Ships Traveling the Galaxy in the ST universe.

When was it established that a warp powered ship couldn't travel from one end of the Galaxy to another?

I ask because I was watching STV the other day, and wondering how the Enterprise and more importantly, a Klingon BOP got to the center of the Galaxy (I seem to remember reading part of the novelization of STV in 1989, and it said something about Sybok receiving a vision of how to make "super shields" which allowed the Enterprise to withstand the barrier, the Klingons shadowing the Enterprise scanned and copied them.)

Was it not untill Deep Space Nine and the wormhole that it was established that it would take too long for a ship to make the trip? So in 1989 when STV was shot there was nothing "in cannon" saying that a warp enabled ship couldn't make the trip?

 

It was Roddenberry back in 1987 that wanted to put the brakes on how fast ships could travel in Trek for dramatic purposes, but he didn't have much say in Star Trek V. Ironically, Star Trek V is pretty consistent with how fast warp drive was generally presented during TOS.

"In-universe," I prefer the idea that warp factors vary greatly depending on where you are in the Galaxy and aren't universally consistent (Warp 4 "here" could be many times faster than Warp 9 "there"). Awareness of where "warp highways" are could mean the difference between a galactic voyage taking days or even decades, IMO.

 

After Voyager got their astrometrics up and running, Seven was able to use her Borg knowledge to compute a new course home that shaved years off the journey.

I favor the idea that "the center of the galaxy" isn't a point at the center of the milky way, but instead is the general region inwards of the federation.

A journey of several hundred lightyears, but not tens of thousands.

 

More knowledge could have taken the Voyager immediately home.

 

Star Trek V is one of the bigger outliers in terms of speed, but is certainly not the only one. TOS had others, as did the other shows. In NuTrek its hard to say, but it seems like they zip around very, very quickly. But it's not a matter of Warp making a galactic trip, but how high a warp factor could a ship attain.

I am not a big fan of the Warp Highway idea, although it's certainly understandable as an attempt to try to harmonize the very wide range of speeds shown in all the movies and shows.

Generally speaking, it's obvious that the makers of Trek want a scale and speed of action for the Federation that vastly exceeds anything like the old Warp^3 idea. I am not sure there is any system that can neatly fit every on screen example since they differ so radically.

 

Ships travel at the speed of plot.

 

This kind of sums it up, really - certainly the fact Roddenberry when making TOS didn't imagine the detail & complexity of the four Quadrants & logistical distances of starships etc…

Had TOS been made today for the first time (or even in the 90's), chances are we'd have fewer of these discrepancies.

 

I don't even think they had the four quadrants in the 60s.

 

^Well exactly, that was my point.

 

In a real sense, trying to maintain a consistency between a given warp scale and onscreen distances creates problems from a dramatic perspective. At some point, your hero ship will be too far away to save the day when something big is going on. The options are to either fudge speeds & distances (i.e. plot drive) or to always be conveniently close by (the only ship in range) to things in the story.

 

If you think about it, Roddenberry's original idea that the ship's crusing speed would be 216 times light is unworkably slow. To visit a new star system evey week, or sometimes multiple systems in a single episode, you would need to routinely move at thousands of times light.

 

It wasn't Roddenberry's idea. He conceived of the ship being much faster.

 

The Making of Star Trek has a formula for warp speeds (warp factor cubed = multiple of lightspeed), which the show never ever adhered to. Off the top of my head...

-Rim of the galaxy in "Where No Man..." and "By Any Other Name"

-1000 light years in 11.5 hours at warp 8.4 in "That Which Survives" (that's Voyager's "75 years at warp 9.975" journey in a month!)

-Centre of the Galaxy in TAS: "Magicks of Megas Tu" and STV: TFF (the latter explicitly launching from Earth and travelling at warp 7)

-Romulan Neutral Zone to Earth in the space of a scene break in ST: FC

-Earth to the Romulus in the space of a scene break in Nemesis.

-Earth to Kronos in 4 days at something under warp 5 in ENT: "Broken Bow"

All establish warp speeds which totally destroy Voyager's premise. They're simply incompatible. The new movies, with their fast trips from Earth to Vulcan and Kronos to Earth, are clearly using these examples rather than anything from a technical manual or Voyager.

Even DS9, which established it's wormhole as being a lifetime distant, hopped from DS9 to Earth, Kronos, Cardassia and Ferenginar in the space of a scene break, often via Runabout, when these journeys should take weeks or months.

It's also worth pointing out that the Voyager Writer's Technical Manual states that at warp 9.975, Voyager's journey would take 33 years, not the 75 stated in "Caretaker". There's also a memo in A Vision of the Future: The Making of Voyager where they're advised to change "warp 9.975", because it was too fast even at Voyager's TNG warp formula speeds to make their journey to Earth a lifelong one. The writers, of course, ignored it. Why should we fans care about these things any more than the people who made it?

 

i thought voyager was like 70000 light years away?

I always equated 1000 light years = 1 year at maximum warp. Which of course the show never adhered to.

 

There is an instructive Warp Chart at Memory Alpha. It gives various speed references from the various shows and demonstrates some of the inconsistencies therein.

 

In an early treatment, Roddenberry wrote that the speed of the Yorktown (later Enterprise) was 0.73 light years per hour. That is about 6,394.8 times the speed of light. But you have only to watch the show to see how even this speed is nowhere near fast enough to do what they want the ship to be able to do.

 

the way I see it (any nautical guys here explain it better)
warp factor is engine revolutions or (rev for cars) not speed as we all assume ,so tng revs v tos revs = better and more efficient engines, better range less fuel burn etc think of early screw powered ships v current ships same revolutions faster speed
and finally ship sailing into wind v ship sailing with wind to its back =different speed
sorry limited time so cant explain it better for now

 

I believe they had 38 quadrants.

Which is of course impossible, as quadrant means "a quarter" but they confused the word with "sector".

I think it's assinine that when Kirk says, "no ships in this quadrant" and suddenly someone thinks they are talking about a whole quarter of the frikkin galaxy. The ridiculous acrobatics some people go through to preserve "canon" is just foolish.

I love that one.

 

Unless each sector is divided into quadrants. Which was apparently mentioned in the TNG Writers Guide.

 

It's sort of like one idea that was floated around that warp factors are more measurements of warp engine output than actual velocity, but that it still was ultimately a case of the higher the warp factor, the faster the ship goes.

There was an attempt to go along with this in the Star Trek: Star Charts book that had the very idea of "sector quadrants." It works if we go with the idea that during TOS, a sector was a really big place back then.