When they say galaxy are they talking about the Milky Way?

[Mistral]

NO one has mentioned the Kelvans-I believe they only took a century or two to get to the Milky Way from Andromeda. And yet that pesky barrier made a mess of their ship too. I believe "Where no man.." was a case of the fence in my yard-i.e.-the barrier Mitchell encountered was the one on the closest edge(of the Milky Way) to Earth. Trans-galactic travel is a big effort-maybe the Federation will pull it off but not until travel between the quadrants is an everyday sort of thing, which it currently isn't.

 

[Dayton3]

Back in TOS, it was a bit more vague: our heroes seemed capable of moving across the entire Milky Way at will, rather than having to spend 70 years in transit. But we can reinterpret most of those references to "the other side of the galaxy" as hyperbole, and pretend that Kirk moved just as slowly as Picard or Janeway.

Kirk's first adventure at the edge of Milky Way seemed to be some sort of a proof-of-concept mission to find out whether one can even leave our galaxy, not a serious attempt to explore what lies beyond. Many a thing in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" points to a short-term mission whose purpose was to deliberately steer into the barrier at the edge and see if one can get to the other side. It seems unlikely Starfleet back then ever seriously pondered sending a ship to a location outside the Milky Way, such as Andromeda or one of the neighboring non-spiral galaxylets.

Yet TOS also has an interesting bit about other galaxies in "The Alternative Factor": the spacetime tremors caused by the two Lazari are reported as having been observed at distant locations...

Admiral of the Week: "You're aware of the effect an hour ago."
Kirk: "Yes, Sir."
Admiral: "You may not be aware of its scope. It occurred in every quadrant of the galaxy and far beyond."

So it seems Starfleet is in chatting terms with observers "far beyond" Milky Way, or otherwise capable of seeing what happens out there. That sort of reach has not been suggested in any other episode, but it does open interesting possibilities.

Timo Saloniemi

Two possibilities exist:

1) Federation subspace telescopes (we've seen some big ones) are capable of monitoring large disturbances from extreme distances in nearly real time.

2) High speed faster than light space probes sent out centuries ago (perhaps by the Vulcans or other Federation races) can communicate with the Federation about conditions in remote locations.

 

[Timo]

The ability to send signals across such distances at such high speeds would wreak havoc with the idea that our heroes in their cool starships could ever be outside realtime communications range...

So I'd rather go with the idea that only very specific kinds of signal can be transmitted across the distances at the speeds (say, universe-shattering spacetime hiccups), and the Federation instruments can detect those and divine their origin, but cannot utilize them for anything else. Active scanning of more mundane phenomena by the best subspace telescopes should be limited to a few hundred or thousand lightyears, only an order of magnitude or two better than starship sensors and comm devices.

If probes really could maintain near-realtime communications that way, Trek adventures (and especially ST:VOY) should look rather different... Then again, it took at most a century for Friendship 1 to report of its disappearance tens of thousands of lightyears away (that is, cease to send updates of its location) in the titular VOY episode, indicating that subspace messages do travel across vast distances in some cases, at impressive FTL speeds even though not quite in realtime.

Timo Saloniemi