"Where No Man Has Gone Before" - edge of the galaxy?

[Brent]

I've always wondered in "Where no man has gone before", how did the Enterprise get to the edge of the galaxy? The ship isn't fast enough to get there quickly?

In the episode it said that the closest base was only days away by Warp from the edge of the galaxy? On impulse it would have taken them only years to get to that base from th edge.

 

[GodThingFormerly]

Brent said:
I've always wondered in "Where no man has gone before", how did the Enterprise get to the edge of the galaxy? The ship isn't fast enough to get there quickly?

It depends upon the direction. The Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy - where the Solar System is located - is (IIRC) only ~2000 lightyears in depth (i.e., the direction perpendicular to the galactic plane). Assuming we are near the center of the structure that would make the nearest galactic "edge" ~1000 lightyears from Sol.

In the episode it said that the closest base was only days away by Warp from the edge of the galaxy? On impulse it would have taken them only years to get to that base from th edge.

Delta Vega was "a few light days" away from the Enterprise's location after its encounter with the barrier.

TGT

 

[Brent]

Still, 1,000 light years would have taken them a very long time even at their top speed sustained right?

 

[Forbin]

Unless they went "up" out of the disk of the galaxy.

 

[Nebusj]

Brent said:
Still, 1,000 light years would have taken them a very long time even at their top speed sustained right?

I doubt it. In ``The Alternative Factor'' Star Fleet is able to order a withdrawal of 100 parsecs (about 326 light-years) almost as a spur of the moment affair. In ``Obsession'' the Enterprise flies about a thousand light years in the time it takes one Ensign and one Captain to work through a personal crisis. In ``That Which Survives'' the Enterprise flies 990.7 light-years in less time than it would take the landing party to become slightly dehydrated. Long journeys are a bit of a hike, but nothing too inconvenient. It's hardly Kirk's fault that his 24th century successors don't know how to take the warp drive out of first gear.

(On the other hand, in ``This Side of Paradise'' we're told the colonists took a year to travel to Omicron Ceti. Assuming that's the less-commonly used name for the star Mira, and that they started from Earth, that's a year to travel 418 light-years. Of course, the Enterprise took considerably less than a year to make that distance herself.)

 

[Brent]

Wow, great information! Thank you, I very much appreciate it

 

[Christopher]

Forbin said:
Unless they went "up" out of the disk of the galaxy.

That is the thousand-light-year distance under discussion. As TGT said, the disk is about 2000 ly thick. (Although that depends on how you define it -- the main stellar disk is more like 6-800 ly thick, while the gaseous disk extends maybe 3000 or more.)

Going the long way, all the way out to the rim of the disk, would be at least 20,000 light-years.


TOS tended to treat the galaxy as a pretty small place, and assumed ships could cover huge distances in a short amount of time. More recent references in DS9 and VGR were based on the assumption that Federation-occupied and -explored space was on a much smaller scale and that ships were much more limited in speed. (The "behind-the-scenes" TOS warp scale claimed that velocity went as the warp factor cubed times lightspeed, but the actual speeds suggested or stated onscreen were thousands of times faster than that.)

So Samuel Peeples no doubt intended Earth territory to stretch nearly to the edge of the galaxy, but later shows have established things that are more reasonable but inconsistent with that, leaving a paradox.

 

[Noname Given]

Honestly, the whole Warp Factor speed conversion didn't even attempt to get nailed down until the non-canon Star Trek Tech Manual was printed; and even hat was an arbitrary idea that later Star Trek series took and ran with.

Warp drive allowed them to travel at the 'speed of plot' for quite a while. Hell, in Where No Man Has Gone Before it's infered that Impuse Engines can drive a ship at FTL speeds as when Sock makes the comment that the Valiant was 'caught and swept into/thrown clear of the barrier, Kirk comments "The old Impulse Engines weren't strong enough"; plus the fact that Spock indicated that they were thrown 1/2 a light year out of the Galaxy and 're-entered here'. Now, if the ship only had Impuse drives, that would have been 6 months before they were able to re-enter the galaxy; but if they had a crewmember like Gary Lockwood's character, we can assume the build up to the captain destroying his own ship took a week or so, like it did on the 1701.

Then we have episodes like That Which Survives where the 1701 is thrown 994.7 light years; yet makes it back to the planet it was thrown from (and yes they were travelling at Warp 14 for 15 minutes or so) in about 48 hours. Maybe Scotty REALLY WAS a miricle worker.

Bottom line, there's no way to reconcile anything like this without some 'out of series' rationalization. Not that this is a bad thing, and Star Trek fans used to love coming up with explainations for waht were refered to as "YATI's" or Yet Another Trek Inconsistency

 

[Ssosmcin]

What I love is that the Enterprise was making a point to see what was beyond the edge of the galaxy, past the barrier. However, they were turned back in that episode.

Two years later, in By Any Other Name, they made it through. And saw what they missed last time...a big gulf of nothing.

So, even if they made it through the first time, it would have been a really short trip.

Hmmm, I wonder why Chekov didn't get the same godlike powers as Mitchell..?

 

[Ronald Held]

I presumed that they went normal to the galactic plane and were on a (speedy) warp corridor.

 

[Brent]

what's a 'speedy warp corridor'?

 

[Ronald Held]

One where the normal TOS or TNG warp factor formula has a large Cochrane factor multiplying it.

 

[Ssosmcin]

Like a High Occupancy Vehicle lane.... More than two people in the car and you can use this lane to scoot past huge traffic jams on highways.

 

[AC84]

Slightly off topic, but...

I don't know how realistic a hazardous galactic barrier is, but I felt it gave the show an entertaining feel of Greek mythology. I don't know why. Off the top of my head, I can't think of an ancient literary equivalent to the barrier other than maybe the gates to Hades. But I suppose that's why I've kept all of my text books from past classes. Wasn't there some kind of ocean barrier?

 

[Nebusj]

Interesting notion and one I hadn't considered. In the mythological world of the Greeks the edge of the world was bounded by Gorgons, along the lines of Medusa, horrible monsters who were happy to kill you in horrible ways sometimes while turning you into stone or something less pleasant. (Of course, this would happen to any Greek foolish enough to get into a Greek myth, so there's some selection bias there.)

The Pillars of Hercules were generally regarded as the end of the world, at least toward the west, and they're generally accepted as being around the Strait of Gibraltar with a couple of other candidates plausible. I don't actually know how treacherous they're regarded as being, or would be regarded to people with Greek-era ships, though.

My impression was that the direct inspiration for the Barrier was the rather surprising and at the time recent discovery of the Van Allen Radiation Belts. The Belts were assigned a fair number of semi-magical properties in dumb science fiction movies or short stories for a while before they faded from public consciousness.