Highways In The Sky.

[T'Girl]

Star Trek fans keep saying they want creative innovation but the reaction by some to the most resent movie says otherwise.

One idea that has been floating around for some time is the concept of high speed corridors through the galaxy. This wouldn't necessary be a "trans-warp" conduit. These would permit ship to travel much faster than is possible with "only" warp drive. A corridor like this would have allowed Archer to travel to the Klingon homeworld in just five days, where it probably should have taken months below warp five. You would travel by regular warp drive to the nearest corridor, take the corridor to a point near your destination, then finish your journey with again regular warp drive.

This would also have allowed Kirk (and the Horizon) to travel the 1,300 lightyears to either the top or bottom "edge" of the galactic disc in WNMHGB.

But they can't be just everywhere because let's face it, we telling a dramatic story here, whether on screen or in a book, giving a Starship near infinite abilities becomes pretty boring, pretty quick.

So, what should the corridors be able to let us do, also what realistically should the limitations be?

Are they all the same?
Do some run basically one way?
Interconnected?
Isolated form each other?
Are some dangerous to use?

I personally see them as isolated to give some limitations. For story telling purposes they will often be in the wrong places. Planets near a corridor have better trade than those more distant. One of the reasons Earth is so prominent in the future is that it sits near a dozens of non-connecting corridors, places like Rigel would have the same advantage (and problems). The corridors would also be noncontinuous, they would start and stop, grow and contract. Sometimes they just disappear, dumping out whatever Starship that might be using them. The corridors move over time.

With this idea, the old TOS warp scale makes sense. Fleet ships cruise at a little over 200 times light, commercial ships at 27 to 125 times light. But in a corridor speeds of 5,000 times light (rare as high as 10,000) are possible. If there was one going straight across the galaxy (and there isn't) it would take just twenty years.

Or is this just plain a bad idea? Can't accept it? Don't want it? T'Girl places to many restrictions on the system (or not enough). Just stick with hyper-warp/trans-warp/worm-hole/slip-stream/Borg-thing.

What the fukk, over.

 

[JarodRussell]

So, what should the corridors be able to let us do, also what realistically should the limitations be?

That's the problem with it. Even if you introduce warp highways, ships would still move at the speed of plot because the writers don't care for consistency when it comes to distances and speeds. That wouldn't change if you introduced yet another magic device. At some point someone would always go like "But they already travelled from Earth to planet xy using a warp highway in a day, but now they needed six weeks for the same journey, what happened?"

 

[Shatnertage]

No, they're coming to the Trekverse--definitely by 2491, when Trek catches up with Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.

Seriously, it's not a bad idea--more restrictions makes it less magical, which opens up more dramatic possibilities than just going really fast and getting to wherever you want to go.

 

[Shatinator]

Star Trek fans keep saying they want creative innovation but the reaction by some to the most resent movie says otherwise.



The corridors would also be noncontinuous, they would start and stop, grow and contract. Sometimes they just disappear, dumping out whatever Starship that might be using them. The corridors move over time.

that's the beauty of this theory, to act as counter wight to the speed of plot!


-The Shatinator

 

[sbk1234]

Wormholes?

 

[StarryEyed]

Star Trek fans keep saying they want creative innovation but the reaction by some to the most resent movie says otherwise.

What in the world does the recent so-called Star Trek movie have to do with innovation?

As to the main subject of your post, yes, warp-highways are necessary to make any coherent sense of the travel time in Star Trek. For instance in TOS - That Which Survives, the Enterprise crosses about a 1000 LY in 12 hours at about warp 8. At that speed, they could cross the entire galaxy (100,000 LY) in 50 days.

The simplest idea is that some areas of space are more conducive to warp than others so the actual speed varies. It's a good explanation for why Archer wanted access to Vulcan star charts to go to the Klingon homeworld in the premier episode. Presumably, the Vulcans had those things charted and mapped out.

In the example from TOS-That Which Survives, it can be speculated that the amazing time Enterprise made can be explained by the Kalandan displacement wave having generated a warp-highway. It can also be reasoned that that particular highway might have faded away over time. Maybe all of them wax and wane in response to random subspace effects.

Its pretty easy to invoke these things to allow for what ever speed the plot requires - within reason. If I was making a sci-fi series, I would have the characters mention these things on occasion to make it official.

 

[TargetPainter]

I think this is a touchy topic, since the possibilities are endless. One way I can see them spinning this is allowing only certain vessels to enter these corridors based upon warp core signatures. In essence this would limit certain races from making use of these warp ways since they can not generate a warp field, that matches the coherent signature of that particular corridor. Wars could be fought over it and the technology required to make safe use of these so called warp highways could only be shared by Federation Vessels or vice verse.

 

[SpyOne]

Here's a favorite notion of mine: paths.
That is, just like the Warp Highway notion, but they can be made by ships traversing the area at warp. The more traffic that goes someplace, the easier (and faster) it becomes to get there.
This would explain how DS9 went from being on the ass-end of nowhere to being a few days' travel from Earth.

 

[StarryEyed]

Here's a favorite notion of mine: paths.
That is, just like the Warp Highway notion, but they can be made by ships traversing the area at warp. The more traffic that goes someplace, the easier (and faster) it becomes to get there.
This would explain how DS9 went from being on the ass-end of nowhere to being a few days' travel from Earth.

You can lump a lot of things together under the same phenomena:

1. Naturally occurring and largely constant
2. Naturally occurring and fluctuate
3. Naturally occurring (as a result of a major event) and transient
4. Artificially occurring (as a result of constant warp traffic) and transient
5. Artificially occurring (as a result of a subspace explosion or displacement wave) and transient

In the case where warp traffic can cause these, you might imagine specialized vessels which are specifically designed to carve out these warp paths.

 

[Timo]

All of these would call for adding something into Star Trek, though. As matters stand today, we have no direct evidence of some routes being significantly faster than others.

If such a speed difference did exist, we should already be getting what TargetPainter already suggested: wars would be fought over the control of fast lanes. Instead, we don't even get dialogue references to our heroes or villains seeking out the fast route. And heaven knows we have had dramatic reasons for such dialogue, especially in VOY where finding the fast route home was the most important topic of the show.

It would be extremely daring to accuse wormholes or fast lanes of getting our heroes from A to B if the heroes themselves never acknowledge this. That is, wormhole travel is often commented on, but it is always commented on when it happens, never left unmentioned. So it can't readily explain things like Kirk traveling to the edge or the core of the galaxy, because Kirk didn't mention wormholes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

Gravity, dark matter, and stellar objects would always make some routes faster than others. The question is just whether they are going to formalise the existeence of routes that have been plotted and maintained meticulously between popular worlds.

 

[Timo]

I'm sure there are advantageous routes due to natural phenomena, and I really like the idea that warp travel also "wears down" subspace so that routes at first become faster with repeated use, then catastrophically collapse in TNG "Force of Nature" style.

However, this advantage can't be beyond a dozen percent or so, or else the fast routes would be an important dramatic element for the show, and would essentially turn it into Stargate. To get from A to B, our heroes would always have to ask "Where's the nearest Stargate/fast lane?", as it would make no sense to putter around at ordinary warp speeds. Picard would never call for warp factors or headings, but would downselect from his catalogue of fast lanes; it would be up to the helmsman or the computer to do the tedious and unimportant warp factor or heading adjustment.

If the fast lanes in turn are only, say, 8.7% faster, then warp factor and heading are important decisions, and the tedious and thankless job for the helmsman or navigator in this case is the seeking out of the slightly faster routes for best implementing the captain's speed and heading orders. Which appears to be what we see in the various shows.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

On the other hand, the navigator's job becomes more interesting if they have to plot their trips through the most advantageous highways. Warp factors become a measure of energy consumption rather than speed and the speed will vary depending on the prevailing conditions.

I don't think Voyager comes into the equation since I would have thought that the highways have to be researched in painstaking detail between regularly used populated systems and that would never have been practical for Voyager, although they would no doubt have been trying to purchase info from local species.

 

[SpyOne]

Yes, sadly, although the idea of "warp highways" solves so many problems with the Star Trek universe as presented, the single best argument against their existence is the absence of mention of them. If they existed, they would be so important that surely it would have come up.

 

[T'Girl]

I don't think Voyager comes into the equation since I would have thought that the highways have to be researched in painstaking detail

One of the things I was going to put in the OP (and didn't) was that you can't detect the highways from very far away, you basically have to stumble over the new ones. Even the old and known ones, given that they are always moving and are only a few tens of miles across, can be hard to re-spot.

Even when you're in one, Sulu, Ro and Paris would have been actively "flying" their respective ships.

 

[StarryEyed]

All of these would call for adding something into Star Trek, though. As matters stand today, we have no direct evidence of some routes being significantly faster than others.
Timo Saloniemi

No direct evidence but the circumstantial evidence is unassailable. They simply have to exist. The example I brought up in That Which Survives alone leaves us no choice. If the original Enterprise is capable of crossing 1000 light years in 12 hours, then Voyager would not have needed 70 days - let alone 70 years - to get home.

There are many other examples. In Broken Bow, Archer mentions Enterprises speed in real-world units. I think it was meters/second. The figure he gave corresponded almost exactly with warp 4.5 on the often used fan warp scale. But the travel time to the Klingon homeworld (I think it was 4 days) would put it at right about one light year away. Obviously, something is going on here.

 

[SpyOne]

Obviously, something is going on here.

Yes, and I fear it is just spectacularly bad writing.
That Klingon Homeworld bit is basically when I gave up on Enterprise. I stuck around for a few more episodes, but ....

Again, the problem is that these speedy routes would be so important to travel, so strategically important, so vital to trade, and charting them would be so important, that just as they simply must exist to fix some fairly major problems, if they do exist the fact that they have never ever been mentioned is a major problem in itself.

 

[Timo]

Of course, some minor variation in local speed is explicitly confirmed to exist: we hear of regions of space where warp travel is slower than elsewhere, such as this "subspace sandbar" thing from VOY. If such variation stays within 10% or so, then no problem; if it's bigger than that, then all the above dramatic complications will emerge.

We could argue, though, that sometimes a dialogue reference to speed variation might be omitted or given indirectly. Say, normally there are no problems with warping in or out of the orbit of a planet deep inside a star system - but once or twice, such an action is declared impossible or dangerous. The easy way out of that is to say that the limitations are temporary, the result of "space weather" that is probably generated by the local star. The stars of Earth and Bajor could be notorious for their bad weather, explaining the couple of incidents where warping wasn't an option. The star of Miramanee's planet could be a third case, explaining how several hours of warp nine did not take Spock's starship farther than two months of asteroid flight time: the weather in the inner parts of the system was so bad that even warp nine amounted to little more than lightspeed. (This would also explain the failure of our heroes to summon timely help from Starfleet: the weather would affect communications, too.)

One might speculate that the "fan scale" of lightspeed times warp factor cubed is what obtains near star systems, and that travel in free space is somewhat faster. That would give some credibility to that unvoiced but sometimes implied scale, as researchers from Earth would at first be misled by the local conditions. It would also explain why Archer's warp 4.4 was slower than it ought to be, slow like in the cubed scale, during the early hours of his mission - and why the test flights to Neptune and back, in six minutes, would also take place within the limitations of the cubed scale.

If the original Enterprise is capable of crossing 1000 light years in 12 hours, then Voyager would not have needed 70 days - let alone 70 years - to get home.

There are two key instances in TOS where warp is way faster than it ought to be: the above "That Which Survives" incident, and the brief jump across 1/16 parsecs in "seconds" in the "Bread and Circuses" teaser. Apart from those, it more or less holds together, although the "fan scale" is probably a tad too slow, especially as regards the higher warp factors.

One might make the effort to interpret these episodes in a more "consistent" manner. In "That Which Survives", for example, we initially learn that it will take "a while" to get back to that mystery planet across those 990.7 ly. We then learn that the ship goes to warp eight. The action then cuts away to the mystery planet for an unknown period of time, and when we return, the ship is at warp 8.4 and 11.337 hours away from the planet. But there was that cut there, allowing us to believe in whatever travel time we prefer.

Now, for warp eight in that episode to be "reasonably" slow, in the range of thousands rather than tens of thousands of lightyears per year, the travel time ought to be around one month... Which is a bit extreme for our heroes to survive with no obvious sources for food and water. But they do manage to dig a grave for their fallen comrade, and even create a tombstone of sorts, despite the local materials being impossibly tough to work with; perhaps an effort of several weeks?

The food and water problem notwithstanding (and our heroes might have found some, so Kirk's later reference to "tomorrow we have to find some" might be a daily ritual for them), the plot doesn't require the action to be fast-paced. Several weeks could indeed pass on the planet before Losira strikes again. OTOH, the ship might have spent a period of time at speeds higher than warp 8.4 during those weeks, but as we know she cannot maintain those speeds indefinitely, so the eventual return to warp eightish would go without saying.

It's still the biggest speed-related problem in all of Star Trek, I guess. Even ST5:TFF and "Magics of Megas-Tu" can be rather easily explained as not featuring travel to the center of the galaxy, merely travel towards the center of the galaxy. And "Bread and Circuses" is really vague; if Chekov's "seconds" in fact means "minutes", then everything is all right because these starships by all rights should be capable of doing about ten thousand times lightspeed in brief jumps.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

I don't mind the idea of warp lanes, but it seems like an unnecessary and suspect patch.

Far preferable, I'd rather have any future Trek writers just agree on the speeds of the ships, do the simple arithmetic that entails, and portray journeys of durations consistent with those speeds.

Might be too much to ask.

 

[Timo]

It's not as if the math would have to be particularly exact. What matters is travel time. And even if speed is fixed, the distance can be freely fudged, since the start- and endpoints of Trek travel are typically fictional - or at least one of them is.

If some writer chooses a worryingly short time of interstellar travel, we simply decide that the two stars were exceptionally close to each other, as long as short times don't become a bad habit. And long times are no cause for worry, since two stars of interest can be arbitrarily far away from each other. Minor variation in travel time between repeatedly mentioned points A and B can be explained away by various means, and major variation just gives us an opportunity to postulate an additional off-camera adventure that slowed down the anomalously long transit!

Timo Saloniemi