I just assumed this particular edge was on the zenith/nadir axis and not on the outer arm edges. There's always that difficulty of how a much slower ship like Valiant made it there. (even with overwhelmed impulse engines) made it there as well.
Number One, captain of the Enterprise
- Thread starter dahj
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Does not compute, since Kirk calls it the "rim" of the galaxy when referring back to WNMHGB in "By Any Other Name". I don't think TOS, the classic movies or the Kelvin ones fit at all with Berman Trek when it comes to speed and distance.
In fairness, I doubt they had taken the time to realize just how densely packed with stars "space" really is. There may be something like 14,000 stars in a 100 light year radius of our own. By the 80's there needed to be some kind of scale that made "sense" for travel in Trek, even if mostly that isn't adhered to.
TNG did it too.
They did? In 'Q Who' Q moves Enterprise 7000 LYs, Data estimates that it would take two years and seven months to get back. So Enterprise D would have made Voyager's 75 year journey in less than 30 years...
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I have long been partial to the (purely fanon) "warp highways" hypothesis about travel times in Trek. I see it as pretty much the only way to make sense of some of the inconsistencies. (Not all: the center of the galaxy and the edge of the galaxy are still hard to rationalize.) I surmise that these "fast lanes" need to be dynamically mapped (which is one of the reasons the navigator is so important on a starship)... such that when Voyager wound up in uncharted territory in the Delta Quadrant, it had no choice but to take the "long way" home at plain old regular warp speed.
Whilst that would explain some things, I really do not want to postulate existence of such a huge setting altering element that is never even hinted in the dialogue. Nope, Sha Ka Ree was not really in the centre of the Galaxy, merely in area that is classified as the central region by the Federation* and Voyager was just a crap ship, rest of the oddities were mistakes by the characters, they meant to say something different.
(*It is not like Enterprise really had over 70 decks either.)
If you're going to play that card at all to "fix" things, why not make it your only card? Seriously, it "explains" everything.
I'm fine with using it for most numerical errors, if those numbers were somehow not an important plot point.
Well not really, TOS also had instances of "we're weeks/months away from the nearest ship/base/radio contact" or "this planet hasn't been visited in years."
If I had to pick one show above others that went for the whole vastness of space angle I'd have to say it's TOS. TNG felt like they were always near something familiar, and heck, even Voyager was more regularly in contact with Starfleet than Kirk and company were
Rojan (not Kirk) said that they entered the galaxy at the "rim", Kirk merely confirmed that he had encountered the energy barrier before.
In WNMHGB, reference was only made to the "edge" of the galaxy.
Interestingly, if the Kelvans are taking the direct route back to Andromeda then they would need to take the galactic "up" route. Maybe they went off course and entered in at the rim by mistake?
Which simply isn't true. Explain, say, electromagnetism. "Simple" would by default be "A wizard did it". Adding anything to that would be to defy Occam, because AWDI already covers everything with the fewest hypotheses.
A phenomenon never exists in isolation. What may look simple in a myopic view is merely false in the greater view. The fallacy lies in the "hypothetical assumption" bit - everything is built of hypothetical assumptions, generally by verifying that those assumptions are true, that is, they accurately describe their subject matter and offer some chance of testable prediction-making as well. But what gets built there is just proof enough that adding the next layer will not involve any simplicity, either. The way forward more often than not requires the testing of multiple unknowns; starting out with a soothing selection of fewer unknowns does not provide advantages, as every false assumption must be shot down anyway.
This is why Occam's Razor is not a scientific tool, but one of the Scientific Lies for Children. It's a shortcut to incorrect results for those who don't want to believe in the framework of previous assumptions (whether tested to verification or destruction). In short, it never really works.
This is not why Occam's Razor is worthless in fiction. There, verification is simply impossible as such, and truth value is not a valid test of a hypothesis. Rather, the more interesting option is the correct one. We could not apply the Razor to the origins of Data or the inner workings of the Klingon Empire in early TNG, nor to the nature of the Kazon or the Borg in early VOY. Simple was always false there - but we had no way of telling. And we never will, in cases like that, because fiction is not slave to causality, even when constructing a fictitiously causal structure.
Timo Saloniemi
...As for the rim business, here we can safely lean against the soft cushion of fiction without needing to fear any razors. The real Milky Way is known not to possess any sort of a rim or an edge. The Trek Milky Way prominently has this purple thing they associate with / outright call the rim or the edge. The latter, fictional construct can lie anywhere we wish. And, indeed, everywhere we wish, because it's always dead ahead of our heroes independently of their heading or orientation, and indeed always a narrow horizontal strip whenever we get a visual. We might be forced to conclude it's in the eye of the beholder only, then, manifesting as a single-dimension ribbon or an edge despite by plot requirement actually being a barrier in at least two dimensions.
On the issue of long warp trips, a simple (!) argument would be to say that travel time and speed are in inverse relationship. The longer you run your engines, the more your speed drops, from the increasing frequency of pit stops required. Covering 500 ly may be ten times faster going than covering 5,000 and a hundred times faster than covering 50,000, in terms of average speed - meaning it's actually a hundred times faster than covering 5,000 ly, and a thousand times faster than doing 50,000, in terms of ETA to finishing line. Especially as your pit stops within 500 ly of Earth may involve manufacturer-approved spares, while those on the other side of the galaxy will not...
This works on short hops, too: going faster than Scotty recommends will blow up the ship and kill everybody, supposedly. But never does, supposedly because the cumulative odds go up with time, and Kirk always cuts before he loses. So even dashes like the one in "Bread and Circuses" might work just fine, without establishing anything much about the practical top speed of the ship.
The true relevance? Writer convenience - they don't have to do any math on short hops, and somebody else will do it for them if the plot involves long duration travel as a background issue (that is, something that won't take place within the confines of the episode of the week anyway, because there's no duration to spare).
Timo Saloniemi
On the issue of long warp trips, a simple (!) argument would be to say that travel time and speed are in inverse relationship. The longer you run your engines, the more your speed drops, from the increasing frequency of pit stops required. Covering 500 ly may be ten times faster going than covering 5,000 and a hundred times faster than covering 50,000, in terms of average speed - meaning it's actually a hundred times faster than covering 5,000 ly, and a thousand times faster than doing 50,000, in terms of ETA to finishing line. Especially as your pit stops within 500 ly of Earth may involve manufacturer-approved spares, while those on the other side of the galaxy will not...
This works on short hops, too: going faster than Scotty recommends will blow up the ship and kill everybody, supposedly. But never does, supposedly because the cumulative odds go up with time, and Kirk always cuts before he loses. So even dashes like the one in "Bread and Circuses" might work just fine, without establishing anything much about the practical top speed of the ship.
The true relevance? Writer convenience - they don't have to do any math on short hops, and somebody else will do it for them if the plot involves long duration travel as a background issue (that is, something that won't take place within the confines of the episode of the week anyway, because there's no duration to spare).
Timo Saloniemi
You're playing semantic games here. "A wizard did it" is not an explanation for anything, much less a simple one, because it implicitly requires assumptions about phenomena outside the boundaries of the naturalistic universe, for which we have no evidence whatsoever. It's precisely the kind of inherently non-testable magical thinking that actual explanations are designed to displace.
And, so? From some perspective, sure, everything is interconnected. For the purposes of fruitful discussion, though, it's generally useful to agree in advance on a scope of discourse that sets clear boundaries for the phenomenon of interest — whether that's how electromagnetism works, or who's at fault in court case, or what fits the continuity of a TV show.
Certainly, neither science nor law (which remain my go-to examples here, as both are exercises in weighing empirical evidence, even thought their goals, criteria, and processes vary quite a lot) ever requires one to shoot down every false assumption. That would be an endless effort, as the supply of false assumptions is by its very nature practically unlimited. Bayesian reasoning comes into play here (although usually not explicitly), as people make reasonable estimates of plausibility and probability based on prior knowledge.
That's a meaningless statement, unless some criteria exist to assess what qualifies as "more interesting." Otherwise it reduces everything to arbitrary subjectivity.
As much as there are claims to objective storytelling criteria, a lot of engagement in fiction is arbitrary and subjective. I'm not saying that storytelling doesn't have requirements, but it isn't a perfect scientific endeavour either, as individuals will vary. And that's OK.
No one knows what those "boundaries" are.
"Fruitful discussion" is a subjective term and when you use it in an attempt to limit someone else's input in a discussion it becomes a conceit. It's an old and tiresome maneuvering tactic that doesn't hold up under close scrutiny.
Yep. And when it comes to fiction, one can argue that, when in doubt, you want to go with the most entertaining and interesting option rather than the most probable--because, unlike law or science, the point is not to arrive at some objective truth but to make cool stuff up.
Granted, striking the right balance between "plausibility" and "entertaining" can be a judgement call, and depends a lot on what kind of story you're telling. One is probably going to be more concerned with keeping the story "believable" if you're writing a kitchen-sink drama about modern life than if you're writing a swashbuckling Arabian Nights adventure.
Look it at it this way. If I walk downtown to get a newspaper today, it's highly unlikely that I will be accidentally mistaken for an international assassin and find myself on the run from the CIA. A decent respect for plausibility would find this outcome extremely far-fetched and improbable. Occam's Razor would have a fit.
But I think we can all agree that it would be a lot more interesting than "Greg Buys a Newspaper, then Comes Home and has a Sandwich."
Bottom Line: It's an art, not a science, and art is not bound by Occam's Razor.
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But I think we can all agree that it would be a lot more interesting than "Greg Buys a Newspaper, then Comes Home and has a Sandwich."
Depends on the sandwich, really.
Depends on the sandwich, really.
I eat boring sandwiches, trust me. Nobody is ever going to write a thriller about them.
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