A frieghter's maximum speed

[Wingsley]

In "Friday's Child", Sulu speculates that best the S.S. Deirdre (identified as a frieghter) could manage is Warp 2. Scotty didn't seem to disagree about "a frieghter's maximum speed".

Does this mean that most Earth and/or Federation spacecraft that aren't starships-of-the-line (such as "frieghters") can only manage Warp 2 in the TOS era? Or is there a rhetorical loophole here that would allow Deirdre and her peers to at least be closer in their performance to ships like the Enterprise than that?

 

[Timo]

It could be the simple statistical-economical truth. Merchant shipping during WWII was in theory technologically perfectly capable of maintaining twenty knots, but it had not been economically viable to upgrade any considerable portion of the fleet to utilize that technology and get past ten knots of cruising speed. Most Earth transports in the mid-23rd century might still use pre-ENT speeds because they had orignally carved a market niche for those particular speeds and had no interest in upgrading; alien transports might handle the high speed market, but SS Deirdre wasn't one of those.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JNG]

Freighters taking years in their journeys in the TOS era is hard to swallow for sure, and I think it's best to assume that Deirdre, the real one, is an older ship--maybe one somewhat slower than the state of the art, running some sort of boring goods on some sort of low-priority run where she'd been doing it forever and any cargo runs requiring greater speed were handled by newer ships.

In bigger stretches, they might have only meant "travel warp 2" over the distance in question at which they were searching, or perhaps the fact that she was supposedly part of a convoy could come into it somehow...

 

[Timo]

But warp two doesn't necessarily translate to years of travel time - Kirk often specified that speed for his interstellar journeys.

It might be that warp two ships in the TOS era do shorter routes than in the ENT era, and thus remain competitive - or in reverse, that the ships in the ENT era were not competitive over short distances, so they had to carve a niche in the market of long distance shipping of not urgently needed goods. Thus, warp 2 is perfectly good for going from star to star, but the ENT era human merchants had to go between particularly distant stars to find customers, and thus spent months or years sailing from port to port.

Compare, say, to how sailing ships continued to ship grain from Australia to Europe well into the 20th century, since grain wasn't a time-critical commodity and the fast steamships were better used for other types of merchandise.

We know that warp 3 is just fine for some ships even in the TNG era; Kivas Fajo's ship falls in this category, and this guy wanted to get around, so warp 3 might have been better than the average of the era.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Santaman]

I wonder then how fast a Sydney class ship would be them, she has probably a tuned down version of the powerplant and nacelles of the refit Constitution while being quite a lot bigger.

 

[Timo]

Well, she was Starfleet. Military transports are sometimes built to be very fast, either when they have a job of providing supplies for combat vessels while underway, or when the stuff they deliver is time-critical, or when they are supposed to haul supplies for the early waves of an amphibious assault operation and thus travel with the combat vessels at high fleet speed.

For all we know, she had a slightly more powerful drive system than her cruiser stablemates.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Vance]

I dunno, no matter WHICH version of 'warp' you're looking at, Warp 2 is dog-awful slow. Just going between two systems really would take years, which would make the journey a little pointless. (I think, in all honesty, the writer of that line of dialog didn't really think through what Warp 2 really MEANT.)

Definately one of those lines on TOS where the 'doesn't work' rule comes to apply. Sulu said it, but the writer clealy made a mistake. You really need warp 4, minimum, to make interstellar freight a worthwhile endeavour.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Says who? We have dozens of easily-hijacked container ships of gigantic proportions that take weeks to get megatons of cheap clothes and materials from the Philippines to North America, often the LONG way around by way of Europe. Meanwhile, there's also a huge market for getting smaller amounts of the same stuff the same distance in mere days by cargo jet, and in mere hours by dedicated courier.

So, just scale up. Whereas the Federation may have a huge need for prefab colony materials or industrial replicator whatsits, there doesn't necessarily follow a need in the economy to get it there RIGHT NOW - so you have the Woden and other low and slow haulers to get stuff around at slow speeds, crewed by people who honestly don't mind being stuck on a ship for a multi-year tour (if you don't already automate these ships, as we've often seen). Have livestock or passengers? Hop on a higher-speed freighter that can get you there in mere weeks. And hey, what if you have an ambassador who needs to get to a trouble spot quickly? Well, if you can't charter a really expensive Vulcan warp sled, look out - Starfleet's got them fancy starships capable of warp eight or more!

Mark

 

[Wingsley]

Well, let me throw another wrinkle into this discussion...

Call me a heretic if you must, but I'm a fan of "Star Trek Maps" (Bantam, 1980), a set of star charts and a guide that contained a discussion on warp drive and relevant planets visited by the Starship Enterprise in TOS. One passage in the "Maps" covered "Cochrane's formula", which added a variable to the equation to boost warp speeds depending on environment. "Cochrane's Variable", denoted by the Greek letter chi, was meant to account for deep space gravitational distortion's effect on subspace. Based on what astronomy has determined since TOS, I assumed that Cochrane's Variable was determined by the mysterious presence of dark matter and/or dark energy (like how the Enterprise's warp engines shut down upon entering the Barrier in "Where No Man Has Gone Before") whose location and behavior was not fully understood.

So in order to figure warp velocity using "Cochrane's Formula" you would take the warp factor cubed, multiply it by the speed of light, and also multiply that product by Cochrane's variable, which would be adjusted depending upon environment. Given this, Warp 2 may be a few thousand times the speed of light along charted "space lanes", but it may take years to cross similar distances on a frontier where dark matter/energy do not provide the necessary "trade wind".

If we assume all of this, the Deirdre could possibly be a civvy Warp 2 freighter, and it could cover some mileage on the space lanes before "dropping off the grid" to enter the "frontier".

So if we can agree that ships like the Deirdre and Harry Mudd's scout (and Cyrano Jone's scout, plus maybe the Space Cruiser Aurora) are all at least somehow technologically related, and may be limited to low-warp speeds, then maybe it is possible that even a Warp 2 ship can get you somewhere without it necessarily taking decades.

 

[Vance]

Says who?

We're not talking a matter of weeks or even months, though, we're talking a matter of years or even decades difference in time, even with the infamous "warp is a random number, really, thanks to the Cochrane Variable" (which would make warp speeds USELESS, by the way). I'm talking about putting in an order, and my GRANDCHILDREN being the ones to recieve it.

 

[Santaman]

I only can think of one logical conclusion, warp 2-3 freighters are for short distances unless they're sucked into a wormhole/plothole that transports them by accident to someplace far from their usual routes.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Then as mentioned, hire yourslef a warp sled. However, if you're running a government where your toolaberry wine takes three years to ferment anyway, then save yourself some latinum and have them on a cheap and slow hauler. And so on.

Economically speaking, there should be no reason NOT to have slower delivery of goods if not every Federation freighter can handle warp four or more. We're talking thousands, or even tens of thousands of civilian ships which in the TOS time frame was arguably still translating to a uniformly high warp speed capability. If the economy can only crank out a few hundred warp five engines at a time in new build ships, or only a few hundred more to retrofit older ships (and I'd imagine a warp engine is hardly plug and play technology), then of course you'll have many slower ships around. By TNG, of course more ships will be capable of higher warpo speed,s and we get even more rapid expansion...

Mark

 

[Wingsley]

Says who?

"warp is a random number, really, thanks to the Cochrane Variable" (which would make warp speeds USELESS, by the way). I'm talking about putting in an order, and my GRANDCHILDREN being the ones to recieve it.

I do not agree that warp speeds/factors are "useless", only that their meaning changes depending on the context they are being applied in. This is a foregone conclusion in deep space anyway; witness what happened after the warp drive failed and the Enterprise had to limp to Delta Vega.

A Warp 8 engine like the one used by Class I starships in the 2260's is still going to be most useful, because the ship will be expected to at least occasionally leave those space lanes and probe into uncharted space, where the presence of dark matter/dark energy is not confirmed. It's also going to be necessary to use multi-warp speeds on those space lanes to carry out important, time-sensitive missions between Federation members and outposts. ("Balance of Terror", "Journey to Babel", "Obsession") The flipside being that Kirk and company ferried Commissioner Hedford ("Metamorposis") to get medical help using a shuttlecraft, which was probably not capable of more than Warp 2 or 3 at the most, so Warp 2 or 3 in some areas must be fast enough to get the job done in a pinch.

In this context, civilian vessels of commerce ("freighters") may not need more than Warp 2, because they are expected to spend almost all of their flight time on designated space lanes anyway.

 

[Vance]

I do not agree that warp speeds/factors are "useless", only that their meaning changes depending on the context they are being applied in. This is a foregone conclusion in deep space anyway; witness what happened after the warp drive failed and the Enterprise had to limp to Delta Vega.

No, it's not. I'm sorry, but it's nothing more than one of the most silly 'fandom' retcons for 'correcting the warp speed' issue ever to have been put forward, and I'm honestly very saddened that it was included in an official product. Besides, if a Captain says 'go to warp 8', is he expected to check with the science officer every single time to just find out, exactly, what the hell he really means?

You're going to tell me that, in all honesty, there's going to be enough variance in mass that something travelling .75C (normal space) is going to notice it enough to dramtically alter its velocity by two or three orders of magnitude (without obviously crashing and exploding by virtue of actually going into that mass)? And you do realize that if there was a variance in mass it would be an increase in mass from total vacuum, which would have the result of slowing down the ship, not magically making it go faster!

Say whatever you want about it, but this 'chi' factor is an embarassment as a 'scientific-plausibility', and anyone who passed a Junior High physics course should be ashamed of putting it forward as a 'magical fix'.

The more plausible explations are that Warp 2 just isn't 8C, or that the writers in TOS didn't think more than 'Warp 2 is slow'. Seems to me that Ockham's razor applies here.

 

[Manticore]

Presumably a captain has reviewed the charts of the region he is in, so he knows very specifically how fast "warp 2" is in a region, if Chi is a factor. A captain who doesn't pay very close attention to the rough Chi levels, if this is the case, would be a poor captain indeed.

Me, I prefer to ignore all of the warp "rules" and charts, because they are almost uniformly and consistently too slow (well, aside from Voyager's journey, and a few references in Enterprise). It's not perfect, because there are still drastic inconsistencies, but it generally works much better than assuming that it takes eight years to cross the Federation.

 

[Lieut. Arex]

We're not talking a matter of weeks or even months, though, we're talking a matter of years or even decades difference in time, even with the infamous "warp is a random number, really, thanks to the Cochrane Variable" (which would make warp speeds USELESS, by the way). I'm talking about putting in an order, and my GRANDCHILDREN being the ones to recieve it.

If you're running a business in a galaxy-spanning nation with automated mining stations whose products are collected once every twenty years, that might happen. For a faster turn-around, you just need twenty or forty such stations to get shipments once or twice a year.

 

[Vance]

Presumably a captain has reviewed the charts of the region he is in, so he knows very specifically how fast "warp 2" is in a region, if Chi is a factor. A captain who doesn't pay very close attention to the rough Chi levels, if this is the case, would be a poor captain indeed.

No, it would be the job of the navigator to translate the Captain's Order for 'Warp 6' into 'real speed'. The captain cannot and should not be bothered with minutae, that's not his job.

 

[Wingsley]

But the whole point of what "Star Trek Maps" was saying (and echoing the dramatic content of TOS, and TNG through ENT, for that matter) is that the presence of dark matter and dark energy is not "minutae" in the STAR TREK Universe. The presence of dark matter/energy would be a major issue, just as astronomers are now figuring out that the presence of these mysterious commodities in space could be a major gravitational factor in holding whole galaxies together.

So, just as Capt. Archer seemed the perfect choice to captain the NX-01 Enterprise because he helped perfect the NX Project and actually build the ship, so Federation starship captains assigned to probe space would be expected to expand their understanding of the presence of dark matter/energy.

When I read over Vance's rejection of the Cochrane's Variable concept, I could not resist thinking about Kirk's frustration in "The Immunity Syndrome". He was literally dying to learn about what his ship was being exposed to, and ironically it turned out to strongly resemble the very same thing we're talking about here. It was like Kirk and his Enterprise had come face-to-face with some ghost he was duty-bound to conquer. Taken in that light, it turns out the Enterprise's "fantastic voyage" may have had more science fiction merit than the show's makers could've realized some forty years ago.

 

[Timo]

I'm talking about putting in an order, and my GRANDCHILDREN being the ones to recieve it.

So the slow freighters wouldn't do "orders". They would ship commodities needed on a constant basis, so that your grandchildren would get the stuff requested in your lifetime, but you in turn would get what your grandparents ordered, and your kids would get your mother-in-law's order, there being no interruptions to the flow.

That's why the old sailing ships hauled grain. True, the waves of arriving windjammers created waves in grain prices, but the flow was still essentially steady.

The more plausible explations are that Warp 2 just isn't 8C, or that the writers in TOS didn't think more than 'Warp 2 is slow'.

Oh, but that is a given!

We have no evidence that warp 2 would be 8c, but we do have wealth of evidence that 'Warp 2 is slow', yet a perfectly credible way to get from star to star. What we further know is that warp 2, or a bit less, is what freighters in the ENT era were doing, and spending months and sometimes years between stars for it. This probably rules out the 8c explanation, because travel times would always be years, then. But this doesn't give us a definite speed, because the trips by those ENT freighters were between fictional stars whose relative distances were unknown.

No, it would be the job of the navigator to translate the Captain's Order for 'Warp 6' into 'real speed'. The captain cannot and should not be bothered with minutae, that's not his job.

Indeed, that's how it would work in the real world, in a ship that can afford enough personnel that the skipper doesn't have to do navigation. The big guy orders a setting for the engines, dictated by company orders on what is economical, and makes a pious wish on arrival time, again dictated by those orders for economical reasons. The navigator tries to make the two ends meet, and constantly refines his or her suggestions to the skipper so that economy (and, if possible, schedule) is maintained.

Nevertheless, our Star Trek heroes often seem to suggest that the warp factors could be used as universal measures of speed, not just for their own ship but that of an opponent or ally as well. However, that doesn't need to mean much: the assumption would be that both friend and foe would operate in the same kind of "weather" or "currents", so a variable definition of warp factors wouldn't matter. And even if Klingon ships used "deviation marks" that don't perfectly match UFP "warp factors", the translators would take care of that, and so forth. All we need to assume is that "warp factor", while apparently an engine setting, isn't specific to a certain type or make of engine in a specific state of repair, but universally applies to them all.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Wingsley]

Alright, let's turn the whole topic inside-out...

What is a "freighter", in starship terms? What would a "freighter" class starship be, and how would it differ from a "transport", or a "warptug" or a "cruiser" or a "hospital ship"? Would the Antares from the remastered "Charlie X" be an example? (NOTE: Kirk's naming of the Anteres changed during the span of that ep, if you listen closely.) What about the Huron in TAS? And how do they relate to the automated vessels seen in TAS' "More Tribbles, More Troubles"?