Can someone tell me how far a starship traveling at warp 9.6 can travel in 12 hours, how many light years?
JDW
JDW
Warp 9.6 ?
- Thread starter James Wright
- Start date
Old scale- 2.42 ly
New scale- 2.76 ly
Thank you, Warp Speed Widget. I knew there would be a reason I downloaded you if I waited long enough.
New scale- 2.76 ly
Thank you, Warp Speed Widget. I knew there would be a reason I downloaded you if I waited long enough.
Fast enough to travel from a nebula near Jouret IV, "one of the Federation's outermost colonies", to "the very core of the Federation", including Wolf 359 and Earth, in a very short period of time. Not years, months or even weeks. It appeared to be days and hours.
I favor a modified version of Cochrane's Formula from "Star Trek Maps", which allows for a variable that changes FTL velocity depending on environment.
I favor a modified version of Cochrane's Formula from "Star Trek Maps", which allows for a variable that changes FTL velocity depending on environment.
...Of course, "outermost" might not be all that far away if Jouret lies in the direction where the Borg were last seen: the Romulan Neutral Zone. The Federation could not have expanded very far in that direction before hitting the wall.
While we saw a location in the Pleiades, some 400 ly from Earth, being prepared for colonization in "Home Soil", we don't actually hear of any actual colony explicitly being hundreds of lightyears out. So there's room to play there with the figures.
Timo Saloniemi
While we saw a location in the Pleiades, some 400 ly from Earth, being prepared for colonization in "Home Soil", we don't actually hear of any actual colony explicitly being hundreds of lightyears out. So there's room to play there with the figures.
Timo Saloniemi
^^ The Federation is expressly stated as being over 200 years old in TNG. In "Conspiracy", Captain Walker Keel invites Picard into the abandoned mining shaft on Dytallix B and during their conversation, Picard states that the Enterprise-D "has been on the outer rim" for some time. Whether that's the outer rim of the galaxy or the outer rim of Federation space, that has to be quite a bit further away that the Romulans. (The Federation, in the TNG Writer's Technical Manual, was stated to be 10,000 light-years across.)
In TNG's "Tin Man", the distance travelled by the Enterprise to Beta Stromgren, even at Warp 9 by the "new scale" created by Sternback and Okuda, would take far longer than the few days Tam Elbrun is aboard ship.
A lass dramatic but similar "deep space" example was later seen in "Transfigurations".
In TNG's "Tin Man", the distance travelled by the Enterprise to Beta Stromgren, even at Warp 9 by the "new scale" created by Sternback and Okuda, would take far longer than the few days Tam Elbrun is aboard ship.
A lass dramatic but similar "deep space" example was later seen in "Transfigurations".
None of those charts match the show. They really travel light years in minutes.
Your widget is in error.
TOS Scale - 884.7c - 1.21 light years in 12 hours
TNG Scale - 1909c - 2.61 light years in 12 hours
Speed of the plot!
Monaco is way older than that. Doesn't exactly span the globe...
...Including when they were the closest ships to the Romulan Neutral Zone in "Angel One"? And when they investigated unrest in the Neutral Zone in "Heart of Glory"?
Either Romulan space is part of "the outer rim", or the E-D kept zipping back and forth a lot.
Incidentally, Dytallix B is said to be orbiting Mira/Omicron Ceti, which is a real star about a couple of hundred lightyears from Earth towards the galactic rim. Kirk visited the same system in "This Side of Paradise"...
Or then it may be the Romulans. What better way to establish an outer rim than to run into people who won't tolerate any further movement in that direction?
More significantly, Picard says it's 8,000 ly in ST:FC. But it wouldn't be a regular sphere 4,000 ly in radius, because that sort of a volume wouldn't have just thousands of inhabited planets as suggested - it would have hundreds of millions.
Several locations mere 100 ly from Earth were stated to be unexplored in Kirk's time. Picard was really out in the sticks when he did 400 ly, and 7,000 ly in "Q Who?" meant a journey of three years at maximum speed (which might be the warp 9.6 we're speaking of, or then not).
Why? We don't know the distance to Beta Stromgren (a fictional location) as measured from wherever the E-D started on that trip.
...Again without data on the starting point of the journey.
Basically, our TNG heroes seem to be able to cover distances of a couple of hundred lightyears within the confines of a single episode (plus whatever happens between this episode and the preceding and following ones). VOY follows the same pattern, although shorter distances can be traversed at somewhat higher speed, and longer ones at slower speed. It's only in TOS that there are truly major irregularities.
The up to six days in "Best of Both Worlds" would count as a "short distance", with warp 9.6 sustainable throughout. IMHO, anything between the figures from the Encyclopedia and values ten times that would be reasonable there.
Timo Saloniemi
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
When picard said the federation was spread across 8000 lightyears I always pictured it in my head as Federation space being similar to a cube shape with the 8000 lightyears representing the distance from one corner of the cube to the other like so:
the red shows the distance which im talking about.
Im not saying Fed space is cubed im just saying that I imagine this is how Starfleet gets the 8000ly figure, by putting Fed space into a cube format (or maybe a rectangular format) in order to get a rough figure.
Rectangle format:
the red shows the distance which im talking about.
Im not saying Fed space is cubed im just saying that I imagine this is how Starfleet gets the 8000ly figure, by putting Fed space into a cube format (or maybe a rectangular format) in order to get a rough figure.
Rectangle format:
...OTOH, were Picard a somewhat older French captain, he would be saying that France stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic, or indeed covers the entire globe. Which would be more or less true as regards the existence of Tahiti and Louisiana, but at the same time quite deliberately misleading.
Picard is on the propaganda mode in that dialogue to begin with. He tries to market the positive sides of Federation future to Lily Sloane, from the moneyless economy and betterment of self to the vast interstellar reach of the society. He'd thus certainly describe a sphere 300 ly across plus a couple of tiny colonies sprinkled up to 4,000 ly in opposite directions as a "8,000-ly Federation"!
Timo Saloniemi
Picard is on the propaganda mode in that dialogue to begin with. He tries to market the positive sides of Federation future to Lily Sloane, from the moneyless economy and betterment of self to the vast interstellar reach of the society. He'd thus certainly describe a sphere 300 ly across plus a couple of tiny colonies sprinkled up to 4,000 ly in opposite directions as a "8,000-ly Federation"!
Timo Saloniemi
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
The only thing I can recall from memory regarding travel time is in DS9 where Cassidy Yates comments that her brother who lives on Cestus III is 8 weeks away at maximum warp and Sisko comments that the planet hes on is on the other side of Federation space, now that doesnt necessarily mean the complete other side of Federation space and that sentence could be taken in a lot of different ways. Cassidy also states that it takes 4 weeks for a message from that planet to reach DS9 showing that subspace messages travel 2 times faster than maximum warp, but then again it all depends on which ship shes talking about when she say maximum warp because if shes talking about her cargo ship then do we even know her cargo ships maximum warp?
Anyway, thats all I can remember from memory.
Anyway, thats all I can remember from memory.
Lots of speedier warp corridors?
One thing that might also have to be taken into account when plotting a course through the Federation is the existence of natural astronomical objects such as the location of planets, asteroid fields, dense nebulae, stars, etc.
You may have two ships in two different locations that travel the same distance at the same speed, but it could take one vessel much longer to reach its destination if it has to take stellar detours around a few bothersome celestial objects here and there...
You may have two ships in two different locations that travel the same distance at the same speed, but it could take one vessel much longer to reach its destination if it has to take stellar detours around a few bothersome celestial objects here and there...
Simple fact:
Writers messed things up.
They have to have ships travel at the speed of plot, otherwise the time depending situations would have been days if not weeks over before the nearest starship can come in and handle it.
On another side ... I really don't understand why didn't the writers simply stick to some statements like from Season 2 of TNG that the Ent would take about 2 years to travel through what ... 7000 ly's (Q who episode) and go from there.
Adjusting the story so it fits with the time our heroes need to travel to specific points is easy and can be just as dramatic without messing up everything.
Writers messed things up.
They have to have ships travel at the speed of plot, otherwise the time depending situations would have been days if not weeks over before the nearest starship can come in and handle it.
On another side ... I really don't understand why didn't the writers simply stick to some statements like from Season 2 of TNG that the Ent would take about 2 years to travel through what ... 7000 ly's (Q who episode) and go from there.
Adjusting the story so it fits with the time our heroes need to travel to specific points is easy and can be just as dramatic without messing up everything.
I don't really see any evidence to the contrary.
Everything from early TNG onwards seems to follow that model: if you go thousands of lightyears, you need years, and if you go tens of thousands, you need decades. If you go mere dozens, you need days at most, hours at best. All TNG, DS9 and VOY figures tally with that.
Again, the actual offenders are TOS/TAS and ST5:TFF. And TOS /TAS is only an offender in the sense that it semi-consistently seems to claim that its ships are a thousand times faster than those of TNG - an idea that makes sense when TOS also seems to claim that the Federation spans more or less the entire galaxy, and is in conversation with other galaxies as well. After TNG decided to choose a different path, from the second season on at least, an inconsistency was created. And this turns the handful of explicit speed references in TOS into offenders, since the consistent TNG/DS9/VOY references outweigh them by sheer numbers.
Not that TOS would have been self-consistent, either. "Paradise Syndrome" has some really wonky warp speeds, for example, when compared either with the rest of TOS or with the rest of Trek.
Timo Saloniemi
I see evidence to the contrary when the Enterprise was going from the neutral zone to the core of the Federation in mere hours.
If the D needed 2 years to travel through 7 000 Ly's then it would probably take them 1 year to travel through 3500 LY.
Last time I checked, that did not happen.
the point is that the writers could have used a simple calculator to determine how long it would take the ship to travel through point A to point B at max. warp and stick with that.
Rarely did they adhere to those figures.
FC: From the Neutral Zone to Earth in just over 3 hours.
Begging your pardon ?
If the D needed 2 years to travel through 7 000 Ly's then it would probably take them 1 year to travel through 3500 LY.
Last time I checked, that did not happen.
the point is that the writers could have used a simple calculator to determine how long it would take the ship to travel through point A to point B at max. warp and stick with that.
Rarely did they adhere to those figures.
FC: From the Neutral Zone to Earth in just over 3 hours.
Begging your pardon ?
The Neutral Zone is really, really close to Earth, isn't it? I mean, Earth and Romulus are practically neighbors. They butted heads just as soon as Earth started establishing a presence in space. Assume that the NZ is several lightyears wide, and that the Enterprise patrolled with a large buffer between themselves and the Zone, and their patrol could lead them very near to the Sol system. Especially if Picard thought he would want to go there very quickly.
Also, nowhere in ST:FC does it say that the trip from the RNZ to Earth took three hours. All we know is that, once Picard decides to go to Earth after all, he does so seemingly in one stretch during which the same people are seen at the bridge stations at both ends of the trip. Could be anything between, say, two minutes and two days.
As for the 7,000 ly reference in "Q Who?", it goes like this:
So if they could maintain maximum warp, they would do something like 2,500 ly/y. Assuming that the trip to SB 185 really is 7,000 ly, which is far from said, since the ship did not start the journey from SB 185.
Timo Saloniemi
As for the 7,000 ly reference in "Q Who?", it goes like this:
So if they could maintain maximum warp, they would do something like 2,500 ly/y. Assuming that the trip to SB 185 really is 7,000 ly, which is far from said, since the ship did not start the journey from SB 185.
Timo Saloniemi
This is sort of an aside relative to where this thread has gone, but has anyone come up with a formula for how warp 9 plus velocities approach infinity as the warp factor approaches 10, or is it just best fit points on an asymptotic curve as drawn by whomever was involved in the warp scale recalibration?
I see a pretty good fit with using the relativistic time dilation equation and substituting the decimal fraction of c in the equation with the decimal fraction of the warp factor acheived beyond warp 9. Just multiply the unmodified warp 9+ velocity by this factor and you get something pretty close to the curve I've seen. Warp 9.6 works out to around 2350c and things head off to infinity towards warp 10.
I see a pretty good fit with using the relativistic time dilation equation and substituting the decimal fraction of c in the equation with the decimal fraction of the warp factor acheived beyond warp 9. Just multiply the unmodified warp 9+ velocity by this factor and you get something pretty close to the curve I've seen. Warp 9.6 works out to around 2350c and things head off to infinity towards warp 10.
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