Time, Distance, and Speed Problems in Star Trek

[Timo]

The main thing about "Cochrane factors" in terms of drama is that they can't be allowed to have much significance. If they really made a difference, then our heroes should not be speaking about warp factors at all - they should be discussing the local Cochrane Parameter and how to find a region of space where they can go a thousand times faster and catch their prey / evade their assailant.

And the thing about "Obsession" is that "halfway across the galaxy" is far more likely to be blatantly untrue than, say, "fifty lightyears away". The same goes more or less for "a thousand lightyears away", if (if!) crossing a thousand lightyears is as unlikely in the context as crossing a thousand miles is today. That is, it can be done, but it isn't done, most of the time.

OTOH, "another part of the galaxy" could well work with the thousand lightyears, quite possibly meaning a hop from one galactic arm to another. And here we must remember that we have basically zero understanding of the structure of our own galaxy, and may well discover a practical division into distinct "parts" that fits our parameters here. Especially as Trek also features this nifty "edge" feature to things galactic, a neat purple barrier that exactly defines the distinct parts (at the very least "inside" and "outside" but possibly the arms as well, if it wraps around those).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Henoch]

I pick a scale that seems to fit most of the examples, and would give otherwise reasonable travel times given the scale of the Federation. Call it high, middle and low scales. In Picards time it is spread out over 8,000 ly. Even at 8,000 x C would take an entire year to make the trip. That seems certainly wrong. On the 5th scale, Warp 8 would be 32,768c. That would mean doing it in 3 months, which seems more reasonable. Maybe they used the 4th scale (low) in TOS and 5th scale (middle) in TNG if you want to say the scale changed? Or 5th in TOS and 6th (high) in TNG? That works even better. Anything too far outside of that, I just retcon in my head canon.

The 4th Scale for TOS seems more plausible, but it may still be too slow for the extreme high speed examples. Roughly, it still takes 3 months to travel 1000 lys at Warp 8. In the Cage, it was mentioned that they are going much faster than 18 years prior to the episode, having broken the "time barrier" (i.e. the forth dimension). Did TOS move from a 3rd power technology to a 4th power technology? I think this a good in-universe explanation. If a higher scale is still needed, maybe a constant (like pi in circle geometry) can be incorporated in the formula to increase the scale further up. Maybe only in the extreme examples, a variable factor is still needed, but to a lesser extent.

By the way, "transwarp" sounds like another dimensional level is in play (i.e. a fifth dimension), for what it's worth. YMMV .

 

[Tarek71]

I just retcon everything that doesnt fit. Unless it's off by just a little. A correction factor that accounts for slight variations is alright. So for That Which Survives we retcon that to 99.07 light years or 9.907 lys and then it works just fine on a 5th or 4th scale. They scaled V'Ger down from 82 AUs to 2 AUs, and they agree that they should have said a week, not a day in Into Darkness. So I just take it upon myself to make the same sorts of corrections.