Bajor's only about 60ly from Earth, a 24th century shuttle craft, most of which relied on fusion reactors for warp travel, could have made the trip in somewhere between 1-3 months.
Functionally speaking, and assuming Warp Travel was the only possible method of FTL, it would have basically been a return to the "Enterprise" era where you had "long haul" transports with months of travel time needed to get between various far flung Federation worlds.
Realistically though, even assuming no way was ever found to stabilize synthetic benemite, they would have just started constant synthesis of the crystals on various worlds and created a network of gas stations that allowed ships to replace theirs immediately any time they de-crystalized.
Or set up transwarp/subspace corridors between systems.
Hmm, so i "learned" a lot looking into this.
Bajor might be 60 or so lightyears from "the core Federation worlds" or it might be 200 or so, depending on the various canon sources used.
TNG and later shuttlecraft (and DIS too, due to frankly retconning), did have warp capacity. But I don't think it is clearly answered in canon whether their warp capability was powered by fusion or M/AM reaction. The few explicit mentions of their warp capability describe the millicochrane rating of the nacells, and fandom seems to have concluded that small M/AM reactors are present in the nacelles, walls, or floors of the shuttles.
However, if shuttles could rely only on fusion power, and could maintain warp 5 (TNG scale) for several months (or could change shuttles at multiple stops), and Bajor was only 60 lightyears away, then Ake could have made the trip in about 3 months. So possible, a stretch, but possible.
So, it seems (if the fusion part is right) they could do this kind of travel. I guess whether those trips happen and how common they are depend on the need for such a long-distance travel and the relative worth of it. But this, to me, argues that the collapse of the Federation and its failure to restore itself sooner was more the result of (1) the immediate disastrous impacts of the Burn and (2) ongoing social/political issues, rather than the longterm technical/transport restrictions. (Which one might hope would be the point or focus of a sci-fi/alegorical show like Trek. Maybe I should go back and rewatch DIS to see what my impression is this time around.)
A lot of "ifs" to get to this point, but maybe we will get some further exploration of these issues in SFA to augment the rather limited exploration we got from DIS. But I fear it is more likely it will be ignored in preference to more shiny graphics, more DOTs, and more punching scenes.
Really liked this episode. Not perfect by any means but it mostly worked for me. Hunter and Giammati brought their A games. And the kids weren’t terrible.
I LOVE that the way she sits in the chair bugs so many people.
I even liked the needle drop at the end, wish they had used the original version instead of the weepy cover version but it fit.
Not sure what to make of the Doctor having a sad reaction to hearing Gwen’s name.
Not a fan of the Cerritos erasure in the opening 60th Anniversary Tag…but I get them skipping the Protostar.
8/10
I liked the references to Prodigy. I think the Doc is sad about her ultimate fate which, thanks to Netflix, we may never know.
They should revise the graphics to include the Cerritos and the Protostar. [#justiceforanimation] Why do you "get" them skipping it?
Speed of plot.
