General Trek Questions and Observations

they'd probably hit the wall, like when Data threw a rock into the wall

 

Just watched "Pathfinder". I thought it was a nice touch that Barclay's holodeck recreations were of old footage: Chakotay and B'Elanna wore Maquis garb, while Janeway (who had long since adopted the shorter style) reverted to her old bun. Kind of similar to the way they kept her collar in shadow during "Worst Case Scenario", so you wouldn't see that she was wearing conventional insignia on her uniform (because she was playing someone else, but you weren't supposed know that).

 

Wow, I never noticed that! And rewatching the episode, I found a hilarious exchange that could perfectly be applied to the newTrek debates:

PARIS: Well, I was thinking, Paris and Janeway retake the ship, and then she decides to execute all the conspirators.
TUVOK: That is an entirely implausible plot development. Captain Janeway would never behave in such an inhumane manner.
PARIS: This isn't real life, Tuvok. It's fiction. Don't get so caught up in logic.
TUVOK: Logic is an integral part of narrative structure. According to the Dictates of Poetics by T'hain of Vulcan, a character's actions must flow inexorably from his or her established traits.
PARIS: Well, I don't know anything about T'hain, but I do know what makes an interesting story, and that's unexpected plot twists.
TUVOK: If you think I will allow you to turn this programme into a parody, you are sorely mistaken.

 

Some of Janeway's writers could have stood to read T'hain's book, and taken notes.

 

I gots another one...

The Federation is frickin' HUGE, Ok?

It's considered canon that the max speed a ship can comfortably sustain is 1000c, or a bit under warp 8. This is established both by Voyager's projected journey home and by Sisko when he tries to collapse the wormhole.

The Federation is 8000 light years across. Assuming Sector 001 is more or less in the middle, that means it takes four years to fly to its edge, and eight to cross it completely.

Even in the days of sail, when a trip to the New World was a really big deal, the crossing typically took under 3 months.

 

There's enough onscreen evidence to suggest that the Federation is not a perfect sphere, but a very irregular shape, with some of its borders considerably closer to Earth than others (Qo'noS and the rest of the Klingon Empire is only 4 days away from Earth at Warp 4.5 or so). Deep Space Nine could still be considered at the edge of Federation space only a week or so from Earth at high warp if it wasn't officially in Federation territory, but rather Bajoran territory at the time.

Conversely, there could be some more distant regions of Federation space--at the outer ends of its irregular shape--that could indeed be so far away from Earth that it could take weeks or even months for just subspace communications.

 

I wasn't nitpicking on travel times to known worlds. Rather on just how big it is overall.
Consider the cross times...
NX01 - Warp 4.8 - 40 years
NCC 1701 - Warp 8 - 8 years
NCC 1701D - Warp 9.6 - 4 years

EDIT: 4 days at warp 4.5 (280c) puts Qo'nos 3.2 light years from Earth... the closest star is 4.3...

 

Honestly I just ignore most of the stuff about how large the Federation supposedly is and how far the various known worlds are from Earth.
The shows never established a map (and let's not bring up the whole 2d vs 3d maps and how borders"should" work in space issues yet again) and how far everything was away from everything else always depended on the needs of the plot.
And that before we bring up the times in TOS/the movies when they causally glavanted to both the edge and the centre of the galaxy.

 

The biggest consistency in Star Trek is how inconsistent warp factors are. You can toss out any kind of devised warp scale or warp speed formula because they might work in this story and be totally wrong in all these stories. You can rationalize it in-universe that warp factors are dependent on local stellar conditions and can vary greatly in different parts of the Galaxy, but it's still basically "writer's choice" when all is said and done.

 

There'll always be those problematic quotes that we'd probably better just ignore, like this Picard one. For example Spock's quote, a character noted for his accuracy otherwise, that his home planet was 'millions of lightyears away' in All Our Yesterdays, which would have necessarily meant that the planet Sarpeidon was in an extragalactic system (though it probably wouldn't be beyond the capacity of some board members to come up with a bizarrely convoluted scheme of reasoning in which it all still 'fits' in the galaxy), which was contradicted by later materials. I'd chalk statements like these up to the "writers have no sense of scale" phenomenon.

 

Given its size, the Federation should have built it's own transwarp network long ago. Warp speed is like going somewhere in a bus, but for long distances you do the equivalent of hopping on a 747.

 

That would make a lot of sense, and it could be one of those things a hypothetical series set in the mid/late 25th century could include

 

It reminds of cars during the days of the Model T (Back then, 60 mph was flying. Now, the average Formula One car goes over 200 mph! )

 

Or the days of ships. In the late 1700's, a two-month crossing of the Atlantic was typical. 150 years later, a steamship could do it in four days.

 

Or a supersonic jet in four hours. That's more like warp speed.

 

STO has transwarp gates in orbit of major worlds as per 2409, though they drift out of focus a bit later on. As well as going from one gate to another, all Starfleet ships can remote-access the gate to instantly jump back to Earth in emergencies, and captains may earn the right to access other gate destinations remotely.

 

But a good chunk of STO has already been invalidated by Picard. It's pretty much an alternate universe by now.

 

It always was.

 

That's the fifth Harry Kim promotion that's been invalidated that way...

 

In 1900, the average speed of a horse-drawn carriage in central London was about 10 mph.
Today, the average speed of central London traffic is about 10 mph as well.

Progress, you've gotta love it.