Could this be how Friendship One travelled 30,000 ly's?

[Deks]

No.

A broadcast signal requires no compensation. A directional signal might. A tightbeam signal could. However, if the vessel were using a quasar-based navigation system, then 'the missile would know where it was'. That would allow either direct transmission in the proper direction or the aforementioned option of telemetry transmitting via the anomaly.

Omni subspace is range-awful - power spreads over 4π, a 2067 probe won’t punch thousands of ly that way. Directional/tightbeam is standard, but then pointing matters: a big anomaly jump breaks your ephemeris, so you don’t know where to aim until you re-acquire. Anomalies aren’t comm relays; they distort subspace (refraction/attenuation), not “carry” a signal home. Quasar fixes still need a good clock and a current state vector - after a big unmodelled Δv, Earth’s track diverges. The episode’s “skip ahead a little” only makes sense with continuous telemetry + local corrections, not major shortcuts.

Evading analogies is bad form. Respond to the analogy or concede the point.

I never evaded anything.
I answered directly. You just didn't like my answer.
But here it is once again for clarity:
The Epstein drive is a sublight reaction engine; warp is FTL spacetime manipulation. A torch tops out at c, so it can’t do 30,000 ly in 180 years (≈166c). That’s why the analogy doesn’t apply here; servicing a warp probe (coils/EPS/firmware) does.

Wrong on all counts.

Funny, and you don't even bother trying to say WHY.
Trek Physics: 30,000 ly / 180 y ≈ 166c (map frame). Any reaction drive is ≤ c. Even 0.5c needs ~60,000 y; 0.9c needs ~33,000 y.

Comms: an anomaly/shortcut chain would break ephemeris + century-scale telemetry the episode implies (“skip ahead a little” only works with continuous tracking).
Ops: servicing a warp probe (coils/EPS/firmware) preserves the time series and head start; replacing it resets both.
If you disagree, show a map-frame timeline that hits 30k ly in 180 y with a sublight or anomaly model without breaking tracking.

No, they don't.

Again, funny, and you didn't even bother explaining.
Hubble: five Shuttle servicing missions over 19 years instead of “just build a new one,” precisely to keep the continuous dataset and public flagship alive.
Voyager 1/2: kept operating since 1977 with ground-side upgrades (DSN, software) because the continuity + optics are worth it.
SOHO / Juno / New Horizons: all run extended missions rather than immediate replacements, to preserve long-baseline time series.
ISS: continuous servicing for decades- ultimate flagship continuity/optics play.

Agencies extend/maintain legacy flagships when continuity, head-start, risk, and politics beat “start over.” Friendship-1 fits that pattern.

No, that's just something you're making up. It was designed to "reach out to other species {and} pave the way for all the manned missions that would follow." This mission of contact (which for most people was obviated by the name "Friendship 1", but you do you cowboy) included the fact that it was packed "with information, translation matrices, scientific and cultural databases {...} computer chip designs, instructions for building transceivers", to the point that it was "practically a how-to manual."

But please, tell me all about its secret missions.

I never implied any secret missions. You were the one who introduced the ferrying alternative.

These aren’t mutually exclusive:

Stated goal: first-contact package (“how-to manual,” cultural data, transceiver plans).
Operational reality: any deep-space probe also sends back housekeeping + ephemeris (position/health) so Earth knows where it is and where to point. That’s all I meant by “continuous, long-baseline telemetry.”

Ferrying it breaks both the optics and the ops: the message is “we reached you under our own power,” not “aliens hauled our postcard.” It also complicates tracking and ephemerides for no scientific gain.

Maintaining F-1 with occasional internal servicing (coils/EPS/firmware) keeps the contact package broadcasting and preserves a clean track- fully consistent with what the episode implies (they could project its course and “skip ahead a little” for local anomalies). Lower assumptions, cleaner story.

Nonsense. "Long-baseline telemetry" can be served by a new vehicle, which you're basically already doing thanks to your multiple-replacement hypothesis. Similarly, "demonstrating reach" is absurd here, since a vehicle that has to have its innards replaced is only the same in a Ship of Theseus sense, but doesn't prove great longevity to anyone. Moreover, what's the point of demonstrating reach with old tech at a great distance? That could be done locally where variables are better controlled.

Continuity isn’t interchangeable. A new probe resets the time-series; servicing keeps the same bus, same path, same link - like Hubble servicing vs. relaunch.
Upgrades ≠ replacement. Swapping coils/EPS/firmware preserves continuity; “bring it home” kills it.
Head start matters. F-1 is already far ahead; a fresh probe from Earth won’t catch it for decades unless it’s vastly faster.
Policy/optics: Quietly maintaining a legacy broadcaster is easier than launching a new non-PD package.
So “bring it home” trades away continuity + head start for no scientific gain.

Absurd. If you have a tractor-trailer / 18-wheeler as your probe, it's a helluva lot easier to swap the tractor truck than to replace the transmission and engine components and whatnot in the frakking desert. But, by analogy, swapping crap in the middle of nowhere is precisely what you are proposing. Just hook up to a new truck and go . . . or just use a new combo rather than hauling old comm and sensor stuff on an antique semi-trailer.

In Trek yard practice you service the internals (field-coil rewinds, EPS reroute, firmware/geometry updates) rather than forklift-swap nacelles or entire drive sections in deep space. It preserves ephemeris/link continuity and avoids turning a low-touch probe into a multi-ship logistics job.

That's what I said.

I wasn't proposing nacelle swaps. I was proposing internal upgrades to the existing nacelles and power handling—same shells, better coils/converters/software. That’s exactly what VOY shows when nacelles are opened and serviced, not replaced.

Oh, but you said the probe was the same, externally, so now you're contradicting your own hypothesis.

No. I didn't contradict myself. You may have misunderstood me:
"Enhance the outer hull” = internal stiffeners/SIF tuning/thermal liners - not changing the silhouette. You can increase structural margin and heat tolerance without external redesign. Same exterior; healthier internals.

Huh. Funny, that. Why, oh why, would the only Federation starship within tens of thousands of light-years drag coils out of the nacelle rather than swap for a whole new nacelle? So much for Amazon Prime.

Rewatch “Nightingale.” Janeway’s log: “major maintenance overhaul.” We see nacelles opened and coils serviced, not forklifted pods.
Whole-pod swaps are drydock jobs - pods are field-geometry matched to the hull/pylons/SIF and need alignment, EPS/plasma replumb, and stress re-qual. Out in the Delta Quadrant, you service internals: rewind/replace coils, converters, control boards, then retune the field.
Trek shows this maintenance model across TNG/DS9/VOY- significant performance gains from upgrading existing hardware, not magic nacelle Amazon Prime.

Have you ever even touched a piece of technology? Are you on a laptop? Ever opened one of those up? Let's say you want to add RAM and swap in faster storage and maybe put in a backlit keyboard. Guess what? Getting a new laptop is easier, but you're sitting there arguing that it would be easier to swap in new pieces with no compatibility concerns with old pieces and yadda-yadda-yadda. It's crazy.

I actually serviced both desktops and laptops and I can tell you that unless you maxed out the RAM and storage in an existing unit on a laptop, you can upgrade them relatively easily - you don't get a new laptop or replace the mobo fully unless its burnt out or so low level where the manufacturer intentionally didn't want to support upgrades.
Same thing with a backlit kb, but ultimately irrelevant since a laptop can function with a normal kb - the backlit is just an extra non-critical thing that basically adds very little.

But either way, your analogy is incorrect. Swapping a whole nacelle isn’t like swapping laptop RAM; it’s like replacing a wing + fuel lines + avionics mid-flight. Pods are structural and field-geometry matched to the hull/pylons/SIF and require drydock-level alignment and retuning.

Starfleet designs for internal serviceability - open the nacelle, rewind/replace coils, converters, control boards, recalibrate the warp geometry. That’s exactly what we see in Nightingale.
Why this matters for F-1: Deep-space intercepts do internal upgrades to the existing shells (coils/EPS/firmware). You preserve the bus, ephemeris, and comms continuity without turning a low-touch probe into a logistics circus.

It's lower on the assumption scale than your repetitive redesigns, chase-downs, and deep space retrofits.

At the risk of repeating myself:
Ferry theory is higher-assumption since we are going by canon.
It needs (a) a faster alien courier with motive and availability, (b) long-distance rendezvous and handoffs, (c) policy buy-in from Vulcans who were discouraging human deep-space ops, and (d) it breaks the continuous dataset/ephemeris the episode implies.

My model needs none of that - just two internal service windows and otherwise ordinary warp. Fewer moving parts, closer to what we see on screen.

... what I said.

Exactly. It's inconsistent with what YOU said because it discards canon.

The date of last contact per Starfleet does not necessarily equal planetfall at Planet Self-Destruct. That's what "insist" meant, since it was in the context of "put her at Planet Self-Destruct".

Sure - last contact ≠ impact date. That helps my point: if contact ended in 2247, then everything up to 2247 must still be explained without anomalies/ferries. That’s ~29,000 ly over ~180 years in the map frame, which ordinary warp + two internal service windows can cover. The final local anomaly could account for the last deflection/planetfall - not the entire journey.

So you're arguing that circa 2203 a ship traveled 1300 light-years to get to the probe. At your preferred Okuda speeds that's a voyage of more than three years from Earth at warp six . . . or six years on the TOS scale.

Who the hell's going to want to fly for three to six years to upgrade a probe when you could just launch another one? That's crazy.

The UFP was founded in 2161.
In other words, my model never needed a ship to leave Earth in 2203 and fly 1,300 ly. The uplift comes from the nearest frontier asset at the time - a UFP yard on the rim, or an uncrewed service drone - i.e., from wherever is already out there. That collapses the trip to hundreds, not thousands, of ly and turns “3–6 years” into months→year-ish, depending on local ships or drones (warp-6/7 exists by then) or an autonomous package.

"Magical payload bays"? LOL! Dude, I get that you want to FUD the alternatives, but that's the goofiest attempt ever. "Oh, behold their magical ability to put things in the trunk!" C'mon, man.

Not “FUD” - just minimizing assumptions based on what’s on screen and trying to work with that.

“Magical payload bays” = the ferry scenario: a faster ship repeatedly rendezvous-captures, stows, powers, and re-deploys a 2067 probe across thousands of ly - despite unknown interfaces, mass properties, and field-geometry tuning. That stacks assumptions (availability, motive, policy, hardware compatibility) the episode never hints at.

Early Vulcans might refuel and log a human warp probe already in flight that was in the neighbourhood travelling at 1c - implying minimal aid, maximum oversight (consistent with their early policy toward Earth as shown in Enterprise). That’s miles from taxiing it across the map or refitting it. My model assumes low touch not high assumptions.

LOL. You're even going to deny canonical speeds?

Hardly.
Canon = on screen. ENT repeatedly treats warp 5 as a design goal, with ~4.5 as typical sustain; higher bursts come only after tweaks. The show also gives distance anchors (e.g., Archer pointing out ~90 ly to Sol near the end of S1 - when the ship reached Risa), which - given all the stops are incompatible with a 1500c@W5 assumption.
We don’t need outlier table speeds to make F-1’s ledger work anyway; the heavy lift comes from the early-UFP uplift + final endurance leg at a few-hundreds-c.

Utter nonsense. So long as the anomaly is a two-way phenomenon that remains in existence long enough to permit the sending of telemetry after transit, a Boeing 747 called Friendship One could wormhole its way to the Ocampa homeworld but still maintain contact with a tower. Then the anomaly closes or otherwise goes away and all the sudden the tower has . . . oh, how should we put it? . . . "lost contact" with the 747. Sounds familiar, no?

All we need is a spatial anomaly that allows for rapid transit from Point A to a distant Point B and allows for radio signals, subspace or otherwise. Guess what? Relocative anomalies are a dime a dozen in Trek, as per my previous list, which I repeat here for ease:

"(See also the problem of assorted sublight craft from Earth that crossed many-light-year distances, which would seem to include Pioneer 10 (1972), Voyager 6 (19??), the cryonics solar orbiter (1990s), possibly the Botany Bay (1996), the Nomad probe (circa 2018), Ares IV (2032), and the Charybdis (2037). I'm not even certain that is a complete list.)"​

Some also allow communication, e.g. the 2351–2371 wormhole, the Bajoran wormhole post-comet, et cetera.

I already addressed this multiple times and this is the last time:
Even if the final loss was near an anomaly, the 180 years before that still require ~29,000 ly of travel in the map frame. A one-off wormhole near Earth doesn’t do that heavy lift.

Comms: Directional subspace links are energy-efficient but need pointing. A big relocative jump breaks the ephemeris, so Earth no longer knows where to aim. “Transmit via the anomaly” isn’t a comms router- index distortions give refraction/attenuation/multipath, not a guaranteed Earth link.

The few stable, two-way cases (Bajoran wormhole, Barzan with stabilizer - actually Barzan was unstable and needed to be artificially stabilized from the DQ by VOY) are singular infrastructure, not random pass-throughs that an unescorted 2067 probe can repeatedly exploit while maintaining a century of trackable telemetry.

Your list is mostly one-offs (and several are sublight craft that took centuries). Building F-1’s whole journey on anomaly luck is higher-assumption than ordinary warp + two internal service windows, which matches the episode’s “skip ahead a little for local anomalies” implication and keeps the tracking story intact.

No, *you* presume continuous century-scale telemetry. After the wormhole pooped the probe out 30,000 light-years away they might have a location, a direction, and a velocity, but little local info. If the thing was at sublight they could estimate its location for Voyager to check out, but there's absolutely no need for them to have tracked it to that point.

The episode dialogue has Kim say “skip ahead a little” because Starfleet could project a course from LAST known coordinates while Kim himself took into account local anomalies. That only works if Earth had a stable ephemeris for a long time to know where the probe might have ended up in the first place.

Don't you get it?
A relocative wormhole that throws the probe ~30,000 ly destroys that ephemeris - Earth wouldn’t know where to aim a tightbeam or what clock drift to assume. They had 'last known coordinates' which were in Voyager's neighbourhood.
Also, sublight after a big jump doesn’t fix the core math: the probe still must have covered ~29,000 ly in ~180 years (≈166c) before that final loss of contact. A one-off anomaly can explain the last deflection, not the whole journey.

It's a better model than yours. The spatial anomaly model is best of all as it requires no new entities and no absurd choices to prop it up.

Again I have to repeat myself (one last time) :
The anomaly model adds entities and assumptions: a long-lived, two-way, relocative corridor that (a) doesn’t shred a 2067 probe, (b) preserves tightbeam comms and ephemeris, and (c) occurs exactly where/when needed - maybe more than once. That’s a stack.

Or have you forgotten that such anomalies frequently damage 24th century ships? What do you think would happen to a 2067 era probe?

On-screen dialogue implies projectable course + local corrections, i.e., century-scale telemetry, not giant skips. And even with a final anomaly, F-1 still had to cover ~29,000 ly in ~180 years (≈166c) before that.

Lower-assumption fit: ordinary warp + two internal service windows (NX-era, early-UFP), then a long endurance leg. No ferries, no wormholes, no miracle corridors - just the boring ops Trek shows everywhere else.

But hey, if you like your model, I'm not going to stop you from using it... but I do reserve the right to think its highly improbable and defend mine.

Who the hell said it was? Not me, so who the hell are you arguing against, here?

In summary, you're desperately trying to justify your idea, with which you've fallen in love, by unrealistically pooh-poohing others. It is not convincing.

Oh, and by the way, I also came up with an idea in this thread, but prefer another. I suppose I could dig in on mine and pretend all other ideas are bad based on trying to suggest problems and pretend they're way worse than they are, but I don't think that would be beneficial to my suggestion anyway. Crazy, right?

That's a mighty assumption you made implying I'm 'desperately' trying to justify my idea.
I like logic/reason/consistency and working with canon with minimal assumptions on 'quick fix anomalies' that would sooner destroy an autonomous probe from 2067 rather than ferry it across tens of thousands of LY's intact while preserving it (or its internal nav systems - which from 90-ies trek and even new Trek are implied would probably end up fried from the first anomalous 'highway').

I misspoke on the “Warp 2” label - Conestoga’s ~2.22c (~Warp 1.3 at best which is what I wrote) is the point. It’s a crewed ark sustaining low-warp for nine years circa 2069. That supports the only claim I needed: a 2067 unmanned probe sustaining ~Warp 1 for multi-year legs is entirely plausible (and more with internal upgrades).

Fixing that label doesn’t change the ledger:
early decades ~1c,
NX-era internal uplift ~100c,
early-UFP uplift → few-hundreds-c,
final endurance leg → total ~30k ly / ~180 y, no ferries/wormholes.

So: thanks for the correction on the tag; but my conclusion stands.

And I'm done repeating myself.