The Trek universe seems to be one where FTL signals travel much faster than FTL starships. Could longer travel times-longer than one year-work if communications are much faster? It occurred to me that hibernation aboard ship might mitigate these longer travel times.
Reginald Barcly & his
PathFinder team used Hyper-Subspace Radio to communicate with Voyager.
I've calculated how fast his Hyper-Subspace Radio waves would need to be to maintain real time communication with Voyager in the Delta Quadrant with the evidence of info I had.
In 1 second, the Hyper-SubSpace radio signal needs to travel 1,000,225.38428672 ly linearly to maintain Real Time Communication with Voyager.
The main issue with long distance signal transmission, even with focus & directed Radio Wave emissions.
Imagine how difficult it is to
send basic WiFi signals 3 miles across a lake.
Now imagine a few orders of magnitude difficulty in doing that across several ly's of space, finding where a StarShip is in the middle of a sea of stars.
If you're off by a fraction of a degree, you completely miss sending the Hyper-Subspace Radio signal to your target.
So the major issue isn't the signal propagation in most cases, it's the aiming + stellar phenomea that might be in the way of your signal.
Just aiming correctly could be a incredibly frustrating task since:
- Space is naturally moving / expanding
- We're naturally rotating around SMBH (Super Massive Black Hole)
- Random Steller Phenomena might be in the way
- If you're in a Star System, you might be orbiting / rotating around a Star or Planetoid.
So many moving objects and calculations that you need to factor in, and then fiddle with, to get your radio signal aim to be correct my tiny fractions of a degree.
As fars as Transwarp Physical Travel, in my head canon for the 26th century, there are solutions to cross Galactic travel, but I've put natural limitations so that all forms of TransWarp capable FTL drives to have more believable/realistic limitations and this way we don't create a situation where one "Ultimate FTL" drive will rule them all.
Yes, you'll be able to cross the Milkyway in a span of "Many Days" or "Hours" instead of a year, but everything has a balance and resource cost. A few rare cases, things can be "Near instantaneous" depending on what drive you use and what resources you have access to.
An example with Quantum Slip-Stream Drive.
There are natural limitations to how long you can stay inside Quantum Slip-Stream since being inside QSS naturally does damage / drains the SIF (Structural Integrity Field) slowly over time.
By my 26the century, the amount of time you can stay in QSS has grown by a few orders of magnitude compared to Voyager's initial launch, but there are still hard time limits before you have to pump more energy from reserves, or pop out into normal space and recharge or fix your SIF Energy Capacitors depending on the situation.
So low end QSS @ Wf 60 ~= 172,479 ly in 74.5 days
And Hi end QSS @ Wf 180 ~= 34,934 ly in 9.3 hrs
Limited use QSS @ Wf 825 ~= 2,799,610 ly in 4.66 hrs <- Requires Synthetic Benemite Crystals that take many years to naturally grow and is a consumable.
Most StarFleet Captains have between 1-15 of these crystals saved up for emergency use when they need to cross vast distances of space in short order or they suffer the "Janeway or Traveller effects" where they get chucked super far away from home and want to return home.
Usually these SBC (Synthetic Benemite Crystals) naturally decay over time and use, but I've found a way to halt their decay until you need to use them.
I placed each SBC in a small container that maintains a small Temporal Stasis Field that naturally halts the decay, if a Captain wants to use it, they will shove the container into a specialized receptacle that will turn off the Temporal Stasis Field and allows usage of the SBC to attain the fastest mode of QSS travel.
So in 99.9% of the time, most StarFleet Captains won't use the SBC, they'll use the slower form of QSS since the SBC is their "Ace Card" to get back home or to make a emergency trip to a destination in super short order.
Same with usage of Spore Drive, you need to grow the Spores and seperate them in containers, find a volunteer who will willingly be Genetically altered to become a Navigator (Genetic Engineering Ban has been lifted and reversed).
There are regulations as to what you can genetically modify though in BiPaB's:
e.g. Narcissim, Sociopathy, Greed ,& Agression are certain traits that aren't allowed to be increased.
