Friendship One

[zDarby]

Friendship One traveled approximately 30,000 lightyears in at most 311 years. (Voyager found it in 2378, 311 years after launch.)

That's no less than 96.5 times the speed of light, 3.9, TNG scale and 4.5 TOS scale. It might be more but it couldn't be much less.

They kept contact with it until 2248 and knew, approximately, where it should be. That rules out sub-space anomalies, like what happened to SS Valiant, launched 2 years before Friendship one.

Any ideas how this might be possible from a probe launched in 2067, only three years after first contact and two years before SS Conestoga which traveled at 1.27wf (TNG)?

Remember that in First Flight then NX-Alpha was the first to break the warp 2 barrier in 2143, 76 years later. Was this a record just for man-carrying craft? Or perhaps it was just a record for that particular architecture? That's not the impressing given by the show.

What do y'all think?

 

[matthunter]

It's worse than that, the Federation knew it was already IN the Delta Quadrant in 2248 and on a course to Uxal. The probe also contained instructions on how to build warp drives and matter/antimatter reactors. If the Vulcans were against humans advancing too quick, you'd think they would balk at this... so is it possible they agreed to provide the probe's drive and put some convenient flaws into the schematics carried by the probe? Maybe what happened to the Uxalis wasn't just them playing with tech they didn't fully understand...

 

[Timo]

It does make sense that a probe might outperform a crewed vessel. Perhaps automatons cope with intense warp fields that would fry people? Also, high warp on a projectile fired from a ship that can't move fast is a thing in "Balance of Terror", and nicely echoes the reality where battleships trundle along at twenty to thirty knots, but their shells scream through the air in excess of the speed of sound.

I'd be happiest thinking F1 was a gigantic thing, a tour de force employing brute force to get far fast. Yet Janeway at the conclusion of the episode indicates she has taken the probe aboard her ship, suggesting modest size (something we never could divine one way or the other from the visuals of the probe in space).

As regards the NX test rigs, sure, those might have been mankind's first-ever flights involving warp 2 and 3, respectively. But the episode never states anything of the sort. The only record mentioned is when Robinson becomes the first human to bail out at warp. Beyond that, the Warp Five Engine might simply have been put through her paces, which included milestones at the humdrum W2 and W3.

What we do know is that W4 was a milestone for the Franklin of ST:Beyond fame. For an Earth-built ship, that is. Quite possibly, Earth rented, bought or stole the services of alien ships capable of much higher warp back in the 2070s already - we see plenty of alien ships in the supposed "Earth fleets" of various ENT episodes, even though it doesn't appear that alien pilots as such would be keen to side with Earth out of mere goodwill.

But there are so many qualifiers in all these arguments that there's certainly room for a W9.28 probe in the early days. Heck, Kirk's ship was always trying to do Warp Infinity when a bad guy sat on the safety valve, and the only thing preventing such was that the physical structure was starting to shake apart. A smaller, sturdier structure with the same warp engine, or even a lesser one, might also do Warp Infinity when so commanded. "Threshold" does establish, after all, that there are no infinite energy requirements associated, merely finite ones.

IMHO the big mystery there is the ability to maintain contact till 2248. We don't know what sort of contact this would have been - perhaps the probe was to make its powerful warp drive hiccup every twenty years, a phenomenon even primitive Earth subspace telescopes could observe across vast distances? If a hiccup was missed in 2248, but the probe was supposed to follow a beeline course (there being no motivation for it to do any diversions, apparently), then the star charts sent by our VOY heroes to Earth would allow the eggheads there to draw the beeline and spot the one and only star system the line actually intercepts during those couple of unsupervised decades.

We don't learn of any results being sent back to Earth by F1, now do we? Perhaps she always was a mere demonstrator, intended to carry Earth's excellence to the edges of its performance but not to achieve anything else?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[DEWLine]

Now here's a question for Rick and Mike to play with.

Who'd be interested in reading up on a mission profile document for Friendship 1? And if the probe did have any onboard data files that were salvageable...?

 

[Tenacity]

sub-space anomalies, like what happened to SS Valiant

I figure the Valiant got to the edge of the energy barrier under it's own power, and was pushed out of the galaxy from there.

SS Conestoga which traveled at 1.27wf (TNG)?

That was ENT.

Friendship One came from VOY, it was ENT that said that Humans started out slow and stayed there for decades. First Contact never stated what Cochrane's speed was, it easily could have been warp three on the first flight, and it increased to warp four within a few years.

What really gets me about Friendship One is that it would have the endurance to operate for centuries. Warp drive was still new tech, and this thing was the energizer bunny.