Why wasn't there an Alternate Timeline episode where Voyager became a generation ship?

I think the Dauntless was depicted as being quite a bit smaller than Voyager in Hope & Fear - I'm reasonably sure there was a lot of talk about the crew not being able to take much with them etc.

 

Because Janeway is so stubborn and adamant at getting the ship home that there is simply no alternate universe in which she accepts this possibility. There may be alternate timelines in which she dies, but never that.

 

There literally is, and I should know: https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Places_of_Exile

 

That would have been an interesting direction for the show to go in, and of course there are fanfic stories where this idea has been explored.

Janeway's an idiot for not planning for this. In the episode where Sam Wildman announces her pregnancy, there should never have been the slightest consideration that Janeway could ask or order her to terminate, and the bit of dialogue where Janeway muses to Chakotay about whether she should allow "fraternizing" is also ridiculous. Who did she expect would still be around in 75 years to reach Earth? Certainly not herself or Chakotay, as that would have put them well over 100. Even Tuvok would have been elderly by that time, so I guess it would be up to Vorik and Harry (don't recall if Naomi had been born by the time of that conversation).

Not canon, as the website says. The show itself should have had the characters preparing for the next generation, but of course Janeway didn't even think of starting any formal kind of schooling when the Borg kids came along. They were just passed around to whichever crewmember might have a free half hour here and there, and I'd bet there were a number of subjects that most Federation kids would learn that the kids on the ship didn't, either because of a lack of anyone qualified to teach them, or a lack of interest.

 

Surely Voyager has giant turbolift funhouses like Discovery that could be refitted to living quarters a bit like the inside of the Navoo/Medina

 

I think they deliberately didn't do that to enhance the unconventional nature of how love between humans and Ocampa would play itself out. If Linnis had, say, an 18 year lifespan (seems reasonable for a half-Ocampa), she'd still have been fairly young when Kes died. And Andrew, with, say, a 30 year lifespan, would be much younger as well.

With romances between species with disparate lifespans, I think you have to be forgiving. And I think that it was cool that Voyager gave us one episode where they really explored how Kes's life and descendants might have played out.

 

IIRC, Enterprise's E-Squared was originally a rejected Voyager story outline.

 

They rarely go at warp 9 and only for short trips when they're in a hurry. Usually, Janeway orders warp 6, so given the times when they're stuck somewhere for one reason or another or when they have to make a detour (like the planet of the brunali where they go once, stay there for some time and then return there to ask questions. That puts their average speed somewhere around warp 5 or even warp 4.

 

Sticking to the cubic scale warp 4 equates to 64c and warp 5 to 125c so the journey would take somewhere between 560 and 1093.75 Earth years.

 

Indeed, IOW a lot longer than what we've seen. Near the ending they were 30, 000 light-years away, that is 45, 000 light-years in seven years!!! Even with Kes' boost that's a lot farther than they should have been.

 

Yeah they really didn't think that one out in the writers room, yes Earth is 75 years away at max cruise speed, but reality of space is, you never do that. Just like a road trip, gps says 13 hours, better plan for 15+ for breaks, gas, etc.

A generational ship episode would have taken away from the Finale, as in, that episode would have to do exactly what the finale done, Reset itself in some way, by time travel, message (Timeless) or some other technobable way to erase that future.
A good idea would be to have a switch out, say 1 episode in the future, 1 episode in the current, and swap for say 6 episodes leading to a crossover, and then find a way for the crews future children to survive ( i do hate the multitude of episodes where the reset vanishes people from existance) Maybe if theres like 30 or 40, that they transfer to the current voyager, and the future voyager sacrifices itself with the old crew.
This would give them new crew members, so more stories, bit of family drama, and new technology.

 

Some timeframes...

Warp 6 (about 400c) - 175 years.
Warp 8 (about 1000c) - 70 years.
Warp 9.975 (about 5000c) - 14 years.

I personally think they should have lowered Voyager's top speed to Warp 9.73, or 2250c, with the idea that it was like driving your car at its stated top speed of 135 mph: you can't do it for long. A long-distance cruising speed with maximum efficiency, equivalent to setting your cruise control at 60, is Warp 8, or 1000c (or about 45% of top speed). Going warp 8 in a ship that can hit 9.975 is more like driving your car at 27.

 

The so-called "official" warp speed tables have never come anywhere near the actual speeds depicted onscreen, so they're useless for any meaningful calculation. There's long been an assumption (alluded to in the Okuda reference texts) that the table figures are only a baseline and that the actual speed for a given warp factor varies depending on local space and subspace conditions. Although the figures are so much slower than the actual indicated speeds onscreen that I wonder why they even postulated they were that low.

Well, yes, that's always been a given. Even back on TOS, warp 6 was the maximum standard cruising speed and anything above it put a strain on the engines and couldn't be sustained indefinitely. In TNG, I think it was anything above warp 8. The tech manual says that at 9.9, the engines automatically shut down after 10 minutes.

It's not a linear relationship, though, given that the effective velocity increases exponentially in proportion to the amount of power applied (with the warp factors up to 9 representing a linear increase in power use). Also, warp 9 is the last stable warp shell configuration, which is why warp 10 is set at infinity. So the curve above warp 9 is totally different from the curve below it. So any attempt to draw an analogy to automotive performance is totally inapplicable.

 

The writers would like you, I think. You're effectively giving full license to "maximum speed is whatever the story demands". So it's perfectly Ok to say that a ship that can travel W9.975 will require 70 years, or 50, or 45, or 95, or 110, or whatever to cross the galaxy.

I, on the other hand, prefer that writers be a little more accountable.

 

I am not a CBS or Paramount executive and thus have no authority to give "license" to anyone involved with Star Trek. (On the contrary, I am a freelance contractor of a publisher licensed by CBS.) Spectators cannot call the plays, merely discuss them after the fact.

 

They've always played fast and loose with how fast warp is, however, in the "Big Picture" mountain view, its been a bit more stable. In Enterprise, Warp 5 is about 1 light year a day, which they relatively, more than any other show, abided by most of the time.
Voyager done 3 ly a day at i believe warp 8 or so, so room for maximum warp to go much faster, but not as fast as depicted, which is fine, suspension of disbelief is one of the hallmarks of the show. To me its something they know, and that I hope they don't trash to hard or often.

 

Yet in TMP Vulcan was 4 days away from Earth. Vulcan is 16ly from Earth so a speed of 4ly per day. Bit hard to do a direct compare as we don't know what speed the Enterprise would have been doing But as you say they've played fast and loose with just how fast each warp factor is.

 

And the Federation is 8000 ly across, low estimate. At Warp 6, you'd need 20 years to cross it. And at Warp 8, Voyager would have been in friendly space 4 years before reaching Earth.

 

Not according to the Star Charts maps, which have been more or less canonized by the onscreen graphics based on them in recent shows. Those make it only a few hundred light years across. Picard claimed in FC that the Federation was "spread across 8000 light years," but there's no way to parse that line that makes sense. Heck, the galactic disk is only a thousand or so light years thick. And a mere 150 member worlds within an 8000-ly diameter would be almost homeopathically sparse.

 

150 in a 1000Ly block would be sparse, with 10's of lightyears between habitable systems. At listed trek speeds, going from 1 end to another would take a Year.
So it seems to me there are either ALOT of empty star systems like red dwarfs (which are a shed load), alot of worlds that aren't up Technology wise, or not everybody in that expanse is a member... probably both.
So lets say: A world in "Federation Space" achieves warp, and has had first contact. The federation has already cleared out say a 10ly radius for them to explore and colonize.
But lets say, they don't want to join after some time in the big leagues, does the federation now try to get atleast a trade treaty with them?
just thoughts.