Details, details, details

[Knight Templar]

The silly thing is there's no reason to be inconsistent if you simply don't add needless information. If, instead of saying the exact distance of something they merely said "just within sensor range" that eliminates a lot of potential discrepancies. Sometimes less detail is more, especially when the numbers don't actually mean anything.

Agreed. Like I said earlier, I think the temptation to load up on details is because Star Trek is (nominally) science fiction and writers and producers like to throw in lots of numbers and other details in order to make it more "real".

 

[horatio83]

Nobody who watches Trek episodes once or even twice notices these inconsistencies as distances, warp factors and any technical stuff in general is usually part of the background atmosphere. Of course you can overdo the techspeak but some of it has to be there to create the illusion that you actually are on a spaceship.
When you watch a movie with a military vessel in it you also hear some technical lingo which you do not understand. The point is not that you understand it but that the illusion is maintained that this is a real military vessel. Now a fictional vessel is of course a bit more tricky but I cannot imagine Spock or Data not talking technically.

 

[JarodRussell]

I think most of the contradictions come from behind the scenes information and novels.

I think a journey to Vulcan is a good example. They state it's 4 days away. But do they EVER mention that it's also 16 lightyears away?

All the warp factor tables are off screen, non canon. Same goes for the information in what (real life) solar system this or that planet is.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I think most of the contradictions come from behind the scenes information and novels.

I think a journey to Vulcan is a good example. They state it's 4 days away. But do they EVER mention that it's also 16 lightyears away?

Tucker once did in the ENT episode "Home" when he visited Vulcan with T'Pol after NX-01's return to Earth.

TUCKER (to T'Pol): You're sorry...you brought me sixteen light years just to watch you get married to someone you barely know.

All the warp factor tables are off screen, non canon. Same goes for the information in what (real life) solar system this or that planet is.

Yup. We can infer that maybe warp one is the speed of light (and even that's subject to debate by some people), but the rest of the warp scale--either TOS or TNG--generally have never matched onscreen material. They're often way too slow.

 

[MacLeod]

I think most of the contradictions come from behind the scenes information and novels.

I think a journey to Vulcan is a good example. They state it's 4 days away. But do they EVER mention that it's also 16 lightyears away?

All the warp factor tables are off screen, non canon. Same goes for the information in what (real life) solar system this or that planet is.

Well they don't exactly say it's 4 days away, Scotty said we can have you back on Vulcan in 4 days. Bear in mind that 4 day trip might have include a shakedown cruise. So the Enterprise might not have been travelling at top speed. So at top speed it might only be 2 days.

But 4ly/day seems a decent enough speed. But if it's 4 days at TOS top speeds it should be far less at TNG era top speeds.

 

[Knight Templar]

In various books, including IIRC The Star Trek The Next Generation Technical Manual, it was said that for dramatic reasons it was quite possible to have the ship capable of going "too fast" as well as "too slow".

 

[MacLeod]

"Ahead Plot speeed"

 

[JarodRussell]

I think most of the contradictions come from behind the scenes information and novels.

I think a journey to Vulcan is a good example. They state it's 4 days away. But do they EVER mention that it's also 16 lightyears away?

Tucker once did in the ENT episode "Home" when he visited Vulcan with T'Pol after NX-01's return to Earth.

TUCKER (to T'Pol): You're sorry...you brought me sixteen light years just to watch you get married to someone you barely know.

Yeah that's when the shows tried to catch up with the behind the scenes gossip.

 

[Kemaiku]

"Ahead Plot speeed"

Or "Ahead plot factor: fairly cautious"

 

[Knight Templar]

Actually, you could achieve pretty much the same "detail effect" by saying instead of "Ahead Warp 6.75" to saying "Ahead, flank speed" or "Ahead, all available speed".

Ambiguity. The friend of Star Trek writers everywhere.

 

[MacLeod]

Not just Trek writers, Ambiguity can assist many a writer. Sometimes less is more.

In the case of VOY and it's apparent slow(er) warp speeds that previous established. If I were a cynic, I would think they said it would take 70 years to travel the 70 000 ly home because 70 into 70 000 = 1000ly/year is easy for the audiance to follow. As if they were treating viewers are morons and going for the lowest common denominator.

 

[Kemaiku]

That's one thing I actually prefered about Stargate, the Hyperdrive was never explained, speed was just speed.

 

[MacLeod]

One of the few things we learned about hyperdrives in the SG universe was that the fastest ships were the Asgard which could traverse the inter-galactic void in minutes (unless they were towing in which case it was hours). Human ships would take weeks unless powered by a ZPM in which case it was days.

 

[horatio83]

I liked the 1000 light years per year notion of VOY, it is easy to remember and was sometimes useful when the VOY sometimes made a big jump and they said how many lightyears they travelled.

 

[BillJ]

I liked the 1000 light years per year notion of VOY, it is easy to remember and was sometimes useful when the VOY sometimes made a big jump and they said how many lightyears they travelled.

Problem is, by that math, it could take years to get from one side of the Federation to the other. Seems like that would be a problematic amount of area to govern.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I liked the 1000 light years per year notion of VOY, it is easy to remember and was sometimes useful when the VOY sometimes made a big jump and they said how many lightyears they travelled.

Problem is, by that math, it would take eight years to get from one side of the Federation to the other. Seems like that would be a problematic amount of area to govern.

In a real sense, that's what Federation starbases are for. In addition to serving as support facilities for Starfleet vessels, they also serve as administrative centers for the Federation in outlying regions.

Also with space being three-dimensional, the eight thousand light-year figure given in First Contact doesn't necessarily mean that's the distance between the two farthest points in the Federation.

 

[horatio83]

I liked the 1000 light years per year notion of VOY, it is easy to remember and was sometimes useful when the VOY sometimes made a big jump and they said how many lightyears they travelled.

Problem is, by that math, it could take years to get from one side of the Federation to the other. Seems like that would be a problematic amount of area to govern.

Sure, once you try to make a general speed rule out of this simply formula from a show whose setup was that it would take two or three generations to get home, once you try to connect stories like WNMHGF and TFF where the Enterprise reaches the center or the edge of the galaxy in a matter of days or weeks with a show like VOY whose ships is supposed to be the fastest ever yet takes decades to cross the galaxy it fails.
The problem of setting up VOY in another galaxy is obvious, if you wanna be mildly realistic the large distances between galaxies would imply that the ship has to spend a large part of its journey in the emptiness of space.

We are Trek fans so we naturally yearn for an epic Trek where everything is connected to everything. But as much as we might like continuity and consistency, it is far less important than the actual dramatic reasons for not caring about it and perhaps the influence of the continuity obsession upon the franchise in the last years, visible in ENT's last season as well as the semi-reboot nature of STXI, was not really beneficial.

 

[MacLeod]

If you go by the figures mentioned in "Where No One Has Gone Before" you get a speed of ~9000ly/ year which means it would take less than one year to traverse the Federation (8000ly given in FC). Going by TMP speeds, you get a journey time of around 50 years for VOY.

But VOY wasn't even consistant with the 1000ly thing. Towards the end of S6 they should have been nearing the BQ if not already in it. As each time they had a shortcut dialouge said x years closer to home. So a jump of 9 500 was said to bring them 10 years closer to home.

Making it 70 years was done for only one reason, to make the journey seem longer than it should have been. You could say for dramatic reasons.

 

[Knight Templar]

The thing that put me off of Star Trek Voyager from the beginning (among other things) was the whole "70 years to get home" and Janeway's constant prattling about "getting the family home".

If it was really going to take 70 years to get the ship back home........then there was no point in trying anyway. There was no reasonable way the ship completely unsupported was going to go on for 70 years.

Better to just admit as such and decide to keep exploring the Delta Quadrant and hope they found some new ally or technology that could help them.

 

[MacLeod]

Well to be fair that was what they were doing during the trip home, and a rough calculation was that by the end of S6 they had managed to shortcut some 48 000ly off there trip and should either have been in BQ or at the very least within a few months of it. considering that at most a quadrant would be 50 000ly from the galactic centre to the galactic edge. And last i checked the galactic core is fairly large and not passable.