Question about a statement Kira makes to Quark in "The 34th Rule"

[Quinton O'Connor]

So I just started reading this little gem and I'm quite enjoying it so far. I had a question regarding something Kira says to Quark, though, and you'll forgive me if I'm off-base here but studying the technical intricacies of the franchise has never been my strong suit.

At one point early on, when relaying to Quark that the Bajorans are threatening to kick all Ferengi out of their space, she mentions sarcastically that he can still keep up his Gamma Quadrant business ventures -- if he left now, he'd get there in three thousand years. (It might have been a different number, but I'm elsewhere at the moment and the book isn't handy; the point is, it was a big number.)

So... three thousand years? But Voyager had already been marooned in the Delta Quadrant for almost two years by the time this novel was written and Janeway said something about 75 years initially, didn't she? So I don't quite follow.

Was this just a literary oversight, or am I missing something extra-special about the distance from Bajor to the charted Gamma Quadrant areas?

 

[F. King Daniel]

I think Kira was just exaggerating.

But 75-ish years was an estimate for one of the fastest ships in Starfleet. Ignoring speed of plot, it probably would take about 3000 years on a slow, dumpy, commercially-available ship.

IIRC Sisko made a similar jibe in the TV show, saying 70 or 80 years to the Dominion after the wormhole was mined.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Come to think of it, Kira mentioned 'Warp 5' as the traveling speed. That would make quite a difference, wouldn't it? Again, this isn't my field -- I'm more about remembering the finite character and setting details, that's more my thing. But since warp factor increasing means that many times the speed of light, that would change the game, too, right?

 

[Cybersnark]

Also, it's Kira "Close Enough" Nerys. She's not generally known for technical accuracy.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

That's a fair point, too.

 

[Destructor]

As I understand it the warp scale is logarithmic, so that Warp 9 is twice as fast as 8 which is twice as fast as 7 and so one. So the difference between 9 and 5 is not 'almost half' but in fact a much larger figure.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Yeah, that's what my second post was meant to imply, that I'd sort of realized that myself. It's all too easy to hear 'Warp 2' and 'Warp 4' and think the latter is twice as fast as the former, because 2+2=4. But when I remind myself (and my quite arts-dominated, less science-oriented mind) that that simply isn't the case, it's easy to see where 'close enough Kira' was coming from.

Close enough, anyway.

 

[Christopher]

As I understand it the warp scale is logarithmic, so that Warp 9 is twice as fast as 8 which is twice as fast as 7 and so one.

Not really. In theory, the 24th-century warp scale from 1 to 9 goes by the warp factor to the power of 10/3, or 3.3333..., revised from the 23rd-century scale where it went by the warp factor cubed. So warp 7 in the 24th century would be 656c, warp 8 would be 1024c, and warp 9 would be 1516c. Above warp 9, it just goes up on an ill-defined curve to infinity at warp 10, for reasons that have no adequate explanation.

But in practice, it's all meaningless. Onscreen warp velocities have almost always been much, much faster than the allegedly "official" numbers would indicate. Even the TNG tech publications acknowledge that the warp tables they offer are only approximate and that actual warp speed will vary due to all sorts of local spacetime conditions, although techie fans always seem to ignore that and treat the numbers as precise.

 

[BrotherBenny]

^It also never helped that some stars were too far away to be reached within the episode's time frame, hence the reason that all the ships traveled at speed of plot.

Take Farpoint Station, it should take months to reach that star, even given some downhill subspace topography or something (see Titan: The Red King for an explanation of that), and there is no way that Starfleet would send the Hood and their brand new flagship on six month journeys.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, except that was supposed to be the whole idea. The original concept of TNG was that the Enterprise was a deep-space explorer that would spend most of its time out beyond known space, rarely returning to Federation territory and rarely encountering any of the TOS-era aliens. The idea was that Deneb represented the farthest fringe of explored territory, hence "Farpoint Station." The Hood was already there, out on the fringes of the exploration zone, as far as humanity had gone, and the E's mission was to probe farther still into the great uncharted mass of the galaxy. You know, to... audaciously venture where... not any individual... has ventured in the past. Or something like that.

But the original creative staff was systematically driven out by Roddenberry's clique, and then Roddenberry himself stepped back more and more, and so that original vision became lost and TNG became about political and diplomatic missions to known worlds, the scope of the stories became more compressed around Earth and the Federation, and that original conception became hard to reconcile.


Come to think of it, though, one thing you need to keep in mind is that we didn't know how far away Deneb really was until the HIPPARCOS survey in 1989-93. At the time "Farpoint" was written, we thought Deneb was about half the distance it's now estimated to be.

 

[kkozoriz1]

^Well, except that was supposed to be the whole idea. The original concept of TNG was that the Enterprise was a deep-space explorer that would spend most of its time out beyond known space, rarely returning to Federation territory and rarely encountering any of the TOS-era aliens. The idea was that Deneb represented the farthest fringe of explored territory, hence "Farpoint Station." The Hood was already there, out on the fringes of the exploration zone, as far as humanity had gone, and the E's mission was to probe farther still into the great uncharted mass of the galaxy. You know, to... audaciously venture where... not any individual... has ventured in the past. Or something like that.

Which I was hoping would be the role that the Titan series would fulfill, New Worlds, new civilizations and all that. Running about 40% so far, counting Destiny.

 

[LightningStorm]

Not really. In theory, the 24th-century warp scale from 1 to 9 goes by the warp factor to the power of 10/3, or 3.3333..., revised from the 23rd-century scale where it went by the warp factor cubed. So warp 7 in the 24th century would be 656c, warp 8 would be 1024c, and warp 9 would be 1516c. Above warp 9, it just goes up on an ill-defined curve to infinity at warp 10, for reasons that have no adequate explanation.

I always thought the Warp factor formula was hyperbolic. And it can in fact be this (where x >= 0 and x < 10):

f(x) = -9x/(x -10)

f(x) above is the multiplier for C
x is the Warp Factor

So Warp 1 would be 1 times the speed of light
Warp 5 is 9 times the speed of light
Warp 9 = 81 times
Warp 9.975 (Voyager) 3591 times
Warp 10 would be infinity

And just to take that a lot further than probably need be...

The whole actual calculation for how long it would take to travel (say 70000 light years) at various warp factors is:

Warp 1: 70000 years (duh)
Warp 5: 7777.78 years
Warp 9: 864.2 years
Warp 9.9: 78.56 years
Warp 9.975: 19.49 years

 

[Christopher]

^Nope, that's not how the numbers given in the tech references break down. And it doesn't matter anyway because it's never actually been adhered to onscreen.

 

[BrotherBenny]

^Well, except that was supposed to be the whole idea. The original concept of TNG was that the Enterprise was a deep-space explorer that would spend most of its time out beyond known space, rarely returning to Federation territory and rarely encountering any of the TOS-era aliens. The idea was that Deneb represented the farthest fringe of explored territory, hence "Farpoint Station." The Hood was already there, out on the fringes of the exploration zone, as far as humanity had gone, and the E's mission was to probe farther still into the great uncharted mass of the galaxy....

....Come to think of it, though, one thing you need to keep in mind is that we didn't know how far away Deneb really was until the HIPPARCOS survey in 1989-93. At the time "Farpoint" was written, we thought Deneb was about half the distance it's now estimated to be.

Now see, I didn't know about that. I just figured the numbers were fudged because the writers just needed something really far away.

 

[Quinton O'Connor]

Well, I didn't imagine this thread would become TrekTech 101, but I'm not complaining. Interesting read.

I especially enjoyed that bit concerning what happened to the original premise of TNG.

 

[David R. George III]

Jeff, it's been a long time, and I don't have the manuscript in front of me, but I'm certain that whatever I wrote, I researched it before committing it to paper (and packed away somewhere, I'm sure, I have notes about it). Warp factors have never been adequately explained within the various Star Trek series, other than noting that they are faster-than-light speeds. But also remember that dividing the galaxy into four quadrants doesn't help matters. A quadrant is still a pretty big place, and the distance from, say, Deep Space Nine to the closest point in the Gamma Quadrant is quite different from the distance from Deep Space Nine to the farthest point in the Gamma Quadrant.

 

[Christopher]

^Well, if characters are talking about Quark's business interests in the GQ, that would have to be to something within a few hundred light-years of the Idran terminus of the wormhole, which we know is about 70,000 light-years from Bajor. So that would be the baseline for a distance estimate. Any variation in the travel time would have to arise from warp factor, the specific route chosen (since different spacetime conditions affect warp velocity), etc.

 

[Timo]

We may dispute the idea of the "Irdan terminus" somewhat, because other stars are indicated to be within really easy reach of the terminus, which probably wouldn't be the case if they lay farther away than the "just under five lightyears" quoted for Irdan.

Perhaps Dax spotted a number of stars in the vicinity, but singled out that ternary system as one the computer could plausibly identify; stars closer by would be nondescript and unknown to Alpha Quadrant science. From "Destiny" we know there's a star right next to the wormhole, one capable of creating a tail for a comet... And from "Whispers" we know there's a nearby inhabited system that a runabout can reach with what looks like a few hours of warp at the very most. And this latter system doesn't appear to be "guarding" the wormhole in any way, so probably it's different from the star that created the cometary tail.

Too bad that Bashir in "Battle Lines" says

"There's Idran, the closest system. It's a ternary star."

Might be that the star next to the wormhole doesn't have planets and thus doesn't count as a "system"...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BrotherBenny]

We may dispute the idea of the "Irdan terminus" somewhat, because other stars are indicated to be within really easy reach of the terminus, which probably wouldn't be the case if they lay farther away than the "just under five lightyears" quoted for Irdan.

Perhaps Dax spotted a number of stars in the vicinity, but singled out that ternary system as one the computer could plausibly identify; stars closer by would be nondescript and unknown to Alpha Quadrant science. From "Destiny" we know there's a star right next to the wormhole, one capable of creating a tail for a comet... And from "Whispers" we know there's a nearby inhabited system that a runabout can reach with what looks like a few hours of warp at the very most. And this latter system doesn't appear to be "guarding" the wormhole in any way, so probably it's different from the star that created the cometary tail.

Too bad that Bashir in "Battle Lines" says

"There's Idran, the closest system. It's a ternary star."

Might be that the star next to the wormhole doesn't have planets and thus doesn't count as a "system"...

Timo Saloniemi

In one of the DS9 relaunch books, the Idran system, which was about three light years away from the GQ wormhole terminus "moved" to be the system the terminus drops you out in, so now the GQ terminus is in the Idran system.

 

[Christopher]

We may dispute the idea of the "Irdan terminus" somewhat, because other stars are indicated to be within really easy reach of the terminus, which probably wouldn't be the case if they lay farther away than the "just under five lightyears" quoted for Irdan.

First off, it's Idran, not Irdan. Second, we're talking about a 5-ly error in a 70,000-ly measurement, so it's too nitpicky to bother with.