The Alpha Cygni (Deneb) System

[Christopher]

^^Yeah, the thing is, there's no particular "mass" of any kind beyond Deneb, just the spinward half of the Orion Arm. Although that is sometimes called the Cygnus Star Cloud, because as we look down the arm more or less lengthwise, it concentrates the starlight and creates the impression of a big dense cloud of stars (although that's just a trick of perspective). And in front of that, closer to Deneb, is a big dust lane called the Cygnus Rift, backlit by the Star Cloud. But that's just a whole bunch of dust. And there's nothing about either one of those that could really be called "galactic."

I think that by "the great unexplored mass of the galaxy," the "Farpoint" script just meant "the mass" in the sense of "the majority" -- i.e. most of the galaxy is still unknown. It wasn't referring to a specific mass.

 

[foravalon]

Then you have to assume that the newly commissioned Enterprise-D has been running a really hot shakedown cruise at high warp with no stops until meeting Q. Using some of the janky warp speed charts I've seen over the years you can get the travel time down to about 4 months.

The warp speed charts have never been compatible with what we're actually shown onscreen, with their values almost always being way too low. Remember "That Which Survives?" Spock said they could get 990.7 light-years in 11.33 hours at warp 8.4. That would make warp 8.4 equal to about 766,500 times the speed of light, whereas by the "official" warp-factor-cubed formula it would be only 593 times lightspeed.

As I said, even the TNG Tech Manual and Encyclopedia have explicitly acknowledged that actual warp speeds vary based on local conditions, with the velocity tables being only average figures. (Also, the writers' assumptions about the speed and range of starships in the TOS era were much greater than modern assumptions, with trips to the edge of the galaxy being relatively common.)

Hence the term "janky", as I said. Even by the modest figures there, the trip can be made plausibly, thank you for emphasizing my point.

This is of course totally in disregard of things like the novelization of EaFp, or the bogus stardate given in "All Good Things", bogus I say since the date given in picard's speech in the shuttlebay is only a couple days before the date of arrival at Farpoint way out on "the edge of explored space".

Stardates aside, I looked into this carefully in researching The Buried Age, and although "All Good Things" does give the impression that the "Farpoint" flashbacks take only a couple of days, there's actually nothing to preclude a gap of several weeks between the initial group of flashbacks on the day Picard takes command and the later scene where he expects the Q encounter to occur.

Just working off the numbers laddie:
The Shuttle Bay flashback from All Good Things: "Stardate 41148.-"
Picard's first log entry from Encounter at Farpoint: "Stardate 41153.7"

The Devil's in the details...

But you're quite right, if you deliberately ignore the explicit statements of time, which preclude a gap of several weeks from initial group of flashbacks on the day Picard takes command and the later scene where he expects the Q encounter, then you're very correct, there's actually nothing left there to preclude that gap.

 

[Christopher]

Stardates aside, I looked into this carefully in researching The Buried Age, and although "All Good Things" does give the impression that the "Farpoint" flashbacks take only a couple of days, there's actually nothing to preclude a gap of several weeks between the initial group of flashbacks on the day Picard takes command and the later scene where he expects the Q encounter to occur.

Just working off the numbers laddie:
The Shuttle Bay flashback from All Good Things: "Stardate 41148.-"
Picard's first log entry from Encounter at Farpoint: "Stardate 41153.7"

The Devil's in the details...

Stardates have never been worth taking seriously as a source of chronological information. The whole reason they were invented by TOS's creators was to be entirely uninformative about when the series was taking place. TNG tried to get its stardates in numerical order, but made no more effort at consistency beyond that. (For instance, the episode "Pen Pals" gives a stardate of 42695.3 in a log entry about six weeks into a mission, and the previous episode, "The Icarus Factor," gave a stardate of 42686.4. That's at most nine stardate units in six weeks. But if 1000 units are a year, then 9 units would be only 3 days and change.)

Besides, the 41148 stardate given for Picard taking command in AGT contradicts "The Drumhead," which established the stardate for that event as 41124. In Buried Age, I chose to assume that Picard had actually said "41124.8" rather than "41148." Maybe when he relived the event in AGT, he had a slip of the tongue when he read the date.

But you're quite right, if you deliberately ignore the explicit statements of time, which preclude a gap of several weeks from initial group of flashbacks on the day Picard takes command and the later scene where he expects the Q encounter, then you're very correct, there's actually nothing left there to preclude that gap.

What "explicit statements of time?" Stardates are gibberish placeholders, routinely inconsistent and contradictory, so they can't be considered explicit statements of anything. And I'm aware of no other dating references in dialogue that would compel those scenes to come only days apart.

 

[foravalon]

Sure thing boss

 

[Timo]

Well, Q set up that Glomesh fence as a symbol to Picard that he wasn't letting them go further than "where no one (human) has gone before"

Except the mesh was between Earth and Deneb IV, preventing Picard from reaching that planet where humans had apparently already been to.

Note that "Star Charts" has an error on page 34, where Mandel accidentally used Alpha Leonis IV for Farpoint's Deneb IV, when he meant Alpha Cygni IV. And, of course, the other Deneb is Deneb Kaitos on p 33.

Actually, the original idea behind Star Charts was that Picard's crew would never visit any location more than a couple of hundred lightyears from Earth. Deneb IV was never supposed to be Alpha Cygni, but instead one of the numerous other Denebs (stars with the word "Leg" in their name) out there - supposedly quite close to Earth, just in a direction that nobody had bothered to explore yet. Indeed, plenty of Earth's relative vicinity would remain unexplored at the time, as we see in TOS that nobody has yet been to nearby places like Beta Geminorum in the mid-23rd century.

Humans might have been to Alpha Cygni, on trips taking years or decades, and might have brought back firsthand data on Denebian Slime Devils and the like. Or then such knowledge would only come indirectly from nonhuman travelers. But by the book's assumptions, no travel to such distant locations would take place during the actual aired episodes of TOS, TNG etc., and the maximum speed of long distance travel would indeed be an "Okudaic-Sternbachian" thousand lightyears per year.

Remember "That Which Survives?" Spock said they could get 990.7 light-years in 11.33 hours at warp 8.4.

To nitpick, what Spock says is merely that the ship is 990.7 ly distant from the stranded landing party; that they need to get to the castaways ASAP; and that Scotty thus better bring the ship to top warp speed. At some later timepoint, the dialogue establishes that staying at warp 8.4 would mean 11.33 hours of time remaining.

How much time passes between those two scenes is unknown. In simplest terms, the landing party is still alive at the second scene despite lacking water, so it can't be too many days, but there is no other sign of passage of time. All the landing party has been doing in the meantime is digging a grave for D'Amato, and carving a tombstone for him (which must have been very slow work since phasers supposedly can't penetrate the local geology...). Oh, and it looks like they haven't been through a night yet, but that's just an impression.

This still doesn't drop warp 8.4 to "manageable levels", but at least we could take it down an order of magnitude or two. And if we wanted, we could do the rest by saying that Losira displaced the Enterprise in time as well as in space.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Therin of Andor]

Except the mesh was between Earth and Deneb IV, preventing Picard from reaching that planet where humans had apparently already been to.

Which is precisely why I said "as a symbol".

You place warning markers before you get to the roadblock. Q wanted to talk to Picard before he reached the point of Never-been-before.

Deneb IV was never supposed to be Alpha Cygni, but instead one of the numerous other Denebs (stars with the word "Leg" in their name) out there - supposedly quite close to Earth, just in a direction that nobody had bothered to explore yet.

Huh? Nope. Not that I recall. And that goes back to Bjo Trimble at the time, coming fresh from a set visit to "Encounter at Farpoint".

Actually, the blurb on the back of the "Encounter at Farpoint" novelization by David Gerrold gives the original nomenclature of the Deneb IV intended for TNG (via the earlier script): it's purposely called Cygnus IV in the blurb.

And Denebian slimedevils are from Deneb Kaitos, IIRC from "Star Charts".

 

[Christopher]

Actually, the original idea behind Star Charts was that Picard's crew would never visit any location more than a couple of hundred lightyears from Earth. Deneb IV was never supposed to be Alpha Cygni, but instead one of the numerous other Denebs (stars with the word "Leg" in their name) out there - supposedly quite close to Earth, just in a direction that nobody had bothered to explore yet.

To be specific, there's Deneb Algedi (Delta Capricorni) at c. 39 ly; Deneb el Okab (Zeta Aquilae) at c. 83 ly; Deneb Kaitos (Beta Ceti) at c. 96 ly; Deneb Algenubi (Eta Ceti) at c. 118 ly; another Deneb el Okab (Epsilon Aquilae) at c. 154 ly; and Deneb Dulfim (Eps Delphini) at c. 358 ly. One could also make a case for Denebola (Beta Leonis) at c. 36 ly, but I doubt it would be called "Deneb."

But by the book's assumptions, no travel to such distant locations would take place during the actual aired episodes of TOS, TNG etc., and the maximum speed of long distance travel would indeed be an "Okudaic-Sternbachian" thousand lightyears per year.

Except that can't be reconciled with the E's trips to the edge of the galaxy (the nearest face of the galactic disk being c. 1000 ly away), and is tough to reconcile with its mentions of Rigel and Antares. There's no way around the fact that it made some much further trips than that.

 

[Timo]

Which is precisely why I said "as a symbol".

Fair enough.

Huh? Nope. Not that I recall.

I meant this was the working assumption for Star Charts, not for "Encounter at Farpoint".

As for "stars with the word Leg in their name", that should of course had been Tail, not Leg. Sorry!

Except that can't be reconciled with the E's trips to the edge of the galaxy (the nearest face of the galactic disk being c. 1000 ly away), and is tough to reconcile with its mentions of Rigel and Antares.

Well, Rigel is explained away in ENT (another case of the sky being full of Rigels), and nobody we'd know really goes to Antares AFAIK. Apart from divinely assisted jumps, the farthest our heroes go within the timespan of a pair of episodes is the Pleiades. Pike might have been to the "real" Rigel at Beta Orionis for all we know, but he didn't need to do that within an episode or even a season.

And the Trek version of the Milky Way has this fancy energy barrier as its sharply defined boundary; this unreal phenomenon could easily be much closer to Earth than the ill-defined area where the real Milky Way runs out of luminous stars. It might also have a non-disklike geometry, reaching particularly close to Earth. Such interpretations never made it to Star Charts, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

^^Where do you get the Pleiades? From the use of their image in "The Cage" to represent the Talos Star Group? I think that's being a bit too literal about the use of a recycled astronomical photo.

Canonically, the Enterprise-D mapped new planets in the Pleiades prior to "Home Soil."

 

[Stevil2001]

And the Trek version of the Milky Way has this fancy energy barrier as its sharply defined boundary; this unreal phenomenon could easily be much closer to Earth than the ill-defined area where the real Milky Way runs out of luminous stars. It might also have a non-disklike geometry, reaching particularly close to Earth. Such interpretations never made it to Star Charts, though.

Though, the Enterprise goes beyond the farthest star of our galaxy in, well, "Beyond the Farthest Star". Whether this is within or beyond the galactic barrier is unclear, but it does indicate that the ship is at the edge of the galactic disc.

 

[Christopher]

^^Interesting that both "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "Beyond the Farthest Star," both episodes involving travel beyond the borders of the galaxy, were written by Samuel Peeples. (And were the second and first produced episodes of their respective series, although the debut of BtFS was delayed until later in the season.)

 

[foravalon]

^^Where do you get the Pleiades? From the use of their image in "The Cage" to represent the Talos Star Group? I think that's being a bit too literal about the use of a recycled astronomical photo.

Canonically, the Enterprise-D mapped new planets in the Pleiades prior to "Home Soil."

What do you mean "where do you get the Pleiades"? You mention the reference he's referring to right there in your post, the "Home Soil" mission. What are you talking about with these wild assumptions about him referring to the Cage??

As for distant locales Sheliak and Mintaka surely deserve honorable mention.

 

[Christopher]

^^As I understood it, Timo made his reference to the Pleiades in the context of an already-ongoing discussion about travel to distant locations specifically in TOS. If he had broadened the discussion to the TNG era, I missed it.

 

[foravalon]

Ah, I see. I had somehow missed the already-ongoing, TOS specific, portion of the thread, my bad.

Regarding travel times, I kinda dig the explanation given with Star Trek Charts (Maps?) which essentially makes the claim that warp speeds are related to local stellar mass, so the less populated an area is the longer it will take a ship to travel through. This seemed to be the justification for why it would take the Enterprise so long to travel to Andromeda when it could apparently travel so quickly to the galactic edge or the center.

That's kinda groovy.

 

[Timo]

Sorry about the confusion; I tried to be as generic as possible, claiming that the Pleiades in "Home Soil" were the farthest any Star Trek hero has ever traveled using conventional warp drive and completing the trip within an episode or between two episodes. This to justify the approach of Star Charts, a book that tries to cover all the spinoff shows.

Mintaka and Sheliak are indeed twice as far away as the Pleiades, and this is a valid point here - probably those are the farthest points visited by any Star Trek hero within the above limitations. (And Spock, Sulu and Uhura do Sheliak in a shuttlecraft, no less!)

...In which case the adventures of a 24th century starship should be taken as happening within a radius of about a thousand lightyears from Earth. The ship was at Tau Cygna in SD 43133, and at Mintaka in SD 43173. If we take "Tau Cygna" as meaning that the star lies in the constellation Cygnus (as the proximity to Sheliak might also suggest, even though it really ought to be "Cygni" in that case), then the ship traveled at least 1,000 ly within 40 SD units (which I do consider basically valid markers for the passage of time, at least in the TNG era and largely in TOS as well, even though not necessarily in the TOS movies and TAS).

That as such doesn't mean super-duper speeds: 40 SD units should be 4% of the year, or two weeks, meaning a speed of about 25,000 c for the trip. Uncomfortably high for a supposed non-emergency sortie, certainly, but probably a good guesstimate for the "high nines". The 1,000 c max speed figure that VOY adheres to would pertain to trips that take the entire year, not to short dashes of a couple of weeks.

As for warp speed being dependent on local conditions, I have to argue that it can only be slightly dependent on those. If favorable "warp highways" allowed travel at speeds orders of magnitude greater than usual, these ought to be a crucial story element in all of Star Trek. The failure to mention them in dialogue would be comparable to failing to ever mention stargates in "Stargate SG-1"... Sure they could be seen as daily routine for our heroes, but zero mention is dramatically impossible.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Therin of Andor]

If favorable "warp highways" allowed travel at speeds orders of magnitude greater than usual, these ought to be a crucial story element in all of Star Trek.

Isn't this the same situation as the cowboy not having to explain how his rifle works when he shoots at the Indians in "Wagon Train"?

 

[Timo]

Uh, not really. If there really is a significant difference in the warp speed of course A and course B, this should be mentioned in dialogue - not necessarily every time, but certainly far, FAR more often than irrelevant information such as "Warp 7, Ensign!" or "Course 123 mark 45!". Commanded warp speed and heading would be essentially meaningless for a ship that relies on warp highways, while it would be a major tactical decision to pick a specific highway or to sail outside highways for a change.

In essence, it would be similar to our cowboy having to explain to the audience that he is going to take this mountain pass rather than that, let alone the path over the peak, and then explaining that there be injuns at Givitta Pass, mudslides at Pass Dasaltwillya, and so forth. The choice has major tactical and dramatic consequences every time.

Or, to go by our Stargate analogy, would O'Neill command "Into the Gate, on the double but not stomping too loudly, slanting 30 degrees to the right on the ramp, and mind the railings!" while forgetting to set a Gate address or specify a destination planet?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Sorry about the confusion; I tried to be as generic as possible, claiming that the Pleiades in "Home Soil" were the farthest any Star Trek hero has ever traveled using conventional warp drive and completing the trip within an episode or between two episodes. This to justify the approach of Star Charts, a book that tries to cover all the spinoff shows.

Mintaka and Sheliak are indeed twice as far away as the Pleiades, and this is a valid point here - probably those are the farthest points visited by any Star Trek hero within the above limitations. (And Spock, Sulu and Uhura do Sheliak in a shuttlecraft, no less!)

Also, even accepting Star Charts' "Beta Rigel" idea as representing the Rigel Colonies from "Doomsday Machine" and Rigel II, IV, etc. from various TOS and ENT episodes, it still makes more sense to postulate that Rigel VII from "The Cage" and Rigel XII from "Mudd's Women" are in a different system from those, much more out on the frontier. And there aren't nearly as many Rigels as there are Denebs -- there's only Rigel (Beta Orionis), Rijil Kentaurus (Alpha Centauri), and Rijl el Awwa (Mu Virginis), and Alpha Centauri is spoken for. Mu Vir is 61 ly away, which might make it a candidate for "Beta Rigel" (since I don't really buy Mandel's idea of it being a fictitious star that happens to be right in front of Beta Orionis; unless it were a really dim red or brown dwarf, we'd know it was there, and if it were such a tiny star it wouldn't have so many habitable planets). So that would leave Beta Orionis, at 800 ly, as the only viable location for Rigel VII and probably Rigel XII.

As for warp speed being dependent on local conditions, I have to argue that it can only be slightly dependent on those. If favorable "warp highways" allowed travel at speeds orders of magnitude greater than usual, these ought to be a crucial story element in all of Star Trek. The failure to mention them in dialogue would be comparable to failing to ever mention stargates in "Stargate SG-1"... Sure they could be seen as daily routine for our heroes, but zero mention is dramatically impossible.

Uh, not really. If there really is a significant difference in the warp speed of course A and course B, this should be mentioned in dialogue - not necessarily every time, but certainly far, FAR more often than irrelevant information such as "Warp 7, Ensign!" or "Course 123 mark 45!". Commanded warp speed and heading would be essentially meaningless for a ship that relies on warp highways, while it would be a major tactical decision to pick a specific highway or to sail outside highways for a change.

I see it more as a decision that the navigator makes. The captain's job is to tell the navigator what their destination is; the navigator's job is to figure out the best way to get there. I touched on this in Ex Machina and The Buried Age, and a bit in Greater Than the Sum as well. As I see it, if it were simply a matter of pointing at a star and heading in a straight line, why would you need a navigator at all? The need for a navigator suggests a need for specific decisions about choosing one route over another. So I figure the navigator's job is to know the plots of the subspace geodesics and mass concentrations and whatnot of the intervening space, figuring out which variant course allows the most efficient and therefore (usually) fastest trip.

In essence, it would be similar to our cowboy having to explain to the audience that he is going to take this mountain pass rather than that, let alone the path over the peak, and then explaining that there be injuns at Givitta Pass, mudslides at Pass Dasaltwillya, and so forth. The choice has major tactical and dramatic consequences every time.

But even so, most stories would skip over that discussion unless it were a relevant plot point. How often have you seen a show including a scene where the heroes discussed which freeways and roads to take to reach the scene of the crime, rather than just cutting directly from their departure to their arrival? (Well, there's The Incredibles, but aside from that.)

 

[Therin of Andor]

In essence, it would be similar to our cowboy having to explain to the audience that he is going to take this mountain pass rather than that, let alone the path over the peak, and then explaining that there be injuns at Givitta Pass, mudslides at Pass Dasaltwillya, and so forth. The choice has major tactical and dramatic consequences every time.

But that, too, would be glossed over to get to the next action shot.

 

[doublegood]

The concept of warp highways doesn't work if we look at the Trek galaxy as having been inhabited for hundreds of thousands of years. If the highways are created by heavy use of certain space lanes, there should be a lot more of them by the 24th century...one imagines the galaxy would be saturated with them.

It also seems that the only highways we can safely postulate about are in the Alpha Quadrant, which is silly. Even though Voyager was in the "unexplored" Delta Quadrant, they encountered a number of species that were space-faring--the DQ was only unexplored from a Federation standpoint. Ostensibly, there should have been a similar number of warp highways in the DQ as there were in the AQ. All the ship would have had to do was ask where the highways were and make sure they had toll money.

Space is big, and my main beef with ST propulsion is that it's just not fast enough. It would be nearly impossible to run an entity as large as the Federation with ships that moved so slowly. The way it's presented, the galaxy is actually a small place...except for when it needs to be big.