Anyone else have a problem with the speed of the new Enterprise?

[DCR]

I finally saw ST:ID yesterday, and I liked it. I also just rewatched the 2009 movie a couple of weeks ago.

The one problem I keep having is the sheer speed of the current universe's starships. If I understand it right, Earth to Vulcan takes about 3 minutes, and if we take Vulcan as orbiting 40 Eridani, that works out to something on the order of 330 light years an hour, or over 5 light years per minute.or almost 2.9 MILLION times the speed of light.

The problem with that speed is that it makes things like ships effectively pointless for any normal voyages. Why not take something more like a plane if you're never more than twenty minutes from home? You don't need the same kind of life-support or fuel storage if your starship can fly back to Earth on your lunch break.

It creates a totally different transportation paradigm.

Now they're supposed to be going on a 5 year mission, but they can't get more than about 2 weeks away without leaving the galaxy entirely.

It doesn't make sense to me.

 

[trekkier]

Well with '09, i always figured that since McCoy knocked Kirk out, there was at least SOME passed that we didn't see. That's my theory anyway

 

[CorporalClegg]

Star Trek ships have always moved at the speed of the plot. nuTrek has a fast plot. Therefore, it has fast ships.

Why do we need another thread about this?

 

[DCR]

Because I hadn't seen the earlier ones, and I think it's a logical discontinuity between the ship design paradigm and the apparent speed.

 

[SeerSGB]

No worse than the E-A making it from the neutral zone to the center of the galaxy in a few hours or a day and a half. Or the E-E making from the Neutral Zone to Earth in a few hours to kick some Borg ass.

 

[austen_pierce]

Now they're supposed to be going on a 5 year mission, but they can't get more than about 2 weeks away without leaving the galaxy entirely.

I know you're making a serious point here, but the way you turned that phrase made me snort my soda.

 

[SeerSGB]

Wasn't one of the reasons they made the TNG warp scale an exponential curve was to handicap the speeds a little in terms of story telling. A basic bullshit technobabble excuse for why you can't zip from one side of the galaxy to the other in a few days.

 

[DCR]

In all the previous versions, and I really didn't want to compare, they've had some trips be unrealistically fast, and some unrealistically slow. Speed and distance have never really been constant. But there's always been the underlying idea that there are some long trips as well as some short ones, and that's something that has never come across in the current iteration. All the trips seem to be super fast.

 

[Flake]

Yes it bothered me initially for a few weeks and I posted a thread here about it!

Yes it is rather bloody fast but as we know the Enterprise does travel at the speed of plot and it always has. I agree this is faster than ever before though..

Best thing you can do is accept it and disregard various TNG/Berman era speed limits that we know of. Its just transwarp or something!, warp works differently now. This is a reboot. Its NuTrek. It. Is. Different. It is not like the Berman era.

Once you begin to ignore the more trivial details of how it fits in with old Trek tech and stop fixating on aforementioned trivial science & tech issues you are then able to enjoy the movie much more. This is NuTrek and it is different....!

It would be great if NuTrek did fit in better with old Trek but I guess it was decided early on that the new producers are not going to abide by Berman-era rules on Trek Tech & science etc. They don't have a science 'dept' to call upon (Sternbach et al) whilst writing the story and they wouldn't welcome the input anyway!

 

[SeerSGB]

The new movies play by TOS era rules. The Enterprise traveled at insane warp speeds during the TOS series. Warp was treated more like stepping on the gas and shifting into high gear. TNG established rules that were never in place in TOS and don't work with the era.

 

[drt]

I don't think there's enough continuity between scenes to get a clear idea of how much time transpires for the trip to Vulcan in ST'09. However, according to the time and distance numbers from That Which Survives (an example of insane speeds mentioned by Seer), at Warp 8.4 a 16.5 light year trip would take about 12 minutes.

What does seem to be too fast of a trip is Kronos to Earth in STID, which appears to take less time than the Vulcan trip (unless a significant amount of time passes before McCoy comments "At least we're moving again"). According to the aforementioned velocity numbers from That Which Survives, combined with the 90 light year distance from Broken Bow, would indicate that trip should be at least an hour minimum.

 

[F. King Daniel]

No worse than the E-A making it from the neutral zone to the center of the galaxy in a few hours or a day and a half. Or the E-E making from the Neutral Zone to Earth in a few hours to kick some Borg ass.

Exactly. It's speed of plot, which Trek has used more often than not. Add to that the Enterprise NX-01 making it to Kronos at warp 5 in I think it was 3 days. It was really only Voyager that adhered to the warp speed chart in the Star Trek Encyclopedia and made crossing the galaxy an impossibly huge task. DS9 made a point to say the other end of the wormhole was 70 years away at maximum warp, but showed the crew zipping between Alpha Quadrant worlds like Bajor, Cardassia, Kronos, Romulus and Earth in the space of a commercial break - kind of odd when DS9 was supposed to be at the far edge of Federation space.

In fact, the very first warp speed formula (warp factor cubed = multiple of c) in The Making of Star Trek was already at odds with the speeds depicted on the show when first published.

Now they're supposed to be going on a 5 year mission, but they can't get more than about 2 weeks away without leaving the galaxy entirely.

Some estimates put around 10 billion Earth type planets in our galaxy. Even if they can get to them really fast, they'll never run out of places to go.

 

[CorporalClegg]

The new movies play by TOS era rules. The Enterprise traveled at insane warp speeds during the TOS series. Warp was treated more like stepping on the gas and shifting into high gear. TNG established rules that were never in place in TOS and don't work with the era.

The rules were never really followed. In every incarnation of Star Trek, warp factors are completely arbitrary.

Even the passage of time that (presumably) flows between travel points has been ambiguous at best.

 

[DCR]

Yes it bothered me initially for a few weeks and I posted a thread here about it!

Yes it is rather bloody fast but as we know the Enterprise does travel at the speed of plot and it always has. I agree this is faster than ever before though..

Best thing you can do is accept it and disregard various TNG/Berman era speed limits that we know of. Its just transwarp or something!, warp works differently now. This is a reboot. Its NuTrek. It. Is. Different. It is not like the Berman era.

Once you begin to ignore the more trivial details of how it fits in with old Trek tech and stop fixating on aforementioned trivial science & tech issues you are then able to enjoy the movie much more. This is NuTrek and it is different....!

It would be great if NuTrek did fit in better with old Trek but I guess it was decided early on that the new producers are not going to abide by Berman-era rules on Trek Tech & science etc. They don't have a science 'dept' to call upon (Sternbach et al) whilst writing the story and they wouldn't welcome the input anyway!

It's not that it doesn't fit with old Trek, that's not the issue. It doesn't have to work like it did in the previous canon, though it does look sort of like the Borg conduits or even Andromeda's slipstream drive.

It's that the naval model is predicated on the idea that long voyages take a long time, and that doesn't appear to be the case in this model. The transportation paradigm doesn't appear to match the observed performance. That's the disconnect.

 

[OpenMaw]

No worse than the E-A making it from the neutral zone to the center of the galaxy in a few hours or a day and a half. Or the E-E making from the Neutral Zone to Earth in a few hours to kick some Borg ass.

One of those is an example from a particularly terrible movie by most peoples standards and the other one is debatable from within the movie.

The fleet engaged the cube in the Typhon sector. We have no idea how much time passed from that point, how far the Typhon sector is from Earth, or how much time passed from E going to warp to the point that the cube was moving towards Earth. Given that the ships were doing physical damage to the cube by that point implies a bit of attrition to the battle. Quite a bit of time could have passed. Is it ridiculous? Yes, but at least we're talking something like many hours passing.



It does bother me a bit just how fast the ships are. On the one hand it's kinda fun to have ships with so much horsepower, on the other hand the size of the galaxy feels rather quaint if you can get to Vulcan or across the neutral zone in minutes. Eh...

 

[Flake]

Yes it bothered me initially for a few weeks and I posted a thread here about it!

Yes it is rather bloody fast but as we know the Enterprise does travel at the speed of plot and it always has. I agree this is faster than ever before though..

Best thing you can do is accept it and disregard various TNG/Berman era speed limits that we know of. Its just transwarp or something!, warp works differently now. This is a reboot. Its NuTrek. It. Is. Different. It is not like the Berman era.

Once you begin to ignore the more trivial details of how it fits in with old Trek tech and stop fixating on aforementioned trivial science & tech issues you are then able to enjoy the movie much more. This is NuTrek and it is different....!

It would be great if NuTrek did fit in better with old Trek but I guess it was decided early on that the new producers are not going to abide by Berman-era rules on Trek Tech & science etc. They don't have a science 'dept' to call upon (Sternbach et al) whilst writing the story and they wouldn't welcome the input anyway!

It's not that it doesn't fit with old Trek, that's not the issue. It doesn't have to work like it did in the previous canon, though it does look sort of like the Borg conduits or even Andromeda's slipstream drive.

It's that the naval model is predicated on the idea that long voyages take a long time, and that doesn't appear to be the case in this model. The transportation paradigm doesn't appear to match the observed performance. That's the disconnect.

I agree. It is waaay too fast and does make everything seem absurdly small, much smaller than ever before. I just think the key is not letting it bother you too much and just shrug it off. Maybe the next writer/producer will pay more attention to it and ensure the scripts have a decent transit time or something..

 

[drt]

I've always rationalized it that Enterprise was capable of crazy fast speeds when absoulutely necessary, but there was some manner of trade-off. I favor the idea that going that fast was maybe possible for a day, but after such a fast trip there was an extended period of rest required to overhaul the engines - to the point that for very long distances (thousands of light years), it takes less time overall to travel at a sane crusing speed.

 

[BillJ]

No.

In universe, I believe this Starfleet has somehow come across slipstream technology. Yet, is still geared towards traditional warp speed. It's possible that only the Enterprise and the Vengeance have the newest technology.

It could take decades for starship design and mission parameters to catch up to the slipstream tech.

That's my bullshit rationalization for the day.

 

[OneBuckFilms]

Both Trek '09 and Into Darkness have cuts mid travel meant to imply that some time had passed.

In Trek '09 for instance, Kirk gets knocked out, then the curtain is drawn ("Unbelievable"), <-- probably one point where time likely passed, Chekov makes the briefing, <-- possible time passed event, then Kirk wakes up (McCoy is in his other uniform, subtly confirming passed time).

For the trip back to Earth in Into Darkness, Kirk orders the jump back to earth, <-- time likely passed here, then we cut to McCoy scanning Harrison in sickbay (at least we're at warp).

Movie time and real time are certainly not synonymous here, so the ship's speed is largely speculative.

 

[OpenMaw]

Not on that last one. There are conclusive markers that indicate only moments have passed. We're also still only talking about, at most, a matter of hours. At most, and at a stretch.There's literally no dramatic tension in that.