The galactic scale of TOS

[Boris Skrbic]

I’m rewatching TOS on Blu-ray and aside from the usual examples of higher speeds than expected (like the trip of a thousand light-years in “Obsession”), it’s particularly noticeable when characters casually refer to “the galaxy” in situations where a century later they’d be speaking of “the quadrant” or “the Alpha Quadrant”. Not more than the galaxy, but not less either.

It’s just a subtle difference in scale that seems to have been lost during the production of TNG, and I’d also argue that we need to question the usual assumption where the same warp factor represents a higher speed on TNG: what if it’s actually lower but safer on average, as opposed to the constant nervousness about reaching Warp 7 or higher on TOS? Maybe Kirk visited a lot of the areas that would later be classified as the Delta Quadrant or the Gamma Quadrant — it just wasn’t followed up on necessarily.

 

[Deks]

I’m rewatching TOS on Blu-ray and aside from the usual examples of higher speeds than expected (like the trip of a thousand light-years in “Obsession”), it’s particularly noticeable when characters casually refer to “the galaxy” in situations where a century later they’d be speaking of “the quadrant” or “the Alpha Quadrant”. Not more than the galaxy, but not less either.

It’s just a subtle difference in scale that seems to have been lost during the production of TNG, and I’d also argue that we need to question the usual assumption where the same warp factor represents a higher speed on TNG: what if it’s actually lower but safer on average, as opposed to the constant nervousness about reaching Warp 7 or higher on TOS? Maybe Kirk visited a lot of the areas that would later be classified as the Delta Quadrant or the Gamma Quadrant — it just wasn’t followed up on necessarily.

The writers were bad with consistency.
I actually like the excessively high warp speeds that allow a ship to travel through a 1000 ly's in a short amount of time like in TOS (say a day)... as it illustrates what a combination of multiple alien species working together could achieve in 100 years since the Federation was founded.
Quite frankly, TNG should have been as Roddenberry originally intended (for Enterprise-D to be exploring other galaxies)

But then TNG writers scaled down and resulted in Warp speeds being excessively slow.
Warp 9.9 was actually confirmed to be about 21 473 x Light speed on Voyager by Tom Paris (speed which the ship never managed to achieve... actually no TNG ships were able to achieve that speed with stock engine setup when they launched)... and Voyager was usually cruising at Warp 6 back to the Alpha Quadrant.
The USS Prometheus (as seen on Voyager), was the first SF ship able to achieve Warp 9.9 and hold it without shaking apart - so at least we have some canonical data which says that in the late 24th century (or at least 4 years after Voyager launched), SF managed to create ships capable of achieving Warp 9.9 as a cruising velocity.

To me, it seemed like TOS and the movies which portray similarly high Warp speeds actually occurred in an alternate universe.
Whereas TNG, DS9 and VOY are in their own universe, and had a version of TOS happening, just slower Warp speeds compared to what we saw in the 24th century.

I don't mind consistency, but Trek writers were BAD at predicting/imagining how far the Federation would realistically evolve, which actually resulted in very little to nothing really changing between the end of Voyager and by the time we saw Star Trek Picard for example (which takes place 20 years later).

Even Discovery managed to mess it up, with journeys still taking months at Warp in the 32nd century (which is extremely unrealistic).

By the 24th century, SF was able to effectively 'double' Warp velocity. And the late 24th century also brought about various innovations and pretty big increases in Warp drive speeds (because every increment past Warp 9.9 results in doubling of speed).

But, even if we assume that the Federation was only able to double Warp speeds every century after Voyager returned to the Alpha Quadrant... by the 31st century (aka just prior to the Burn) it would be something like this:
Warp 9.9 (mid/late 24th century) = 21,473 times LS
Warp 9.91 (mid 25th century) = 42,946 times LS
Warp 9.92 (mid 26th century) = 85,892 times LS
Warp 9.93 (mid 27th century) = 171,784 times LS
Warp 9.94 (mid 28th century) = 343,568 times LS
Warp 9.95 (mid 29th century) = 687,136 times LS
Warp 9.96 (mid 30th century) = 1,374,272 times LS
Warp 9.97 (mid 31st century - just prior to the Burn) = 2,748,544 times LS.

But, doubling speed every century is a highly conservative estimate which doesn't take into account exponential developments and returns in science and technology which would effectively result in something akin to 1000x - 1 million times improvements from the 24th to the 25th century - and 25th to 26th would be akin to billion or trillion times improvements - this would be accurate for just 1 species... and on TOP of that you'd have to add in influx of added technological/scientific and diverse knowledge bases (not to mention capabilities) of dozens to 150 other alien species - this is why the Federation should have been FAR more advanced and extragalactic (or exploring other galaxies - including Andromeda) by the 24th century.

But bringing it back to doubling of speed of every century:
Even with Warp 9.9, it would take just a notch under 7 years for a ship to go from one end of the Milky Way to the other.
In the 25th century, it would take 3.5 years to do the same... an seeing how the Federation would likely grow more in all that time, ships wouldn't be launching from Utopia Planitia all the time (in fact, U.P. would be just 1 of many shipyards in the entire Federation)... but from other regions of UFP (which are closer to say Gamma and Delta Quadrants).

This also doesn't take into account Quantum Slipstream version 2 which allowed speeds of 10 000 Ly's per MINUTE... and the first version of Quantum Slipstream allowed for speeds of 300 Ly's per hour (or just a notch under Warp 9.97).

Version 1 of QS did produce quantum stressed on Voy hull, but that doesn't mean SF wouldn't be able to study this technology in detail and create reinforced structural integrity fields, etc. which would negate those effects.
And, V1 of QS didn't need Benamite Crystals... only Version 2 did... and I reckon that if Voy was able to make V2 of QS in just 4 months after encountering v1 of the technology, I'd imagine SF with all of its resources would be able to solve the phase variance issue in about 4 months, and probably find a way to synthesize Benamite Crystals in days or hours... as opposed to years, and either slow their decay drastically, or find means to recrystalize them (perhaps an analogue of Dilithium crystal recrystallization technology).

I mean, we're talking about 150 different space faring (and technologically advanced) alien species working together.
I seriously think the writers heavily understated how fast the Federation would progress.

 

[Timo]

What our heroes say may be considered relevant, but in that case all of it probably should. And the TOS heroes were all about local scope: they visited nearby stars (calling them by their familiar names) and crossed modest distances (referring to the appropriate lightyears or parsecs).

They sometimes were quick about it, covering the hundreds of lightyears in a matter of minutes. But they didn't travel tens of thousands of lightyears even if they had hundreds of minutes to spare. (Sure, Spock at one point speaks of "millions" of lightyears, but at that time he's crazy.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Boris Skrbic]

To me, it seemed like TOS and the movies which portray similarly high Warp speeds actually occurred in an alternate universe.
Whereas TNG, DS9 and VOY are in their own universe, and had a version of TOS happening, just slower Warp speeds compared to what we saw in the 24th century.

I wouldn’t go that far, but I can imagine limitations occuring eventually that would to some kind of overall slowdown (though even in TNG era we’d see local examples of higher speeds).

And the TOS heroes were all about local scope: they visited nearby stars (calling them by their familiar names) and crossed modest distances (referring to the appropriate lightyears or parsecs).

That could be interpreted as the minimum safe region for travel inside the Federation and towards nearby governments, whereas the reach of exploration was much longer, but without any kind of permanent presence in terms of starbases or deep-space stations.

But they didn't travel tens of thousands of lightyears even if they had hundreds of minutes to spare.

They did leave the galaxy on two occassions under standard engine power, so if we say they could travel 1,000 light-years in two days, then even 50,000 light-years in 100 days seems quite reasonable.

 

[Timo]

This I guess is telling; the "reach of exploration" is what took the TOS heroes to nearby stars, and previously unvisited miracles awaited them at systems essentially neighboring Sol, such as Pollux. And the ability to cross 400 ly in reasonable time never translated to either the ability or the willingness to travel 40,000 with just the couple of extra sandwiches it ought to have taken. Either the tech was of low endurance, or then the heroes were...

...A bit like space exploration today, perhaps, with heroes rocketing to the sky and then just sort of hanging around there!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Henoch]

I think the TOS warp engines were classified as "time machines" and needed to be decommissioned and replaced with new warp engines that can't result in time travel. Under normal use, fantastic distances are transversed via limited time travel, or under special situations, unlimited time travel occurs with small distance changes.

 

[Ronald Held]

I think the TOS warp engines were classified as "time machines" and needed to be decommissioned and replaced with new warp engines that can't result in time travel. Under normal use, fantastic distances are transversed via limited time travel, or under special situations, unlimited time travel occurs with small distance changes.

You mean the Enterprise's wsrp engines,versus all the Constitution class ones?

 

[Henoch]

Probably all of them, plus with mods, the Klingon BOP, too. That Spock knowledge is dangerous.

 

[Timo]

...Or then it's just Sol that allows for time travel, and non-Earthlings are thus screwed, knowledge/engines or not.

Perhaps the TOS Starfleet benefited from having all its crews conduct multiple five-year missions during their five-year tour of duty, there being a "rewind" session at Sol after each stretch? Which is why stardates sometimes move backward for a given set of heroes, without comment. But needing to come back for rewinding would artificially limit the reach of Starfleet back then, and thus the TNG one would do better even with slower ships.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Henoch]

...Or then it's just Sol that allows for time travel, and non-Earthlings are thus screwed, knowledge/engines or not.

Perhaps the TOS Starfleet benefited from having all its crews conduct multiple five-year missions during their five-year tour of duty, there being a "rewind" session at Sol after each stretch? Which is why stardates sometimes move backward for a given set of heroes, without comment. But needing to come back for rewinding would artificially limit the reach of Starfleet back then, and thus the TNG one would do better even with slower ships.

Timo Saloniemi

I theorize that very high warp speeds result in a reverse time dilation effect. Star Trek has shown that warping very close inside a planet-size (Psi 2000) gravity well or near a star-size (the black star or our sun) gravity well causes the ship to go back in time. Even very high warp speed in a weak gravity environment like the Milky Way itself may cause a slowing of time but not quite reversing time. The net effect is time travels faster for the ship and slower on the outside. Depending on your warp speed, what appears as one hour for the galaxy would be longer for the ship. The ship appears to travel larger distances in less time as observed from the outside. This effect may account for the ridiculous speeds seen in TOS at times. The space-time warp engine is a time machine when gravity is added to the mix. YMMV.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

So in “Gamesters of Triskelion”, a detour of a mere two dozen light-years is enough to ruin McCoy’s day, while Kirk’s party is “surrounded by creatures belonging to races scattered all through the galaxy”.

 

[Phoenix219]

I theorize that very high warp speeds result in a reverse time dilation effect. Star Trek has shown that warping very close inside a planet-size (Psi 2000) gravity well or near a star-size (the black star or our sun) gravity well causes the ship to go back in time. Even very high warp speed in a weak gravity environment like the Milky Way itself may cause a slowing of time but not quite reversing time. The net effect is time travels faster for the ship and slower on the outside. Depending on your warp speed, what appears as one hour for the galaxy would be longer for the ship. The ship appears to travel larger distances in less time as observed from the outside. This effect may account for the ridiculous speeds seen in TOS at times. The space-time warp engine is a time machine when gravity is added to the mix. YMMV.

It does make me think of The Cage's bragging about the Time Barrier, and the engines using Time Warps.....

 

[Timo]

So in “Gamesters of Triskelion”, a detour of a mere two dozen light-years is enough to ruin McCoy’s day, while Kirk’s party is “surrounded by creatures belonging to races scattered all through the galaxy”.

I guess this is the way humans speak: people from "all across the country" tend to be from all across the county instead, and "the universe" includes one's hometown and the part of the sky above it that can be seen from the porch. A Trek hero so far has to successfully defend a grandiose claim of galactic reach, our intrepid wormhole travelers aside. (Or one of those "it came from outside the galaxy" claims for that matter.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[publiusr]

Still sorta mad at Christopher for what happened to the TOS engineering hull in one novel

 

[at Quark's]

I think faster propulsion don't necessarily speed up exploration. No matter how fast your ships are, exploring the entirety of the galaxy could still require centuries (assuming a non-exponential growth of Starfleet's workforce), as the galaxy is simply humungous. The situation is perhaps comparable to a group of 20 people today that are tasked to explore every single village on earth and make personal, physical contact in each village with the people there. Sure, they can literally travel across the planet in 24 hours but even only visiting all the villages in, say, India, might still take decades. So I wouldn't be surprised if, in the 29th century they've had quantum slipstream ships for 2 centuries, ships that could zip through the entire galaxy in, say 15 minutes or so, but local exploration still wasn't finished by that time.

 

[Timo]

On the other hand, knowledge of the Milky Way may well jump up from 11 to 19 percent during the first seasons of TNG, not because Starfleet ships would cover that much volume, but because some of them would reach players who know about the extra 8 percent and are willing to share. If this is what happened, then it would be a bit odd for there not to be further such jumps, with increasing frequency even: soon enough, ships would be fast enough to reach all the places that together know about all the places.

If having a comprehensive wikipedia page about every planet in a given volume does not count as the volume being explored, then it's difficult to explain away the discrepancy between the percentages of "Where No One" and "The Dauphin". OTOH, we can easily decide that telescopic or probe observations don't count towards exploration, since we more or less directly see they do not: only a starship can make heads or tails about the local conditions even in cases where probe studies of the place are explicated or telescopic observation from Earth would have been going on since the 17th century.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Henoch]

The problem with telescopic observation is that when looking at that star system 100 lys away, your information is 100 years out of date.

 

[Boris Skrbic]

Not with subspace telescopes.

 

[Henoch]

Do we get evidence of visual "subspace" imaging in TOS? I don't think they viewed ships, etc. over 300,000 500,000 kilometers (2+ second visual delay). After that, they used "sensors" to gather information but not visual pictures, but I could be wrong.

 

[Timo]

We got precious few TOS plots where the mystery on a nearby planet could have been solved by looking. But "Doomsday Machine" was definitely one of those: the heroes needed to check on whether a series of star systems had planets or not, and the dialogue quite heavily implies they did that by flying through each one. And at least at the first and last of such systems, they were quite deep in before making the assessment.

So the ship probably lacked a telescope capable of providing the necessary realtime data, visual or otherwise (but visual would have sufficed!). And Starfleet couldn't be bothered with pointing a telescope at these targets from elsewhere...

Timo Saloniemi