Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole...

[Timo]

Re: Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole

Well, "something important is 2-6 days away" is standard fare for all Trek shows, and thus goes just fine with the established warp speeds for those shows. It just requires us to believe that important things in the Trek universe aren't very far from each other. And since the writers are likely to return to important things in future episodes, in all sorts of combinations and permutations, it's good strategy to believe that they indeed are all clustered closely together.

There are pretty few exceptions to all that, really. A couple of TOS episodes suggest that starships should be about ten to hundred times faster than VOY would have us believe, but those episodes deal with fairly short distances, mere hundreds rather than tens of thousands of lightyears. Starships may be good sprinters but poor at sustaining their pace.

And Spock saying to Zarabeth that his dad and his stuffy, inhibited, emotionless ways are a million lightyears away doesn't strike me as a particularly unexpected line for the situation, even if the real distance is more like sixty-five lightyears.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole

O. No. Just making conversation.

I find Ent Daedalus to be a particularly reprehensible violator or traveling sensible distances. They traveled a hundred lights from Earth and back again during the course of a single episode, or something like that. The episode should have lasted a year in "real time" which as running a close second to to the Expanse where they back track over the last two years travel over the course of an ad break.

 

[Timo]

Re: Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole

To be sure, we can nitpick our way out of that, too. They traveled to a "star desert" that was said to be devoid of star systems for a hundred lightyears. Two ways to help out the clueless writer:

1) They didn't travel to the middle of that, but just a dozen lightyears in, which already sufficed for Erickson's experiments.

2) They didn't travel much anywhere, they just defined "star system" as a star that has planets of note. And Earth in the Trek universe happens to sit in a neighborhood where most stars indeed lack planets. So going just a hundred ly out would bring them to these Barrens already.

Really, a hundred lightyears shouldn't take a year or anything. Sure, two seasons only took the ship some 130 ly away from Earth, but she wasn't racing for the Guinness Record of Farthest From Earth or anything. Her speed was solidly established as "from star to non-neighboring star in a couple of days" from the first episode on, and later we got the more solid figure of four ly per day. A hundred ly would then take three and a half weeks, plus pit stops - a plausible voyage for "Daedalus" which takes place in the middle of a long row of undated episodes. ("The Augments" was in May 27, "Babel One" in November 12, and there was a buffer episode on either side that implied a considerable passage of time but only a few closely spaced days of onscreen action, leaving maximum margin for "Daedalus".)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole

I fetched this quote from a transscript...

Captain's Log, supplemental. We're entering an area known as the Barrens. There's not a star system within a hundred light years. Perfect conditions for Emory's test.

Back on point.

Janeway didn't chart the course home. She would have approved it, but plotting the course was not her job. Just choosing the destination. The grunt blue collar buts and bolts of actually plotting their course was a job for a gold shirt not a red shirt.

My Guess is that would have been Tom's job, since the classic Navigator's role was integrated into the pilot gig, Job failing that no one from Stellar Cartography made a peep until Good Shepherd unless you count Kim and Seven building that thingy place which made everything easier to map... Been drinking a little. Sorry... Astrometrics!

Unless Tom, still I believe being a red Shirt too, delegated the Job further to another member of HIS STAFF, which were never really accounted for in the grand scheme of Voyager, even though Tom must have been working for one of his former underlings after he was demoted to Ensign suddenly becoming a minion helmboy suckling to the chief helmsman.

 

[Stone_Cold_Sisko]

Re: Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole

looking at that map, I see, yet another missed Voyager storytelling opportunity (among the hundreds of others). Or maybe I missed an episode that dealt with it, but Voyager should have gone to the galactic core.

 

[Timo]

Re: Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole

If anything, it seems the ship was avoiding the core. Does that mean the area would be unnavigable? Quite possibly; it wasn't exactly cakewalk even when Kirk went there in "The Magicks of Megas-Tu"...

Janeway didn't chart the course home. She would have approved it, but plotting the course was not her job.

Sure. But she would be the one choosing between Scylla and Kharybdis, giving her navigators the doctrine by which to work out the course for the day. She would be saying "for the next month, our priority is to steer away from inhabited planets, hide in nebulae and generally keep a low profile" or "we're low on pretty much everything, make sure we visit inhabited systems" or "let's rev up and go through the fastest possible subspace flats".

Decisions like that might explain the initial 30 degree angle, the avoidance of the core, and the curves projected for the yet-untraveled path through Beta Quadrant. Indeed, the bends in the projected stretch are the best indication that command decisions do have a major impact on the route. (Most of the tight bends and odd directions in the route already traveled through Delta would in turn be the result of the various random shortcuts, unrelated to Janeway's course preferences.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Guy Gardener]

Re: Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole

Plotting the course home was certainly a work in progress. Have you read the Asimov books about the second foundations psychohistorical timetable? Constantly tweaking and redevising. I always found that monk like work to be so studious... Compare that to janeway arbitrarily saying at the conclusion of an adventure "resume a course for earth."

 

[Tino]

Re: Voyager going to Gamma Quadrant to find Bajoran wormhole

Timo said:
Of course, if (and when) that wormhole were found to be unusable, the total travel time would have been something like 65+90 years.

Very good point! Image their faces when they reach the Wormhole with a sign on it, "closed for maintenance". :-)