I used to think it was too much, too - until I read that current real-life estimates put an insane ten billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ten-billion-earths/
Why the Xindi never appear in TOS / TNG / DS9 / VOY
- Thread starter Deimos Anomaly
- Start date
I used to think it was too much, too - until I read that current real-life estimates put an insane ten billion Earth-like planets in our galaxy.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/03/ten-billion-earths/
still seems off...
I mean at the end of TOS, they'd barely mapped a 1/4 of the alpha quadrant... given the Enterprise's top speed back then, they would have mapped a tiny fraction of the alpha quadrant, I seriously doubt 800+ individual species existed around their tiny area of exploration...
M
I mean at the end of TOS, they'd barely mapped a 1/4 of the alpha quadrant... given the Enterprise's top speed back then, they would have mapped a tiny fraction of the alpha quadrant, I seriously doubt 800+ individual species existed around their tiny area of exploration...
M
Where does this datapoint come from? We get the figures 11% and 19% at the start of TNG, which would be from 1/2 of Alpha (or a comparable volume) to 2/3 of it.
We know the ship could do at least a couple of thousand lightyears per season, from the sum total of explicit distance references in episodes like "Squire of Gothos". A dozen ships like that would quickly cover much of Alpha, even if only in the sense of making UFP-explored space look like a really tiny hedgehog with really long spikes. The thing is, though, those other cultures would also be exploring, and it would be the sum total of these explorations that would bring together 800 cultures in an eyeblink.
I rather suspect the number would be much higher, as the current estimates for life-supporting planets are based on the idea that such planets developed naturally. In Trek, cultures would have been terraforming them for millions or billions of years already. And it's rather uncommon to find such a world without a native or visiting humanoid culture to it...
...Although associating the cats with the Xindi culture is just about the only way we could accept "them" as having had four wars with mankind two centuries before TAS. After all, ENT makes it pretty clear that only the Xindi had had anything approaching a "war" with Earth by that time. Unless we assume they were the mercenaries of the Romulans in that war, and recognized as such (so humans would know they don't know what the actual Romulans look like)...
Timo Saloniemi
I suspect the Federation has maps for at leasta 1/4 of the Galaxy. After all in the DSN pilot, the Runabout was able to identify the star Idran based on data from the Quadros 1 probe. So that system could be considered to be mapped.
Though I take it you mean explored with manned starships, but if we take the 800 figure from the novel, set circa 2369. That would be around 200 years of Human space exploration. Once you start to factor in increasing speeds of ships, greater numbers of ships a large volume of space could have been explored. Now of course some of those 800+ could have been contacted prior to the development of not contact directive. And some contacted races might not fall within the region of space claimed by the UFP.
So it is plausbale
The stellar disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter, and is, on average, about 1,000 ly thick.
So, if we do that into quarters for the quadrants, we have 25,000 light years across and 25,000 light years in length, for the alpha quadrant, and still 1,000 light years thick... that gives a standard volume of 625,000,000,000 light years cubed just for the Alpha Quadrant... basic math there.
So given the Enterprise (Constitution class), had a maximum speed of Warp 8, and a maximum safe speed of Warp 6 (As explained in TOS: That Which Survives), we can avarage that the Enterprise did a comfortable speed of 216c
So again, back to maths...
Warp 6 = 216c...
So it would take about a week to reach Alpha Centauri (4.3 light years from earth)
Just to put that into context for you... it would take just over 115 years to fly from one side of the alpha quadrant to the other at Warp 6... Hardly fitting within the '5 year mission' perameters...
M
Patently false, as our only datapoints into how fast the TOS warp factors are indicate speeds in the range of hundreds of lightyears in a DAY, not in a year.
We really can forget all about that nonsense and start picking-and-choosing between actual datapoints, which may not be in complete agreement with each other but certainly debunk the idea that a nearby star could only be reached in a week. After all, Kirk in TOS hopped from star to star in a matter of days at the very most, without indication that those would be neighboring stars.
Those speeds would allow for the galactic hedgehog to extend its spikes across a thousand neighboring cultures easily enough in the couple of centuries the UFP has existed before Spock's World. And that only by using the frontline starships; lesser probeships could also establish contact, or at least make others curious about the UFP and cause them to make contact.
Timo Saloniemi
I used the information specificallhy available on Tech Specs for the Constituion class around the internet...
Constitution Class Speed:
Warp 6 (maximum safe speed)
Warp 8 (maximum speed)
Warp 9 (attainable at extreme risk)
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Constitution_class
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(NCC-1701)
http://www.ufstarfleet.org/wiki/index.php?title=Constitution_Class_Starship
If you can site sources where the Constitution class ships regularly travelled faster than any starship in TNG, DS9 or Voy, please do...
M
Constitution Class Speed:
Warp 6 (maximum safe speed)
Warp 8 (maximum speed)
Warp 9 (attainable at extreme risk)
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Constitution_class
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(NCC-1701)
http://www.ufstarfleet.org/wiki/index.php?title=Constitution_Class_Starship
If you can site sources where the Constitution class ships regularly travelled faster than any starship in TNG, DS9 or Voy, please do...
M
Speed and distance in Trek fluctuates wildly. Look at the video in my sig, at 8:00. Warp 8.4 in TOS would have managed Voyager's "75 years at warp 9.975" in a month!
I just calculated the times and distances given on the standard warp scale on Memory Alpha...
Once you have the specific warp speeds, and know the distances, then mapping out travel time is a very simple equation...
I can't really go into continuity problems, as i know TOS is full of them, but using a standard warp scale that's generally accepted, i can map out general distances and times
M
Once you have the specific warp speeds, and know the distances, then mapping out travel time is a very simple equation...
I can't really go into continuity problems, as i know TOS is full of them, but using a standard warp scale that's generally accepted, i can map out general distances and times
M
I'm not sure that a table put in technical manuals that the writers never ever actually adhered to counts as "accepted"
There's a table of canonically stated time-distance ratios here: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Warp_factor and it's totally random.
There's a table of canonically stated time-distance ratios here: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Warp_factor and it's totally random.
fair enough... i was just going on calculations, i still firmly believe that the original Constitution class couldn't outrace a Galaxy, Intrepid or Sovereign class ship though, and their speeds are 'standardised' and i can calculate the travel times off them easily...
M
M
Now there's your problem!
Oh, that's trivial. Warp eight was supposed to be hair-raising at first, but our heroes never faced ill effects from doing it - and, as in that above video link, in "That Which Survives" it got them across a thousand lightyears in a day. For Picard, such speeds were supernatural: seven thousand lightyears in "Q Who?" would take three years rather than a week.
Naturally, "That Which Survives" has always been an outlier. But it's also an example of regular performance, as opposed to alien-induced speeds or other flukes. And outliers are the norm for TNG and VOY as well, more or less requiring us to believe that the speed corresponding to a given warp factor varies per unknown circumstances. Whatever the explanation, the phenomenon itself completely negates the value of any calculations on what these mighty starships "could" or "couldn't" have achieved. What they did onscreen was possible for them, leaving (in good or bad) basically nothing impossible.
Timo Saloniemi
I agree that from an in-universe perspective, the newer ships should and would outpace the old. There's just a big complicated mess of retcons as to how far ships can travel and how fast warp speeds are meant to be, and writers not paying attention, muddling everything up.
Very true - although not necessarily in the real world. Destroyers got a lot slower after WWII, for example, as there was no point in them maintaining 35kt+ speeds any more, and endurance was preferable to dash speed. Many fighter aircraft ceased to be multiply supersonic as well. And then there are the supersonic passenger transports... Basing travel time calculations on known 1940s-50s speeds and as such realistic predictions and extrapolations would result in completely erroneous figures in these cases.
In the Trek universe, though, speed would appear to be of value despite the twists and turns of history.
Still, it's not that outlandish to think that Picard's juggernaut would be sluggish in comparison with Kirk's nimbler ship. Or that there has been minimal evolution in warp propulsion between TOS and TNG. After all, there appears to be a "galactic norm" to how fast ships are going (or else we could never have chase scenes!) - which means average starfaring cultures are going to plateau on their warp speed evolution and then get stuck on that plateau for millennia, allowing for the observed synching.
Timo Saloniemi
...Although the only way we can really tell is because VOY "Threshold" tells us that Warp 10 now equals infinite speed, whereas in TOS it clearly did not. The rest of the TNG era ships could simply be unable to go faster than warp 9-point-something on the TOS scale for various reasons. 
Timo Saloniemi
Timo Saloniemi
Personally, I always hypothesized that the area of space that was formerly encompassed by the Delphic Expanse was the the area spinward of the Federation core planets that included Cardassia, Bajor, Ferenginar, Breen, and Tzenketh. I figure that after the Delphic Expanse was dispersed and the Xindi-Insectoids and -Reptillians' attempt to destroy Earth thwarted, the major local powers all decided to concentrate for the next century or so on expanding antispinward and anticoreward. I figure that only by the time of late TOS (the mid-to-late 23rd century) did the Federation begin expanding and exploring spinward, leading, over the course of the 24th century, to the UFP encountering the Cardassians, Bajorans, Tzenkethi, Breen, and Ferengi.
I figure that this nicely explains why the UFP didn't encounter so many races that are so relatively close to the Federation core planets for so long, and provides a nice excuse for why they don't seem to have encountered many Xindi in the period between 2154 and 2364.
I figure that this nicely explains why the UFP didn't encounter so many races that are so relatively close to the Federation core planets for so long, and provides a nice excuse for why they don't seem to have encountered many Xindi in the period between 2154 and 2364.
...Although the only way we can really tell is because VOY "Threshold" tells us that Warp 10 now equals infinite speed, whereas in TOS it clearly did not. The rest of the TNG era ships could simply be unable to go faster than warp 9-point-something on the TOS scale for various reasons.
Timo Saloniemi
RAAARGHBLARGH! Threshold isn't canon!
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