How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 2067 ?

[MacLeod]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

...But this goes a bit deeper than that. Supposedly, by 2248, F1 had sailed out to a distance equal to that between Starfleet HQ and Janeway. Never mind comms delay - Janeway supposedly had no means of sending messages to HQ at all, either at two-second delay or two-century delay. So how come F1 did?

Another probe in Trek canon communicated from afar, too: Quadros 1 sent data from a distance of 70,000 lightyears, equal to Janeway's first-season distance from HQ and about twice that of the seventh-season distance. Although in that context (the DS9 pilot episode) we got no information about comms delay - Q1 might have sailed out millennia prior, and its findings might have taken those thousands of years to reach the Federation. Or Q1 might have been a long-base interferometry probe, never sailing to the Gamma Quadrant as such, but merely making possible telescopic observations of that distant location. F1 is a completely different issue... Especially as we know it's old Earth tech and not something built by more advanced cultures.

Timo Saloniemi

I seem to recall some early TNG episode were Enterprise is flung somewhere distance. I might take centuries to make it home at high warp, but subspace radio would be their a few decades.

So if the F1 probe is sending a signal back, Earth will still get a signal until is stops transmitting, even if the delay gets longer and longe as the light years increase. The signal might have stopped being received in 2248 or it might have stopped transmitting in 2248 and they stopped receiving it later. The "lost contact" could be the time it stopped, or the time they stopped getting a signal.

As for the probe remaining in warp. Warp field sustainters like the photon torpedoes have. Also the class 9 probes that are used sometimes to send single people out to starships. Get the ship to warp, then sustain that speed in a massively extended cruise via a warp bubble. Every once in a while the warp drives fire off another burst to keep the ship at warp, but for most of the time the ship just cruises. This might be fatal to humans, but the probe wouldn't care.

What is more of a puzzle is that Earth left detailed plans for building antimatter power plants in the computers of the probe in an effort to make friendly contact with other species near Earth's level of advancement. I don't recall if there was anything in there about warp drives, but a lot of antimatter technology from 2060s Earth.

That would be TNG's "Where No One has Gone Before" in which Data said a subspace transmission from 2.7 millon light years out should be received by Starfleet in fifty one years ten months years out before he was cut off. Which places subspace communication at approx 47 000ly per year. So about 3 years for VOY to receive a reply

Incidently Data said it would take over 300 years to get home. As he didn't say over 400 years the travel time would be 300-399 years. And at 399 years it would give a speed of 6767ly per year travel time. Which means VOY would complete her Journey in about 11 years.

 

[Ithekro]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Enterprise likely won't have to worry about running into anything in the vastness between galaxies. Voyager still has to dodge gravity wells and the galactic core. Plus, at that time a Galaxy-class ship was probably rated to travel for decades as a time while Voayger could not. Also Data was likely anwering a question based on speed and distance, not that they could actually make the trip before the ship broke down, or they ran out of antimatter. Not sure if Picard's ship would make the generations trek with with the families breeding new crew members under the command of Captain Data.

 

[TEACAKE'S PLEATHER DOME]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

"Space Breeding"

 

[HIjol]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Pre-Big Bang Gravitational Space-Time Anomalies. And Dark Matter. Oh, and also White Holes.

Yep!

 

[Mytran]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Voyager honestly made appalling progress under her own steam. Even discounting the 15 weeks wasted in Resolutions, they averaged a mere 400 LY a year by the middle of Season 6. Were it not for all the many boosts and shortcuts they discovered, it would have taken 175 years to get home!

 

[Timo]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

That TNG bit from "WNOHGB" is a bit more complicated than that - Data appears to offer a list of alternatives, rather than a single figure, for how long the message will take to reach home. One of the alternatives is 51 years, another is 10 months, but the next one is nine weeks which is incompatible with the 10-month thing and the 51-year thing (it really ought to be 52 years and one week, see). And then comes sixteen days, again incompatible with the previous figures, before Picard stops the babbling short.

But the important thing is, they did send the message. Did Janeway ever even try?

The other important thing is that in both "WNOHGB" and "Caretaker", it is stated that the trip home "even" at maximum speed "would" take this and this long. In other words, it's made clear this will never happen - maintaining maximum speed for that long, or indeed for any significant length of time (heck, "maximum cruising" for the Voyager equates a minutes-long chase at most), is completely out of the question.

Presumably, it used to be different, though: Archer supposedly flies home with the pedal at the metal in "The Expanse", reversing two seasons worth of travel in one month. Perhaps primitive warp engines never ran anywhere near the edges of their theoretical performance and were in no danger of blowing up from extended flank speed use - and this held for F1 and NX-01 alike.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[MacLeod]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

VOY also compnds the problem by stating that the ship had a sustainable crusie velocity of warp 9.975.

Now of course the trip there might have caused damaged which meant it could no longer sustain that speed but that was never indicated in dialouge. It was really a poor word choice given that sustainable means that something can be maintained at a certain level. A better choice would have been either to not have the word use something like maximum.

 

[Mytran]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Worse, they repeated the line again in Relativity - it would have been the perfect opportunity to retcon Warp 9.975 as a "maximum" speed instead.

Then again, the way Janeway is spouting off the specs to her old mentor sounds a lot like she's just recalling them from the owner's manual. IOW, it's a claim made by the manufacturers that was never borne out in the field.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

"Cruise velocity" is about parameters.

How long can they sustain X velocity for Y time or Z distance.

Is cruise velocity about staying at Warp 9.975 for nine hours, or a month or forever?

Is Cruise velocity about staying at Warp 9.975 for 1 light year or 10 light years or to the other end of the universe?

 

[Mytran]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Indeed, but "sustainable cruise velocity" really shouldn't apply to speeds that can only be maintained for a few seconds, IMO

From "Threshold":

PARIS: Warp nine point seven, nine point eight, nine point nine.
TUVOK: He's exceeding our maximum velocity. I am switching to long range sensors.
PARIS: Warp nine point nine five.
TUVOK: He is approaching the threshold.

 

[MacLeod]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

"Cruise velocity" is about parameters.

How long can they sustain X velocity for Y time or Z distance.

Is cruise velocity about staying at Warp 9.975 for nine hours, or a month or forever?

Is Cruise velocity about staying at Warp 9.975 for 1 light year or 10 light years or to the other end of the universe?

Yes but they didn't say Maximum cruise velocity of 9.975 which allows for more leeway in to how long they can maintain a speed. Once you add a quantifier such as sustainable doesn't that sort of infer that they can maintain that speed until they run out of fuel or suffer a breakdown?

You might say that running at such a high speed might put the systems under increased stress, which might be true if that is the case then the speed is not sustainable.

You car might be able to happily crusie along at 80mph without any issues, try crusing at your cars top speed for the same length of time as the 80mph cruise. Which do you think is likely to cause more damage the 80mph cruise or running at top speed?



At the end of the day they put it in to make the ship sound fast, without really putting much thought in to it. And what the word sustainable means to people.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

The exact line was "sustainable cruise velocity of warp 9.975", which the tech advisors were advising against while "Caretaker" was in production (the memos are reproduced in "A Vision of the Future")

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Did the ship move faster if the nacelles flapped?

 

[MacLeod]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

The exact line was "sustainable cruise velocity of warp 9.975", which the tech advisors were advising against while "Caretaker" was in production (the memos are reproduced in "A Vision of the Future")

I think the recent discussion is exactly why they advised against the line. But tech advisors are there to be ignored are they not?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

My guess? An Ion Storm caught the probe and swept it halfway across the galaxy (those funky ion storms are always doing things like that).

Could even be the same storm that hit the SS Valiant around that time.

 

[Ithekro]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Wasn't the Galaxy-class suppose to be able to sustain Warp 9.6 for about half a day?

 

[SpocksOddSocks]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Did the ship move faster if the nacelles flapped?

Nah. That would slow it down because it would attract space chickens, obviously.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Could the space turkey in the baby seat next to the captain, interbreed with the space chickens?

 

[Ithekro]

Re: How could they have built and launched the "Friendship one" in 206

Not without a permit.