Some writers of Trek seem like they have never cared enough about real distances in space versus speeds. There are many examples of locations in the galaxy being too quickly reached, but very few where they stuck to their charts and speeds. All of this was done for the convenience of plot, and I think that's fine to an extent and so long as the stories were good. What I'm wondering is, would it really be limiting to writers if they established canonical speeds for ships and locations for alien home worlds? For that matter, would it be so hard to think of space as 3D vs. 2D? Would a universe with defined locations and details be such a bad thing, or would it just hamper creativity? Is this amount of forethought more than any series producer could handle?
Astronomical correctness and plot
- Thread starter Ryan8bit
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I don't think it would really hinder creativity. But I do think the realities of TV production make it extremely low priority to do so. When they're rushing to get their show produced on time, on budget, the last thing they're going to worry about is how long it should take to get to Vulcan at warp 8 from Cardassia.
If you'd like to see a decent attempt at accuracy, I'd suggest reading Diane Duane's TOS novels. She seems to make an effort to consult a real star chart before she writes.
It may not have to be precise, but just having a general understanding of what is where might not be so bad.
Two weeks (if we're talking about TV and not movies, where ST:V failed hard) should be plenty of time to just realize what distances are not quite right. I'm going to use an example from Enterprise, since it is the clearest offender of establishing a law and then breaking it. In "Broken Bow", they say that Neptune and back in 6 minutes is roughly how fast the Enterprise is. Neptune is at its shortest, 4.3 billion km away, which would make a trip 8.6 billion km, or roughly one-thousandth of a light year. That would mean the speed was one-hundredth a light year per hour, or about 90 light years in a year. This actually wasn't too far off from the fan-described formula for TOS. But then they say that the Klingon homeworld is 4 days travel. Aside from the ridiculous political implications of that, in that amount of time, they should only be able to travel one light year, which isn't enough distance to even reach any star from here.
Now, of course this sounds nerdy and possibly over-analytical, but they have hired people who are science advisers, yet they make some pretty terrible mistakes. It doesn't seem too far fetched to me to just have a good portion of it established beforehand, and then to work from there. To me, it seems like a logical method of storytelling.
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Warp factors are used to obscure this whole thing, and no speed chart or any exact detail on how consistent or not consistent warp factors were when applied to real travel was ever given in an episode, so I'm not sure how they could "stick to" something that they themselves were determining by writing it. If they were to say it is "X days to Vulcan," saying it's reached "too quickly" is just a matter of fannish opinion.
Yes, backstage information exists which proposes speed equivalences for warp drive and such, and as fans we are acquainted with it. But as surprisingly often as this info is consistent with what we see in episodes, what makes it to air takes priority even if it isn't. By TV standards, the episodes have been pretty consistent.
Roddenberry wanted the travels between stars to approximate sea voyages of ships between ports of call, noting that drama would suffer if the ship could reach an emergency too quickly. Beyond nitpicking hours and minutes and such, the "big picture" on warp drive was a success: very few Treks ever seemed to violate the basic premise that the galaxy still required a long time to explore at warp drive and only a small part of it had been visited. (Star Trek V is arguably an example of one that did.)
Don't get me wrong: it bugs me as much as the next guy when they fly from DS9 to Earth in a runabout or when it's 4 days from Earth to the Klingon Homeworld instead of, say, 4 weeks. But as the canon determines what we know about warp drive, I guess ours is but to rationalize and not to expect that the writers should stick to a non-canon chart. Flirting with a speed equivalency in "Broken Bow" sure threatened to complicate the issue...but hey, we'd previously been told one shouldn't even *go* to warp "inside a solar system," so who the heck knows.
It's true, there is a lot of non-canon, but somewhat accepted ideas. However, there are several episodes that are shown to follow these ideas. But there are many more examples of inconsistencies. For instance, kudos to when they try using a real Star in the show, but then shame on them for not using them right. For instance, in TNG "Conspiracy", they travel to Dytallix B, which is a planet orbiting Mira. If this is the Mira we all know, that puts it somewhere around 400 light-years away. Then they travel to Earth in a short amount of time. Voyager pretty much got it right when they said that it would take 70 years to reach home because it was roughly 1000 light years per year (still pretty generous according to fan charts). Wouldn't 400 light-years take the Enterprise at minimum a couple months to travel?
Would it be so bad if they just used a set scale? You know what your story requires, so don't use Mira.
The only time I ever saw this as a problem was on Voyager when they'd travel a thousand light years and still see a Kazon or a Malon.
To be honest there are two reasons why this shouldn't be a very high priority.
1) The ease at which Star Trek depicts space travel as like zipping around town from place to place is silly anyway given our current understanding of the universe. All science fiction needs to immensely reduce the scope of space as a convention when in fact it is nigh impossible to travel around.
2) Even very accurate high warp speeds would not make space travel as depicted in star Trek easy. Anything below say warp seven still wouldn't get you very far. Using the common warp=light speed cubed formula warp 6 is 216 times the speed of light. There are about a hundred known stars within 20 light years/240 light months of Earth. Even to some of our closest neighbors at Warp 6 it would take a month to travel. The original Enterprise would need to travel 5 years just to get to the closest nebula.
It is best not to look to deeply into how sci-fi gets around the universe. That is one issue where it is more fi than sci.
To be honest there are two reasons why this shouldn't be a very high priority.
1) The ease at which Star Trek depicts space travel as like zipping around town from place to place is silly anyway given our current understanding of the universe. All science fiction needs to immensely reduce the scope of space as a convention when in fact it is nigh impossible to travel around.
2) Even very accurate high warp speeds would not make space travel as depicted in star Trek easy. Anything below say warp seven still wouldn't get you very far. Using the common warp=light speed cubed formula warp 6 is 216 times the speed of light. There are about a hundred known stars within 20 light years/240 light months of Earth. Even to some of our closest neighbors at Warp 6 it would take a month to travel. The original Enterprise would need to travel 5 years just to get to the closest nebula.
It is best not to look to deeply into how sci-fi gets around the universe. That is one issue where it is more fi than sci.
And then in First Contact, the Enterprise travels from the Neutral Zone to Earth while the same Borg battle is taking place.
I will agree that a set, consistant depiction of distance would be nice, and really, not that hard to accomplish. Just change a word from "hours" to "days" or "weeks" or whatever. But Unfortunately, such continuity will always be a low priority to the TV production people. It goes along the lines of what happened to Ritchie Cunningham's brother, Chuck, and how Andrew Keaton seemed to age a couple of years from one season to the next. As for science advisors, I personally just don't think they're listened to. They probably have less influence on a tv show production than the caterers. It just sounds highly intelligent to say "We have science advisors on our show." Good pr.
How long did it take Craptain Kirk to reach the center of the Galaxy? 
The writers often like to use identifiable stellar names, such as Rigel or Arcturus or Mira. Unfortunately, this is often a poor idea, because the most "famous" stars on the sky are "famous" specifically because they are very bright - which in turn almost always means they are incapable of hosting a star system similar to ours.
So basically, the writers should have a double reason to avoid "real" locations. Not only do real stars give us a means to judge and condemn their travel time choices, they also ill befit the Trek plots which require the presence of Class M planets at those locations.
Still, I generally feel that warp drive and the quoted distances and travel times are in good enough an agreement. It just requires me to believe that a long journey from A to Z can be conducted faster than the sum of short hops from A to B to C to... to X to Y to Z. That is, warp drive gets faster when you stay at warp longer. Sounds like natural enough an assumption anyway.
The rule-of-thumb would seem to be that a ship can span 1,000 ly per year (since a year requires lots of pit stops), but perhaps 500 ly per month (since a month requires fewer pit stops in absolute and relative terms), and 200 ly per week (an almost straight run), but only 0.5 ly per hour (because most of it is spent in acceleration - that is, the first hour at warp 5 is slower than the subsequent hours at warp 5).
In such a setup, the error bars get so wide that basically anything goes, but it's still theoretically systematic.
Timo Saloniemi
So basically, the writers should have a double reason to avoid "real" locations. Not only do real stars give us a means to judge and condemn their travel time choices, they also ill befit the Trek plots which require the presence of Class M planets at those locations.
Still, I generally feel that warp drive and the quoted distances and travel times are in good enough an agreement. It just requires me to believe that a long journey from A to Z can be conducted faster than the sum of short hops from A to B to C to... to X to Y to Z. That is, warp drive gets faster when you stay at warp longer. Sounds like natural enough an assumption anyway.
The rule-of-thumb would seem to be that a ship can span 1,000 ly per year (since a year requires lots of pit stops), but perhaps 500 ly per month (since a month requires fewer pit stops in absolute and relative terms), and 200 ly per week (an almost straight run), but only 0.5 ly per hour (because most of it is spent in acceleration - that is, the first hour at warp 5 is slower than the subsequent hours at warp 5).
In such a setup, the error bars get so wide that basically anything goes, but it's still theoretically systematic.
Timo Saloniemi
This wasn't too bad but the fact that they did get the Neptune and back in 6 minutes thing right (As well km/s in Fight or Flight) ment that there was some thought put into it, they just chose to ignore it.
To be sure, we already have every reason to believe that warp travel inside or close to star systems is significantly slower than warp travel in deep space.
It would be perfectly consistent if the speed of an Earth-Neptune warp five run were less than one tenth the speed of a Neptune-Vulcan warp five run. This would explain to satisfaction why ships slow down to impulse speed when entering a star system even when there is an emergency in "BoBW"; why a trip of several hours at warp nine doesn't take the ship farther than the distance backtracked in two months by a sublight asteroid in "Paradise Syndrome"; why ships so often opt to send sublight shuttlecraft to star systems instead of warping in, beaming down the passenger, and warping out; and why there is virtually no warp combat, as combat so often takes place within star systems.
Perhaps some star systems are more warp-hostile than others, explaining why slowing down at Sol is mandatory in "BoBW" but slowing down at other star systems is not necessarily done. Even more conveniently, it could be argued that warp-hostility is a time-dependent phenomenon, analogous to bad weather, and that there was a horrible gale during "BoBW". Certainly the general naval analogy would be both consistent and entertaining: you just don't go all out in shallows, and if you try it anyway, you "risk" it, and you lose some efficiency when your props churn up mud and your hull fights the waves.
Timo Saloniemi
It would be perfectly consistent if the speed of an Earth-Neptune warp five run were less than one tenth the speed of a Neptune-Vulcan warp five run. This would explain to satisfaction why ships slow down to impulse speed when entering a star system even when there is an emergency in "BoBW"; why a trip of several hours at warp nine doesn't take the ship farther than the distance backtracked in two months by a sublight asteroid in "Paradise Syndrome"; why ships so often opt to send sublight shuttlecraft to star systems instead of warping in, beaming down the passenger, and warping out; and why there is virtually no warp combat, as combat so often takes place within star systems.
Perhaps some star systems are more warp-hostile than others, explaining why slowing down at Sol is mandatory in "BoBW" but slowing down at other star systems is not necessarily done. Even more conveniently, it could be argued that warp-hostility is a time-dependent phenomenon, analogous to bad weather, and that there was a horrible gale during "BoBW". Certainly the general naval analogy would be both consistent and entertaining: you just don't go all out in shallows, and if you try it anyway, you "risk" it, and you lose some efficiency when your props churn up mud and your hull fights the waves.
Timo Saloniemi
Not really. The implication is that it's dangerous or risky, not inefficient.
And it doesn't really matter what kind of retconning or fan explanations one can come up with to rectify the mistakes of "Broken Bow" because it was pretty clear that somebody consulted some sort of warp scale and did the math. Yet they didn't think about any of the other distances. Besides, if they can get to Neptune and back in six minutes, and that's considered slow, then Voyager should have been able to get home in a couple years. The whole galaxy should have been explored by the time Voyager began.
Looking at it from the opposite direction, what would an accurate travel time do to the drama of the story? If we suppose, for the sake of argument, that the distance is 60 light years, that would be a trip of about 6 months at warp 5. Could the dramatic tension of the plot be sustained? What changes would have to be made to the story? How would the audience feel about whole weeks of the ship's first voyage disappearing in a jump cut?
Maybe there is a way to make it work, but my first, gut-level reaction is that they made the right choice dramatically, however stupid it was from a techical standpoint.
Of course, they could have avoided the choice between drama and technical accuracy in the first place by scrapping "Broken Bow" entirely and hinging a plot around a trip to Alpha Centauri.
Marian
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This was the pitfall of Enterprise, really. They wanted to do TNG but in a different time frame. However, you can't really tell that the ships 200 years later are faster because they always travel at the speed of plot. At any rate, a four day journey in 2150 should take maybe four hours in 2350. That is way too fast, and you'd think the Klingons would've attacked Earth since it was so close, but they never did. They shouldn't have included the Klingons to begin with, and they just added to the idea that the Star Trek universe gets smaller and smaller, and everything becomes closer together. The prequel was not thought out very well.
I'm guessing you're not familiar with the concept of Wormholes?
I'm guessing you never watched SG enough to notice the ships, starting with the occasional small ship taken from the goa'uld and ending with engines that could travel from galaxy to galaxy.
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