Just an observation...

[Timo]

Oh, right... Thanks!

600 (A sector is 20 light years)

But the "three years off the trip" claim might rather indicate 3,000 ly...

I wonder... Since the three years were shaved off "in an hour", but the catapulting itself only lasted for less than a minute the first time around, perhaps the catapult has fringe benefits? That is, after shooting the ship across thirty sectors in a minute, it lets the ship coast further at high speed, so that in the next 59 minutes, she has spanned a further hundred and twenty sectors?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

The catapult which Voyager used to shave off 3000 ly's was controllable in the manner of setting a direction in which the ship is catapulted.
They were unable to control just how far they could go though.

 

[LastStarDate]

Wow, this is getting technical! Which episode will this "Catapult" be used?

 

[The Borg Queen]

Wow, this is getting technical! Which episode will this "Catapult" be used?

I think it was already used in "The Voyager Conspiracy"?

 

[Timo]

Yup.

The catapult which Voyager used to shave off 3000 ly's was controllable in the manner of setting a direction in which the ship is catapulted.
They were unable to control just how far they could go though.

Which might amount to the same thing, as the path the ship was taking home was not a straight one. Aiming at the right direction but under- or overshooting by hundreds if not thousands of lightyears might in fact mean falling off the projected optimal path, and thus slowing down the journey...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Nebusj]

I always thought that once an object in space is moving, there doesn't need to be any more propulsion because there is no friction. So why couldn't they use the engines to obtain warp whatever, then shut them off and coast? I'm sure there is a good explaination and I can't wait to hear it!

Well, that's basic physics --- Galilean relativity, in fact, and it carries over into modern physics quite well --- that if you have something in motion at a constant speed, it should continue at that speed and in that direction unless an outside force acts on it. Put roughly, if you're inside a spaceship there shouldn't be a way to tell, without looking out the windows, whether you're at rest, travelling slowly, or travelling quickly.

However, it seems that in Trek physics this breaks down on faster-than-light travel. Now and then we get a declaration that natural phenomena can't travel faster than light (usually about four episodes after the person saying it has observed a natural phenomenon travelling faster than light); what seems to be meant is that some kind of sustained engine is necessary. This has curious implications for physics, although I can't say they're any more curious than the implications that faster-than-light travel implies.