As for taking her chances with borg space, Janeway was likely betting that the borg would ignore her ship. And they probably would of providing they hadn't started Fecking shit up for the borg. Remember borg ignore you if your not a threat and have nothing of value to assimilate. 1 small federation ship is not a threat. The borg have already assimilated dozens of fed ships so they likely won't find anything of interest in voyager. It only has a crew of just over 200 so it's not even a great source of drones. The only intresting thing on voyger is the fact it's a star fleet vessel out of its range. In scorpion we see a borg cube stop to scan it. From that scan it likely saw it had no new technology from what it already knew and probably pulled logs out of the computer explaining why it was in the delta quadrant. From that the borg likely decided meh.....and as we say it moved on to join the rest of the borg fleet. Fact is that cube could of dumped a few dozen drones on voyager and assimilated it with minimal effort or wasted time, but didn't so it's likely the borg would not have bothered with voyager. The dominion though would of swatted voyager the minute it entered dominion space.
Only in terms of stardate timekeeping at short time intervals, though - where we hit the stone wall of stardate timekeeping at short time intervals being all over the place, with one decimal point marking anything between a minute and a day. In direct dialogue terms, we hear of a distance of "a few light days", and don't have pressing storytelling reasons to think this took less than "a few days" to cover, so I'd refrain from using this as the basis for further argument - if other reason exists for believing in FTL impulse, then this isn't in direct contradiction, but beyond that... Or then the braking from relativistic speeds, a great feat, may be what prevents further great feats. But Kirk may just be arguing the futility of blasting "out" into interstellar space (because they'll not reach civilization even in years but decades, what with having killed their coreward momentum) rather than the impossibility of leaving orbit. Well, Janeway knows the Dominion is infinite - that is, it cannot be dodged at all, because it overlaps their point target 100%. That Janeway would have any reason to think the Borg would be at location X, for any value of X, is never well justified. The first time we learn of the Federation having any idea of where the Borg might be is when Crusher in ST:FC suggests they would be in Delta. We don't know where she got that idea, and we don't know if she was right (the Borg are predominantly in Delta) or wrong (the Borg are everywhere, or the Borg are predominantly in Alpha or Beta or Gamma). But the Borg don't block the route to Earth; there's no evidence of them blocking any route to anywhere. The Dominion specifically do that very thing... Really, going to the Gamma wormhole never would have made any sense - it's sixty years there, against the seventy straight to Earth. Cutting ten years off the trip won't make any difference to the puny humans who will all be geriatric in the end anyway, and the long-lived Tuvok won't mind either way. Interquadrantic travel at mere warp is not a solution. But while looking for shortcuts is, there's no good reason to look for them anywhere but the straight route home. The odds of finding them elsewhere aren't known to be any better, after all. Timo Saloniemi
In the briefing room: Assume that a month equals 28 to 31 Earth days. Spock says: Assume that a few light days is the distance light travels in 1.0 to 10.0 Earth days. Then the Enterprise travels about 1.0 to 10.0 light days in about 0.01 to 31 Earth days of ship time. Thus the average speed of the Enterprise going to Delta Vega should be between 0.032258 and 1,000 times the speed of light. 0.032258 times the speed of light is 9,670.048 kilometers per second. That is 229.70 times the escape velocity from the Solar System at Earth's orbit and 15.659 times the escape velocity at the surface of the Sun. So what sort of star would have an escape velocity of at least 9,670.048 kilometers per second, and possibly many times that, at the distance that a reasonably habitable planet like Delta Vega orbits it? Kirk doesn't say that they will take decades or centuries to reach a friendly planet, he says that they won't have enough power to leave orbit around the planet Delta Vega, its star, and also any more massive object that might be in that star system. How can Janeway know an impossible thing? Nobody knows something which is not true. So how can it be possible for the Dominion to overlap the mouth of the wormhole 100 %? The Dominion was never mentioned in the entire first season of DS9, despite several contacts with people of the Gamma Quadrant. In the second season it was only mentioned three times before "The J'em Hadar". If the Dominion ruled the space around the wormhole mouth that should have become known as soon as first contact was made with the local people. The Dominion may be thousands of years old and it may be very large, ruling thousands of inhabited star systems. But in one episode while travelling in the Gamma Quadrant it was said that the nearest J'em Hadar base was weeks travel away. And in "The Search" the location of the home world of the Founders was reached after what seemed like a relatively short voyage instead of years or decades, indicating that the Dominion rules only a tiny fraction of the vast Gamma Quadrant and thus should be easy for Voyager to travel around. How do you know the distance between the Gamma Quadrant mouth of the Bajoran Wormhole and the Caretaker's Array?
Why would this be the slightest bit relevant? If Kirk gets stranded at the planet, this would be because he has spent his delta-vee. It then wouldn't matter at all how much delta-vee he had in his pocket when he started: the only thing that would matter is how much delta-vee he has left after he completes his Delta-Vega-reaching maneuvers. Which might be quite close to zero. No. What he says is one thing; what this means is another. And what he says is not the above bit, but this: All the bits are debatable in full. "If we can't?" at first glance refers to the ability or inability to regain delta-vee. But "We'll be trapped in orbit there" is not that clear-cut, and even "We haven't enough power to blast back out" doesn't help much until we decide what that one in turn means. "Back out"? Well, "back" means the initial state, which by all appearances is high speed coasting away from the Galactic Barrier and hopefully towards the inhabited areas of the galaxy. If Kirk can't achieve this, then he's indeed "trapped" and has little reason to leave the orbit. He'd then do better to just surrender to Mitchell whose powers could keep his crew alive, or to commit immediate suicide out of fear of becoming Mitchellified. Umm, what? People know untrue things all the time. Janeway knows the Dominion watches over the wormhole, because Benjamin Sisko told him so. Ben may be wrong (and indeed it later turns out that yes, he's mostly wrong and the Dominion only occasionally bothers the Gamma end), but Ben in turn has no reason to think he would be wrong. He was there when the Dominion did this very efficient bit of wormhole-guarding just a short time ago. So Janeway is wrong, for a brief fraction of time (between "Jem'Hadar"/"The Search" and "In Purgatory's Shadow"). She has no reason to think she would be wrong, though. And she's right at all other times, it being flat out impossible for a Federation starship to make use of the wormhole. This wholly independently of where the Dominion might draw lines on starmaps, or what sort of schedules its patrol ships have. What counts, and the only thing that counts, is the impression Sisko and subsequently Janeway gets. By looking at the onscreen maps, I guess. I don't need to know it with the accuracy of a few lightyears, or even ten thousand lightyears. I can get a good grasp of the order of magnitude from the map. It's no different from the Ocampa/Earth distance: it obviously would take decades to travel, which is the option Janeway declares unacceptable. Timo Saloniemi
There is of course another reason not to head towards the Gamma Quadrant terminus of the Bajoran Wormhole, when it is first discovered the Aliens inside close it to passage, if they can do it once they can do it again. Would you take the risk?
Nobody in their right mind would, because there is nothing to gain. Even in the scenario where the Prophets hold the doors open and the Jem'hadar all go to sleep for a week, going that route provides no advantages. Getting home still takes a full lifetime... "Guys, remember that bus stop where the gang toppled and burned that National Guard APC and killed everybody? There's a theoretical chance the stop isn't their territory after all, so we could walk there in about six hours and hope that the crazy bus driver who randomly refuses service has retired tonight. We could walk there even though it's in the opposite direction from home, and shave up to an hour of travel time and be home by ten rather than eleven. How about that, folks? Or do we take the direct route home and see if we can catch a taxi or an uber en route?" Timo Saloniemi