Just an observation...

[Sisko4Life]

I've seen Voyager a couple of times through on Spike. I noticed in the earlier seasons, you always see Voyager out in space at warp heading for the AQ, but in the later seasons you almost never see Voyager at warp, its always limping along at a slow impulse. Is there an explanation for that?

My other question is why does Voyager always travel toward the AQ at Warp 6, but in the episode where they had to turn around and rescue Janeway and Chakotay she says "we have some time to make up" and orders Warp 8. Why wouldn't they just go Warp 8 in the first place? Maybe I'm missing something...

 

[The Borg Queen]

Maybe it has something to do with the rate they use fuel.

Perhaps fuel consumption is exponential in relation to warp speed, so traveling at Warp 8 uses twice as much fuel as Warp 7, which in turn uses twice as much fuel as when traveling at Warp 6?

And as they have a habit of not bothering to refuel until the meter is already on empty ("Demon") perhaps they didn't want to risk it.

 

[Timo]

It sounds natural enough that some lower-than-maximum warp speed would be the most economic one, and the safest way to get home quickly. However, this doesn't explain why the ship is so often at impulse when the episode opens. Dropping to impulse simply cannot be a fuel-efficient or otherwise efficient way to get home.

In TNG, the ship usually had a perfectly good excuse not to be at warp: they were charting this or surveying that, or waiting for a rendezvous. And we caught the E-D at warp rather often anyway, usually when the episode opened with an emergency.

However, Voyager cannot use any of these excuses - yet it shows the ship at impulse more often than TNG did, and usually without giving any sort of explanation. So we probably have to invent new excuses here.

For example, the ship might constantly be on the verge of breaking apart and would require regular stops, a fact hidden by the pristine exterior. Or perhaps getting navigation fixes at warp is difficult?

As for "Demon", one might argue that there simply weren't safe places there for refueling, and that the ship always risked running out of fuel when traveling through uncharted stretches of the projected route - but got extremely lucky all the other times.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JNG]

Because Voyager is operating independently, long downtimes are required to generate antimatter, maintain the warp coils and so forth. Spare parts would sometimes to have to be fabricated or replicated as stores run out, and a downtime or reduced operation for many different systems (main deflector, shields, warp drive, IDF, SIF, tons of them) would limit the ship's speed until it was back up to spec. According to the Writer's Technical Guide for the series, the antimatter generator eats ten tanks of deuterium to make one tank of antideuterium; I don't get the impression it does so particularly quickly and imagine the fuel issue is at the top of the list. It would also sometimes be necessary to scan ahead, resolve navigational issues, identify potential dangers and even monitor subspace radio traffic to ascertain if they will be violating some territorial claim (not that Janeway always cared).

Because of all this and more, showing the ship as not *always* proceeding on course at a respectable warp factor is, oddly, one of the more "realistic" aspects of the series. They just can't, and flying home with the warp drive should never have been a realistic hope for them anyway.

 

[Jeri]

In Pathfinder, when explaining to Admiral Paris how they extrapolated Voyager's approximate location, they assumed Warp 6.5, IIRC. There must be a reason for that assumption.

 

[Sisko4Life]

Yeah, I love it how they targetted that area and voyager received the message, even though it supposedly had 30,000+ light years of "jumps."

 

[Cali]

I think Voyager's normal cruise speed was Warp 6, with a maximum cruise speed of Warp 9.975

 

[Jeri]

Yeah, I love it how they targetted that area and voyager received the message, even though it supposedly had 30,000+ light years of "jumps."

They had to try in three sectors before they found them.

 

[Bacl]

Yeah, I always wondered about that too.

It does make sense, given lack of Starbases and what we know (or can guess) about 24th Century Federation Tech, that Voyager could not simply set course for the Alpha QUad and go there at warp 24/7 for fifty years.

However, I think Voyager would have been a great opportunity to create a new exterior starfield look, one that showed they were at warp speed but not using their warp engines....a kind of starship cruise/coasting.

 

[Akiraprise]

How would you show that? The streaking stars have indicated warp speed for a long time now. Even coasting they're still at warp speed, so the stars would still streak by.

 

[JNG]

"Coasting" in a peristaltic field-effect drive that requires continuous energy input would be awfully hard to explain. There was a bit on TNG where they "saturated" the warp nacelles for a bit to run at warp for 2 minutes or something, and intriguingly, the different FX used to represent it looked very, very similar to the standard warp drive "trails" effect used in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture."

 

[LastStarDate]

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!

 

[The Borg Queen]

Something to do with maintaining a Warp Field to keep the ship suspended in sub-space?

 

[Timo]

Yeah, I love it how they targetted that area and voyager received the message, even though it supposedly had 30,000+ light years of "jumps."

To be exact, after the last position fix from "Message in a Bottle", there had been four "jumps". In "Hope and Fear", it's just 300 ly. In "Night", it's about 2,500 ly. In "Timeless", it's ten years, supposedly out of 70, and thus supposedly corresponding to about 10,000 ly. In "The Voyager Conspiracy", it's thirty sectors, three years, perhaps 3,000 ly.

Out of all these, only the jump in "Timeless" was perfectly along a course chosen by our heroes. In "Hope and Fear" and "The Voyager Conspiracy", it was more or less in such a direction, but the hardware used set some limitations on where to aim. In "Night", it was in a random direction dictated by natural phenomena.

Now, Barclay and Harkins must have made a statistical analysis of some sort on how many jumps the heroes would be likely to do in the intervening two years. But surely such an analysis would produce a wide range of possible answers, not just three "reasonably sure" sectors. Basically, then, we're left to think that Project Pathfinder made a number of assumptions that were utterly wrong, but happened to cancel out each other, so that the end result was utterly right after all!

It is of course also possible that the Pathfinder folks had gotten additional positional fixes after "Message in a Bottle", preferably after the long "Timeless" jump - but Harkins explicitly claims that their guesstimate is based on the original fix.

Then again, "Pathfinder" has no stardate. So we could easily argue that the events there actually take place before "The Voyager Conspiracy", eliminating that 3,000 ly jump. There is no mention of the communications established in "Pathfinder" in the immediately preceding or following episodes, so we can move the stardate-free episode back and forth rather freely. Not so freely, though, as to eliminate the huge jump in "Timeless"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deks]

It's just a mess-up created by writers.
I was also wondering how Barclay managed to send a transmittion to Voyager based on original communication from the time when the Hirogen comm network was still operational.

The episode could have explained things better.
Barclay after all was turned into super-human (at least in terms of intelligence) during TNG and could have had one of those insights for calculating extraordinary outcomes.
They could have fitted it into the episode.
Plus SF obviously had knowledge of the Hirogen comm network collapsing because they sent a message to Voyager before it occured and quite possibly had it under surveilance.
As a result they would be able to extrapolate that the chain reaction originated in the DQ just like Voyager did.
Seven of course was monitoring the network with astrometrics sensors at all times, but one would consider the possibility, that SF did the same.

 

[Jeri]

Since it was simply said the project assumed a 6.5 warp factor -- and they didn't mention downtime for searching for supplies, exploring, etc -- I tend to think it was good fortune that Barclay found them. He wanted to so passionately, the galaxy gave him a break.

 

[Deks]

Since it was simply said the project assumed a 6.5 warp factor -- and they didn't mention downtime for searching for supplies, exploring, etc -- I tend to think it was good fortune that Barclay found them. He wanted to so passionately, the galaxy gave him a break.

He should have missed the wormhole exit coordinates in the DQ by about 15000 Ly's.

He probably also could have scanned a large portion of space before sending a message, determining that Voyager was nowhere in sight, have an 'enlightened idea' and find them thousands of LY's closer to the AQ.
It would have been more plausible and could have been put in.

 

[Jeri]

I wonder how much spread there is around a message signal; i.e., how many light years an itinerate pulsar/array message would encompass.

 

[DanStro]

I've seen Voyager a couple of times through on Spike. I noticed in the earlier seasons, you always see Voyager out in space at warp heading for the AQ, but in the later seasons you almost never see Voyager at warp, its always limping along at a slow impulse. Is there an explanation for that?

My other question is why does Voyager always travel toward the AQ at Warp 6, but in the episode where they had to turn around and rescue Janeway and Chakotay she says "we have some time to make up" and orders Warp 8. Why wouldn't they just go Warp 8 in the first place? Maybe I'm missing something...

In TOS (and TNG too?)I think it was more a wear and tear issue. Going faster than cruise would stress the engines, the higher warp you go (or the longer you stay at a high warp) the more the stress and the down time for repairs/maintenance will be longer. I don't remember them saying as such in VOY but I can't see why it would be much different for their engines.

 

[Sisko4Life]

Originally Posted by Timo

To be exact, after the last position fix from "Message in a Bottle", there had been four "jumps". In "Hope and Fear", it's just 300 ly. In "Night", it's about 2,500 ly. In "Timeless", it's ten years, supposedly out of 70, and thus supposedly corresponding to about 10,000 ly. In "The Voyager Conspiracy", it's thirty sectors, three years, perhaps 3,000 ly.

You forgot that major 20,000 light year jump from the commandeered Transwarp Coil. IIRC, the writers stopped doing large jumps in Seasons 6 and 7 because Voyager was almost out of the Delta Quadrant. So since "Message in the Bottle, there has been 300 + 2,500 + 10,000 + 20,000 + 600 (A sector is 20 light years) = 33,400 light years off target!!!!!