The Cage, The Menagerie and Canon

Arena is easy - those weren't parsecs that Sulu was counting off during the chase, they were partial sectors (AKA par-sects)

 

There was a period of time when I could watch Star Trek Monday - Friday and then 3 times on Sunday.

 

You beat me to it. A little arithmetic makes .73 ly/h to be about 6395 times the speed of light. At that speed, you could cross 1/4 of the galaxy's diameter in just under four years. That gives you access to tens of billions of stars, meaning the handful of stars with civilizations would be within your reach. The trouble would be finding them, especially the ones that aren't broadcasting yet.

It's over six times faster than the premise of Voyager implies (75 years to cover 70,000 ly). It's fast enough to be considered overkill, but it works better than the old "warp factor cubed times the speed of light," which was no match for galactic distances.

 

And given that the maximum speed of the ship goes up by one warp factor each season, .73 is the lower maximum limit.

Earth to Alpha Centauri in less time than it takes to fly from LA to New York. Zephram Cochrane would be amazed.

 

Of course someone could have seen "The Cage" for the first time oo videotape or DVD before he saw "The Menagerie" for the first time on videotape or DVD.

Or possibly there are portals which lead from one location in spce to another, so that a ship can vanish from one location and reappear in another instantly, and Ttey could reach Cestus III by travelling at warp thorugh only a tiny fraction of the 1,500 light years distance. So they could return to Cestus III at warp factor 1 and stilll pick up the medical staff left behind befoe they all starved to death or died of old age.

 

Warp 1 was just to maneuver to the correct course heading. I bet he opened the old girl up right after the closing credits.

Also, was the Enterprise "instantly shifted" 500 parsecs or were they quickly dematerialized, "beamed" away and quickly rematerialized? If the latter, then maybe the Enterprise was riding a subspace "tunnel" back to Cestus III as similarly happened in That Which Survives when the Enterprise was racing back a thousand light years to the planet they abandoned the landing party. These powerful transporters beamed the Enterprise a vast distance but left a residual "tunnel" through space or subspace allowing the Enterprise to travel inside it back to the source much faster than normal. Maybe Arena was the first instance where Spock discovered the residual transporter tunnel effect which he used again in TWS.

 

This works dramatically for the latter adventure. In the former... Well, the episode did end on a note of "Ah, we'll have a thousand years to think about this"! Perhaps the quest to get back home appeared hopeless initially?

Timo Saloniemi

 

Let's assume that Warp 7 really is 0.73 ly/hr and that the Enterprise also established it can maintain that speed during the chase in Arena. With best factors in favor of our heroes, 500 parsecs less at least the ~22 they travelled outside mapped space gives about 478 parsecs (and probably less than that) to recover. That's 1560 lys. At 0.73 ly/hr, it would take 2137 hours or 89 days or about 3 months.

If we look at Stardates, the next episode is in 41.2 stardates or about 15 days if 1000 stardates is ~1 year. To make the timeline reasonable, the speed back would need to be about a factor of 10 times faster. That's my theory for what it's worth.

(I do recognize that the upcoming encounter in The Alternate Factor could have occurred on the trip home, if you use Stardate or Production order. Equally, the Enterprise could have tripped over the black star as it raced back and time travelled in Tomorrow is Yesterday, if you use Airdate order. These two additional factors just muck up the already strained logic, so ... )

 

Parsecs are used so strangely in Trek that I am extremely reluctant to interpret them in their 3.26LY capacity.

Maybe the chase in Arena wasn't 22 but 422 "parsecs"? This would put the final position of the Enterprise fairly close to Cestus-III

 

Maybe the UFP 'parsec' uses an orbit other than Earth's for its calculations?

 

It's how far you get if you have one darsek to fill your deuterium tank on.

...Mytran's excellent analysis of parsecs in Trek, over at that other thread, shows the need for a relatively short version of the unit. How short exactly, remains a bit unclear, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I like the concept of a completely alien unit of measurement, although "barsek" would fit the plosive lip movements better

That thread was years ago and there's been a lot of discussion on this board since then. Maybe time for a version#2?

 

How many parsecs since then? The search page for Chrissie's transcripts was great when it worked, but it no longer does, and Chrissie apparently isn't gonna make DSC or LDS or SNW transcripts in any case...

Timo Saloniemi

 

How inappropriate of them to use Earth-based distance units like parsecs or even kilometers. What's next: using Earth-based time units? I see nothing wrong with a human populated starship from Earth using Earth-based units of measurement. Poor Spock has to constantly do conversions in his head. One more reason why the crew of a Starship are mostly from one planetary race.

 

That doesn't make sense. It's not that hard for people from one culture to adopt another culture's measurements; it's actually pretty routine. Everyone on Earth today uses the same time measurements, hours, minutes, and seconds. Nearly everyone uses metric measurements for distance, mass, etc., and the rest use Imperial measurements. And most cultures use the Gregorian calendar, at least as a backup to their own local calendars. All these systems started out as local, but they were spread by traders and empires and over time were adopted universally. And that's been the case so long that everyone living today was born in that status quo, so those measurements aren't foreign to them, even if they might have been to their distant ancestors.

By the same token, in the TOS era, the Federation has been around for a century, so presumably everyone aboard the ship, regardless of their planet of origin, was raised with Federation standard units of measurement.

 

I really miss that search resource
The next best option is to use Google and input the following criteria (for example):

site:www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek "parsec"​

However, it's much more clunky

 

Yeah, that's what I used before the Script Search page went up, and I'm back to using it now. Although I learned it as the search term first and then the site address. I guess it works either way around.

 

He'd probably rather enjoy that...

Ah yes, the message of Star Trek: "Keep to your own".