how did reginald know where to look?

[Kai Winn]

if my memory serves me right, bore kes hurled voyager from 70k to 60k lightyears from earth when she finally departed. later in the same season 4, voyager had the first contact with earth in 'message in a bottle'. not much closer than the 60k lightyears yet, considering they spend the whole year fighting some krenim time ship, anyway.
season 6, episode 'the voyager conspiracy'. mr tash's ingenious catapult throws voyager across 30 sectors of space, 3,000 lightyears.
the very next episode is 'pathfinder'. reginald established contact with voyager by sending a message to a mere three sectors of delta quadrant space. 30,000 lightyears from the federation by now.
from 60k lightyears to 30k lightyears, that's 900 sectors. in case voyager stays on a straight line. if it deviates just a little, the number rises considerably. a lucky strike by reginald.

 

[Garm Bel Iblis]

if my memory serves me right, bore kes hurled voyager from 70k to 60k lightyears from earth when she finally departed. later in the same season 4, voyager had the first contact with earth in 'message in a bottle'. not much closer than the 60k lightyears yet, considering they spend the whole year fighting some krenim time ship, anyway.
season 6, episode 'the voyager conspiracy'. mr tash's ingenious catapult throws voyager across 30 sectors of space, 3,000 lightyears.
the very next episode is 'pathfinder'. reginald established contact with voyager by sending a message to a mere three sectors of delta quadrant space. 30,000 lightyears from the federation by now.
from 60k lightyears to 30k lightyears, that's 900 sectors. in case voyager stays on a straight line. if it deviates just a little, the number rises considerably. a lucky strike by reginald.

I believe we'll have to go with the Simpson's explanation here: A Wizard did it.

It bugged me too. But it was mild compared to some of the assumptions and wrong info Voyager had. Continuity was not their strong suit.

 

[Emnabtond]

Kes's leap is accounted for as that happened before the Season 4 contact episodes.
However, the leap in Dark Frontier seems to be forgotten sometimes and it should have made it impossible for Barclay to find them.

 

[Finn]

Was it stated how far from the "wormhole" thing they could contact Voyager. With 500 light year range, they could cover a lot along the path between the first contact and Earth. They were in a rush when they were lucky to find voyager. Otherwise, they would have just systemically sweep a specific search parameter between Earth and their last known location of Voyager. I was under the impression it was luck. the computer seemed to pick several locations before Voyager picked up the signal if I remember right. Nothing out of the ordinary or unexplainable, IMO.

 

[exodus]

I'm going to assume he tracked it by looking for a Federation warp signature.

 

[Guy Gardener]

That's how they probably how they found Friendship One.

Hmm?

Did Janeway tell them to stop looking for Equinox?

Pathfinder was half a season after Equinox, but Pathfinder had been trying to keep tabs on "any" Federation Starship lost in the DQ for a year and a half before Equinox and Voyager bumped heads.

 

[Klaitu]

I don't know for sure, but I'm sure that since it was in Voyager that Barclay probably just sprinkled some borg nanoprobes on the midas array, and that made it work.

I also think it's awesome that it takes a TNG guest star to save the entire Voyager main cast.

 

[eepruls]

There's also the use of the slipstream drive ("before it cut out") in 'Hope and Fear' and the Borg warp conduit in 'Dark Frontier'. What about the Vodwar underspace before they were kicked out?

 

[ChaosAngel]

Maybe they communicatd with other races voyager had contact with while testin the array in a vague attempt to find the missing ship. Either that or barclay is psychic O_o

 

[Guy Gardener]

Wow.

Cosmic Clue? (Cluedo for nonAmericans.)

very Pink Floyd.

"Hello? is there anybody out there?"

but randomly opening communications with unknown species at an unknown level of development or sophistication is challenging the Prime Directive some what that they would be altering the natural development of many races prewarp and post warp as they discover that there is life on the other side of the galaxy.

 

[Timo]

It should probably be noted that Barclay's three guesses were not given consecutive sector numbers. So he didn't have the ship's position down pat to a resolution that encompassed three sectorfuls of space. Rather, he had at least three different models on what might have happened to the ship, and each gave a different result.

Makes sense, sort of. He'd know Janeway would at least try to stay on a specific path, give or take a few dozen lightyears. He'd know how fast she would go on the average if she didn't get boosts. And he'd know she did have the habit of finding boosts every now and then. The three models could be the ones with the best odds, there being at least two dozen fairly good guesses and hundreds of average ones but no practical chance of testing them all.

OTOH, I don't think Starfleet has any means of observing Delta Quadrant happenings in realtime, unless some local observer sends reports via a super-duper hotline. At least we never heard of such a capacity. Subspace telescopes have been shown monitoring Mars from the Cardassian border ("Parallels"), but we have no idea if that was in anything approaching realtime. There's no evidence of more distant observations, except at lightspeed.

Friendship 1 is an interesting question. This is the dialogue on the issue:

Janeway: "We lost contact with the probe one hundred and thirty years ago, but its last known coordinates-"
Torres: "Let me guess. We're in the neighbourhood."
Janeway: "Starfleet's mapped out a search grid."

Nothing there to prove that there was realtime contact. And the "last known coordinates" aren't even confirmed to have been the ones where the probe was found. They could simply be the basis by which Starfleet mapped out the search grid, projecting a future course.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Guy Gardener]

Friendship One vs the destiny from SGU?

It's AI.

There's a logic model behind it's reasoning for altering the course it was given. And being computers, complex of simple they were given courses. Not every probe is going to discover benevolent Borg at the end of space and be gifted with enough sentience to plot an illogical course.

Meanwhile if Starfleet can "see" planets in the DQ. It should be able to track impossible routes in which Voyager would run out of resources and sanity from finding no port of call no matter the supposition that they can live it out in a star desert for a year in Night.

So Barclay tracked thousands of possible courses from Ocampa to half way to earth which resulted with Voyager running out of food or fuel, and in contrast only discovered three routes were they were fine and dandy.

 

[kimc]

I also think it's awesome that it takes a TNG guest star to save the entire Voyager main cast.

I think found rather than save would be more accurate.