Another Enterprise!
You can solve that by spending more time at a specific location and going into more detail about a species/culture/planet/location before moving on.
What is your personal head canon?
- Thread starter AmandaSmith
- Start date
They could have done the probe thing anyway.
The Friendship one probe was tracked by Starfleet until 2248, and it was roughly at the location they expected it to be in the late 24th century, so apparently no wormhole or other freak accident was involved, and the probe was capable of covering those 30.000 light years or more in 3 centuries by itself. Friendship one was built in 2067, only 4 years after the invention of warp drive, by a world that still must have been recovering. So by the standards of 23rd or 24th century Starfleet that would have been a very primitive probe and they should be able to send out far more capable ones.
Yeah, but practically nothing about Friendship 1 stands up to scrutiny.
The probe was launched in 2067. It was found 30,000 lightyears away in 2378 on Otrin's planet, though it must have crashed decades if not a century before then. So that's ~30,000 lightyears in ~200 years. Which means it was sustaining an average speed of around 150c, or warp 5.3 on the TOS scale.
Also, we know from various technical manuals that starships tend to have typically three years of fuel aboard when fully supplied, but somehow Friendship 1 sustained warp 5.3 for over two hundred freaking years. Yes, it can refuel deuterium with the Bussard collectors, but where the hell did all its antimatter come from!?
Why the hell did people get excited about the NX-01 when Friendship 1 is clearly technologically superior!
^ In fact, that's the point I wanted to make. The friendship one probe capabilities are ridiculous. With any sensible technological progression from that in the next few centuries (and development of production means in that post-scarcity society), exploring the galaxy should have been far easier and have been further along by the time TOS (and certainly TNG) rolls around.
2378
- 2067
= 311
Sm I missing why you said ~200? Was that just a typo or does the math need adjusted? 30,000 ly fir 300 years comes to 100ly a year.
During the exodus, the proto-Romulans created replicants — and those eventually rose up, dumping the biological survivors on Remus to mutate into the Remans. Though most of them don’t know it, the Romulans are all “cylons” and always have been, and that fed into their new cultural obsession with secrecy (and, paradoxically, their fear of artificial intelligence), although now only the highest Zhat Vash leadership knows this.
Or it doesn't have the fuel capacity and it got caught up in a "UnderSpace" lane just like USS Voyager and managed to pop out near the planet it crash landed on.
"UnderSpace" is supposedly incredibly vast, uncharted, and usually committed to a persons memory for secrecy reasons.
That's a possibility, but in that case I wouldn't expect Starfleet to have been able to track it to very close to where Voyager eventually found it.
StarFleet might've eventually received a transmission home many many years later due to slow transmission speeds and only "Recently" showed up to co-incide with Voyager's path home.
You literally quoted the bit where I explain why it's ~200 rather than ~300 but apparently ignored it.
Voyager (or Trek as a whole) having ridiculous, impossible science details that don’t add up? Never!
They also have ridiculous, impossible short-cuts that can be used to fix those issues that "Don't Add Up".
If they didn't have enough fuel, then a Short Cut must've been encountered.
You got to ask yourself, how did the Refit Constitution Class Enterprise-A reach Sha Ka'Ree that was close to the Great Barrier.
Voyager took quite a while to reach home and it had numerous short cuts and is orders of magnitude faster than the Refit Enterprise.
The obvious solution, "UnderSpace Shortcut".
Yes, I missed where you postulated the probe crashed decades to a century ago.
I didn't "postulate". It's apparent from the episode that it didn't arrive at Otrin's planet recently. "We had decades to think about it [the reason you sent the probe]" Otrin tells Janeway. Reverse engineering the probe, building an antimatter power grid, and then creating antimatter weapons would have taken significant time. Memory Alpha lists Friendship 1 as being destroyed in the 23rd century around the time that Starfleet lost contact with it.
Just my own headcanon, but I seriously doubt the Federation is that huge. On the scale of this image the Federation would be a dot the size of this period .
The galaxy is 100,000 light years across, correct? Picard said that the Federation spanned 8000 lightyears, in First Contact. (in which direction, I don't know. Is it up or down, as the spacecrow flies?)
I'm guessing the Federation would be more like the size of this emoji
on that scale.
I'm guessing the Federation would be more like the size of this emoji
on that scale.
The UFP is technically a "Dot", it just happens to be a "Dot" based on what you're referencing as scale.
Given that Space is 3D:
The size of our Milky Way Galaxy is pretty large once you factor in all the larger structures.
While Star Trek was made in reference to the "Thin Disk" section of our Milky Way Galaxy, it's a VERY incomplete view of our actual Galaxy and all it's Galactic Structures.
There are ALOT more Star Systems floating out & about in the other structures as well, just with less Star Density then in the "Thin Disk" section. Those are you usally 'Older Star Systems'.
Space is HUGE.
To me & using a proper reference of 'Our Universe' as "Scale", even using our 'Milky Way Galaxy' as "Scale", it makes the UFP's territory look PUNY & TINY in the grand scheme of things.
We cover < 1% of the Thin Disk Section, hell we're less than ½% of the Thin Disk Section in a Top-Down 2D view.
Imagine how much smaller they figure out the UFP Territory is once we see it in "Full 3D" and compare it to the rest of the volume of the Thin Disk.
So yeah, as grand as our beloved precious UFP is, we're still PUNY.
Hell look at the Dominion's Territory or "The Borg's" territory, they're larger than the UFP by a size-able margin.
Yet we think we're special.
In reality, we're not as special as we think we are.
I never bought the 8,000 LY across from First Contact as a full sphere (spherical) diameter. That would make the Federation ridiculously huge, given the low member of core worlds (<200). At best, I could believe 8,000 LY is the distance between the two most remote and far-flung (isolated) outposts of the Federation with huge swathes of non-Federation space in between.
Yeah, I can buy that the Federation has outposts that far out, well away from the core worlds.
Something like this maybe.
One wonders though whether the Federation could defend such outposts if they were attacked. I mean, going by the ~1000 LY/year rule of thumb (that Voyager seems capable of) it would mean the farthest of such outposts would be (almost) 4 years out from the core territory. Possibly somewhat shorter (the 1000 LY/year rule might hold only for the longest distances), but still, it seems such outposts/worlds would need to depend almost entirely on their own means of defense.
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