Earth to Vulcan in 30 minutes - a possible solution?

[shapeshifter]

People keep talking as if The Canon still matters, I don't think it does.

REBOOT, people. This is the Brave New World. I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they now have Transwarp, (whatever that was) wormholes, corridors or anything that brings Trek back to the cutting edge by removing old story telling stumbling blocks.

The days where the drama of the time it takes to travel around the local area of our galaxy may be long gone and I say it's a good thing no matter how the means violates the canon.

Stories of Near, (or even Far) Extra-galactic proportions may now be possible with the OP () ideas and I, if true, cannot wait to see them. To Infinity and Beyond1!!

 

[EJA]

Silly once again if their maximum speed was only warp 4 - it would take weeks.

Isn't the Enterprise's maximum warp speed Warp 7?

Also are we sure they weren't heading to Vulcan at TNG warp speeds which are faster than TOS warp speeds?

I mean with the 3 or 4 warp cores they had the ship has to be pretty fast.

Warp 4 was the speed they were trying to achieve after being damaged in the fight so they were travelling at warp 4 for at least part of the journey. I was already taking the TNG warp speed tables into account - it would still take several hours to travel between Earth and Vulcan at TNG Warp 9.9 from what I recall. Obviously if they've re-jiggered them again to make everybody faster, I don't approve.

Maybe Scotty managed to give the transwarp engines a power boost. He is a miracle worker after all.

 

[OneBuckFilms]

One thing to consider, as has been pointed out before, is that there is a lot of Time Compression, and we literally don't know how long many of these journeys took for either vessel.

Based on what is on screen, we have no hard facts.

 

[EnsignRicky]

I'm not sure how they do it, but I do know that they had to come up with something fast after Starfleet instituted the thirty minutes or it's free policy.

 

[JarodRussell]

One thing to consider, as has been pointed out before, is that there is a lot of Time Compression, and we literally don't know how long many of these journeys took for either vessel.

Based on what is on screen, we have no hard facts.

I said before, the trip from Earth to Vulcan takes just a little longer than 3 minutes in this movie. Because there is no time bypassing cut. Sulu says they reached maximum warp, and in the very same scene Chekov makes the announcement that they arrive at Vulcan in 3 minutes.

Unless you want to argue that it maybe takes hours to reach maximum warp. But I think that can be excluded.

 

[Gojira]

One thing to consider, as has been pointed out before, is that there is a lot of Time Compression, and we literally don't know how long many of these journeys took for either vessel.

Based on what is on screen, we have no hard facts.

I agree, there are many episodes and movies where the crew travels to it's destination without much reference to time. I don't think it is anything new or anything to get upset over.

 

[Nerys Myk]

My own personal view is that they should set the limits of the technology and write the story around them rather than changing them to gloss over a hole in the plot.

Yes, that's exactly the point. There's no difference between a Deus Ex Machina and "ships that travel at the speed of plot". Both is bad writing.

Are.

 

[pookha]

they had issues in tos going as far back as where no man has gone before.
not only was enterprise out on the edge of the galaxy so had an earlier ship that no way should have been out that far.

 

[Amaris]

they had issues in tos going as far back as where no man has gone before.
not only was enterprise out on the edge of the galaxy so had an earlier ship that no way should have been out that far.

The Valiant, traveling on impulse, no less. Even optimistically, that's a good 20,000 years before reaching the galactic "barrier" at the edge of the galaxy.
At Warp One or Two (old scale), it would still take well over several generations.

J.

 

[Sci]

Starships in Star Trek have always moved as fast as the plot requires. Pookha rightly notes that "Where No Man Has Gone Before" had the Enterprise way farther out than it should have been able to reach at maximum warp. Star Trek VI had the Enterprise, Excelsior, Chang's warbird, and Qo'noS One all rushing between Earth and Qo'noS like it was a hop, skip, and a jump away. Earth, Vulcan, and Andor seemed right next door to each other in ENT, and very distant from one another in "Journey to Babel." Bajor is far out from the Federation in early DS9... and just a few hours away in later DS9. The Romulan Neutral Zone is hours away in TNG's "The Defector"... and just a few minutes away from Earth in Star Trek: First Contact.

I forgive all the other Treks for it, and I can forgive it in ST09, too -- especially since ST09 at least bothers to be nonspecific about how much time passes between Earth and Vulcan, which is more than most of the preceding examples bothered to do.

 

[Pauln6]

I think you can forgive the early writers a bit more since the warp factor system wasn't really well defined back then. Also, many people have hypothesised that the edge of the galaxy could be crossing the width of the disc rather than the far edge - still a huge distance but not as huge.

The problem I have is that the plot of the new movie doesn't work if you apply existing rules to it. Vulcan stations and scanners would have known that the Narada was on course for it days or at least hours before it arrived (or did it have a cloak - I don't recall that). Enterprise could probably crank a bit more speed out temporarily to catch up with the fleet over a longer journey and would most likely have arrived in plenty of time and would probably have had time to intercept the Narada before reaching Vulcan etc. The current plot makes the Federation look a bit more incompetent than normal. Maybe Kirk really is Captain ++ material after one day on the job by their standards.

 

[EJA]

As I said before, Scotty is a miracle worker. According to the website I posted a link to in this thread a little while ago (think it's on page 2), page 558 of the third edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia stated that a starship travelling at warp factor 9.9999 could cross twenty light years in 52.7 minutes, i.e. just under an hour. It's just remotely possible that Scotty managed to reconfigure the warp engines to temporarily allow for this speed for their pursuit of the Narada to Earth. But I agree that we're probably never going to get a completely satisfying explanation for all this. I certainly can't think of anything else. At the end of the day, it's just fiction.

 

[Timo]

A couple of random rimshots:

The arrival of the Narada at Vulcan may have gone undetected because the mining ship didn't arrive at warp speed. Remember that her arrival was heralded by a "space thunderstorm", a phenomenon we witnessed twice elsewhere in the movie. We first heard of it when the Narada met the Kelvin, and next when she plopped into the black hole in the climax of the story. We may have assumed that the "storm" is associated with time travel, but perhaps it is the standard effect of the mining ship moving from place to place? She may e.g. be doing it by using red matter for creating convenient black holes or whatever, after finding out how red matter allowed travel in the first place. Certainly there's no time travel going on above Vulcan, right? Yet the "storm" is still there.

Could it take hours to reach maximum warp? Well, obviously it could. After all, that's exactly what happened in ST:TMP, the other maiden voyage of a new Enterprise. And it was an even more dire emergency in that older movie (definite threat to Earth vs. possible threat to Vulcan), so one can hardly argue that Pike would have tried harder.

Could it take days? Probably not, unless something went wrong. And while it would be very realistic that something did, we don't get the sense of a major malfunction from the dialogue. So the "four days from Earth to Vulcan is good going" idea from preceding Trek would have to be adjusted a bit, at the very least.

Overall, I have a definite antipathy towards this latest movie, and it colors my views of its use of fictional rules (the most important element of scifi writing). In other Trek movies, there has been a plot contrivance or two, an unlikely coincidence that drives the story to a certain direction and creates drama where there otherwise wouldn't have been much. In STXI, there are something like twenty plot contrivances, all of which are necessary to create the eventual outcome. I can easily swallow two impossibilities for breakfast when watching scifi. I can't stomach twenty.

Still, I'm not so hostile towards this movie that I wouldn't feel the urge to do the writers' job for them and explain away some of those contrivances. The travel time issue is one of those: the movie would work so much better if previous Trek conventions on travel time were used.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[EJA]

I thought the space lightning storm was when Spock Prime emerged in the Jellyfish. Nero then proceeded to dump him on Delta Vega and head to Vulcan.

 

[pookha]

I think you can forgive the early writers a bit more since the warp factor system wasn't really well defined back then. Also, many people have hypothesised that the edge of the galaxy could be crossing the width of the disc rather than the far edge - still a huge distance but not as huge.

The problem I have is that the plot of the new movie doesn't work if you apply existing rules to it. Vulcan stations and scanners would have known that the Narada was on course for it days or at least hours before it arrived (or did it have a cloak - I don't recall that). Enterprise could probably crank a bit more speed out temporarily to catch up with the fleet over a longer journey and would most likely have arrived in plenty of time and would probably have had time to intercept the Narada before reaching Vulcan etc. The current plot makes the Federation look a bit more incompetent than normal. Maybe Kirk really is Captain ++ material after one day on the job by their standards.

but it isnt just the early writers.
look as others have said the writers never let some technical issues get in the way of a what they considered to be a good story.
and in the early days fans understood this and thus was born the fun of trying to find interesting explanations for why things were the way they were.


as for narada having a cloak ;it is very possible in the years waiting for spock and preparing to break nero free the crew worked on upgraded for the ship.

they could have had specs for some of the earlier cloaking devices which even a two version earlier cloak would be very advanced for the movie time period.for all we know some of the narada crew could have been former military.

and yes to answer some one else reaching maxium warp might take awhile.

while a ship can go to warp near a planet (numerous examples through trek) they might not be able to get to maxium warp till away from a planetary system.

and if they needed to travel and get into a corridor this might mean slowing down or even dropping out of warp while going into the corridor and then going to maxium warp.

we know it took some time because bones and others had time to change uniforms.

actually maxium warp for a corridor might be different then maxium warp elsewhere.
especially if this was corridor that for some reason might only be used for extreme emergencies.

it would also help to explain why they were sensor blind until they got to vulcan if they were traveling in some type of warp highway or corridor.

and i dont think either enterprise or the narada took it back to earth.

that seemed to take longer then the trip to vulcan.

it may be the corridor was afected in some way when vulcan exploded.

 

[Pauln6]

Since Spock was headed off to rendevous with the fleet, they wouldn't have been in the vicinity of any Earth/Vulcan warp corridor. They would also have been light years away from Kirk and Scotty on nearby Delta Vega. You can unpick one thing and something else still doesn't make sense...

However, since Delta Vega isn't in orbit around Vulcan (mind meld telepathic flashback notwithstanding) it is also arguable that they were not as far away from Delta Vega as they were from Vulcan. However, it seems likely that Delta Vega is in the Vulcan solar system unless there is another star very close by (Alpha Centauri is our closest star and it is several light years away). I'm not an astronomer so I don't know if that's true of Epsilon Eridani or not.

Space is huge. I think they were silly to try and maintain dramatic tension by having everything happen so quickly. This is just another sign of modern society's obsession with instant effort equals instant rewards. Indiana Jones managed to maintain dramatic tension with just that little line flying across the map of the word. Maybe that's what we need for Trek! It's easy to see why writers deliberately ignore this stuff! The ire of nerds must be less hassling than trying to work this stuff out in advance.

 

[Timo]

Regarding "sensor blindness", that's only consistent with what we saw in TOS. The sensors of that time and age couldn't tell whether a starship was present in a given star system unless the hero ship herself entered that system, or was within something like half a parsec of it ("Bread and Circuses"). Pike's ship in STXI didn't suffer from any extra handicap in addition to that.

...Save, of course, for the inability to make contact with the rest of the Fleet, a fact that he found somewhat worrisome. The heroes probably wouldn't have discussed that unless there was something exceptional about not being able to chat with the other ships (but not so exceptional that one would immediately suspect deliberate jamming or the total destruction of the other party). Since Earth couldn't make direct contact with Vulcan (and was worried about that), it would only make sense that the ships couldn't chat, either - even if the reason for both turned out to be something relatively benign.

So the movie isn't really all that different from TOS as regards these fictional rules. It's just the travel time and distance issues that are inconsistent with TOS. Those, and Chekov's age... The rest is just plot contrivances on top of plot contrivances, but still within the rules of the TOS universe.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[pookha]

the ability to communicte and the time it took varied wildly within tos.
some stuff was real time and other times it had massive time delays.

and distance didnt seem to play that big a part in why.

and things happening quickly isnt new either.
obsession, arena????
did people actually watch star trek the series.

 

[JarodRussell]

My own personal view is that they should set the limits of the technology and write the story around them rather than changing them to gloss over a hole in the plot.

Yes, that's exactly the point. There's no difference between a Deus Ex Machina and "ships that travel at the speed of plot". Both is bad writing.

Are.

Oh, a smartass.

 

[Pauln6]

and things happening quickly isnt new either. obsession, arena????
did people actually watch star trek the series.

I was thinking more in terms of Federation space stations and listening posts. I think its unrealistic that an unidentified vessel could pass from Klingon Space into the heart of the Federation without someone noticing. How rubbish are they supposed to be? Not hard to explain away though, Borg technology blah blah. Although that then begs the question why they didn't cloak to get to Earth. I don't recall the Borg ever using cloaking technology either in spite of assimilating Romulans in season one or two of TNG so maybe they're not compatible.

I don't recall anything specific in my nitpickers guide but yeah, Trek has always been full of holes. Two wrongs don't make a right though!

Stargate used military advisors, Trek should use nerd advisors. Simples.