Biggest problem with "Voyager" is that they didn't really take any chances.

I might imagine that when you are under near-constant threat of attack, forced to take stealthy routes evading detection, while coping with resource and crew manning problems at the same time (which was all the case at least for early S1) you might not make too much headway at first (until you become more experienced at it).

One wonders though how under all this strain, they still found spare time time and energy to do some old-fashioned Starfleet exploration

 

Individual episodes were much easier to handle with the suspension of disbelief, than taken as a whole.

 

When it was first announced that Voyager would be set in the DQ, I thought they would most likely have an episode about the 2 stranded Ferengi.

 

A few times it looks like the show/writers/producers just ignored previous scenarios, didn't know about the show or just flat out forgot the storyline. They did the same thing in Homestead, the one where Neelix met a colony of Talaxians 40,000 light years from where Voyager started. It took Voyager 7 years just to get that far, and they did it because of unusual accidents and such. It's hard to explain away that one---it makes no sense at all.

 

Well, they left Talax at least a generation earlier.

 

Yes it does. It didn't say exactly when they left Tilax. They could have been traveling for decades

 

But they hadn't been gone so long that they didn't know about the war with Haakonia, right? Of course, that war could have been going on for a long time before Jetrel's weapon was used. I think I recall from that episode that Neelix said he was 19 when that happened. And it had been about 20 years previous to the episode Once Upon a Time.

 

I just scanned the transcript and I don't think they mention the war. But for argument we could say that they left when the war started so that would be at least 20 years. Possibly more depending on how long that war had been going on.

 

At the end of Caretaker, Janeway makes this estimate:

"Even at maximum speeds, it would take seventy five years to reach the Federation, but I'm not willing to settle for that."

Sounds to me like the 75 year-figure is before taking into account all possible obstacles that would slow their progress. Moreover, I think it would have been impossible for the Captain to give an accurate estimate taking the factors you mention into account at this point in their trip. They had only been in the DQ for a few days at the very most and had only just met the Kazon. They probably had no idea how many of them they would be facing over which regions of space, what other enemies they would encounter, like the Vidiians, and such. Neelix certainly wouldn't have given too much information away at this point in time freely, as his knowledge was his bargaining item.

 

We only know that it was within her lifetime. She mentions her husband being killed on another world that they settled on along the way.

 

There's one major problem--the dates won't add up. Like Tracy Trek mentioned, Janeway said it would take up to 75 years at maximum to make it home.

Dexa says she remembers what Talax looks like. If she's a young adult, at the very least she would have been a child when they were supposed to have left. So an estimate about her time traveling from Talax to the colony--about 25 years?

 

So what doesn't add up? It would take 75 years to reach the ALPHA QUADRANT. The talaxian colony was nowhere near the AQ

 

I think it might be something along the lines of that the Talaxian colony is in the region of 30-40 000ly from Talax.

 

That would have been my guess too, but just for a few lines of dialog from the characters to explain this....Notice that there was suspiciously no discussion of how the Talaxians traveled that far.

I'm not as good at computing the light years and distance traveled since Voyager started out of the DQ, so I admit I may be totally, totally wrong.

But Homestead occurred a couple episodes near the end of the show, the 7th season. End Game suggests an additional 17 years of straight travel to reach the AQ. Janeway says that it would take 75 years estimate at maximum to reach the AQ. That would that suggest 52 years at maximum to reach the point where the Talaxian colony was established.

Dexa claims to have been on Talax, the younger she was, the more believable it is, the older she is, the harder it is to accept.. We would have to believe Dexa was at least 57 years old in this episode! lol

 

Well to put things into context excluding normal war drive distance VOY made these jumps

9500ly "The Gift" Kes' Gift
300ly "Hope and Fear" slipstream
2500ly "The Void" subsapce Vortex
10 000ly "Timeless" Qunatum Slipstream drive
20 000ly "Dark Frontier" Borg Transwarp Coil
200ly "Dragon's Teeth" Vaadwaur underspace
600ly "Voyager Conspiracy" Gravition Catapult

Distance travelled 43 100ly Add another 6000 or so ly for normal warpdrive and we are nearing 50 000ly which would likely have put them into the BQ. No of course we don't know the exact location of Talax realtive to the Talaxian colony but we can certainly say at least 30 000ly of that trip would have been in a straight line twoards Earth ("Timeless" and "Dark Frontier")

 

And what if she was 57? Or 67? Or 77? What is a Talaxian life span? What is their aging process? We don't know

 

As is shown in the(canon) maps above, Voyager had not yet reached the Beta Quadrant, but it was mentioned in the penultimate episode that they were approaching it.

What are you guys saying? That it should have taken her 40 years and not 30? Do you see space travel as an interstate highway? As Sophie just mentioned also; do we know how long Talaxians live? If they had come up with some explanation, would it stop you from hunting for nits? Both real and imagined

 

Oops. I got this thread mixed up with the Did Voyager need a map? thread. This may help here, too.

 

Well I have found an Interveiw were Rick Sternbach is asked the question Re: USS voyager and the BQ his answer was

I can only guess that the writers simply wanted to keep only the Delta Quadrant in people's minds, without having to deal with anything new. They didn't deal with what I call "situational tech" like Voyager's location/trajectory terribly well, even with adequate explanations and diagrams.

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/reports/sternbach-interview.htm

And I tend to agree with his answer.

 

Nonetheless, to put them in the BQ would be to have them travel further than they already did. They simply didn't get that far, and them nearing this "border" in the second to last episode shows that the trajectory, distance, and progress shown in the astrometrics maps wasn't ignored.

If you ask me, the whole "quadrant" thing was abused wayyy too much. In worked well in TNG the one or two times it was mentioned, but DS9 and Voyager dumbified it. In Voyager, there's nothing wrong with saying "Here in the Delta Quadrant," but almost every mention of Alpha Quadrant should have been substituted with "Federation Space" or "Home" or any other appropriate designation.

Likewise for DS9. It was fine referring to the other side of the wormhole as "Gamma Quadrant" but more and more they started saying "Save/lose the entire alpha quadrant!" or other such phrases that would equate Federation space with the whole quadrant. In the last few seasons, these phrases start to appear in almost every episode.