS and TNG because they went over Warp 10 in TOS heaps of time without once devolving or any other creepy things happening.
Well i go by the idea that yeah if the went warp 9+ they could have done it in years..... But theres a diffrence to making that speed and maintaining it. Yeah the ship can ho 9.975 but only for a few minutes, longer and you risk tearing the ship apart or burning the engines out. Hence why warp 6 seems to be used alot. Maybe its the ideal speed to avoid damage and give the best fuel economy?
Then there's super-mega-hyper-warp in NuTrek, which allows a ship to travel from Earth to Vulcan in minutes.
I also think there may be subspace lanes were warp is faster and easier to maintain. Hence why even the NX-Ent was able to reach some distant places quicker than it should.
And my rule of if it stupid then its wrong applies... The writters obviosly had a brain fart and made a mistake seeing as voyger and most of startfleet never seem to use warp 9 unless its a emergancy.