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Why wasn't there an Alternate Timeline episode where Voyager became a generation ship?

No to get too off course, but why is the Dauntless posted as 161m? The ship definitely seemed as big as Voyager.
I think the Dauntless was depicted as being quite a bit smaller than Voyager in Hope & Fear - I'm reasonably sure there was a lot of talk about the crew not being able to take much with them etc.
 
Because Janeway is so stubborn and adamant at getting the ship home that there is simply no alternate universe in which she accepts this possibility. There may be alternate timelines in which she dies, but never that.
 
This was just a thought that I got carried away with. I really liked little Naomi and Icheb (and the other borg babies), and I would have loved to see an episode where they (and Miral) are the adult protagonists, in a time when many of the ship's original crew is elderly/dead. The ages might not work perfectly but this is Voyager so it doesn't matter.

Naomi would be captain, of course, and Icheb would probably be the chief engineer. Miral would also probably be head of a department because she'd be one of the oldest members of the second generation. Barring something crazy there's no way the number of people on Voyager could produce enough children to replace themselves, so there would have to be a few more aliens, and probably holograms too. A crazy mish-mash of characters, none of whom have had real Starfleet training, acting like they are Starfleet, because most of them were raised to. Oh! actually I guess Vorik would just be middle-aged at that point. More Vorik!

I don't even have any ideas about how or why this timeline would have been revealed to us in the show, I just think it would have been bonkers and great. What do you think?
That would have been an interesting direction for the show to go in, and of course there are fanfic stories where this idea has been explored.

Because Janeway is so stubborn and adamant at getting the ship home that there is simply no alternate universe in which she accepts this possibility. There may be alternate timelines in which she dies, but never that.
Janeway's an idiot for not planning for this. In the episode where Sam Wildman announces her pregnancy, there should never have been the slightest consideration that Janeway could ask or order her to terminate, and the bit of dialogue where Janeway muses to Chakotay about whether she should allow "fraternizing" is also ridiculous. Who did she expect would still be around in 75 years to reach Earth? Certainly not herself or Chakotay, as that would have put them well over 100. Even Tuvok would have been elderly by that time, so I guess it would be up to Vorik and Harry (don't recall if Naomi had been born by the time of that conversation).

Not canon, as the website says. The show itself should have had the characters preparing for the next generation, but of course Janeway didn't even think of starting any formal kind of schooling when the Borg kids came along. They were just passed around to whichever crewmember might have a free half hour here and there, and I'd bet there were a number of subjects that most Federation kids would learn that the kids on the ship didn't, either because of a lack of anyone qualified to teach them, or a lack of interest.
 
I'd assume at some point the human genes in the mix would start slowing down their aging process.

I think they deliberately didn't do that to enhance the unconventional nature of how love between humans and Ocampa would play itself out. If Linnis had, say, an 18 year lifespan (seems reasonable for a half-Ocampa), she'd still have been fairly young when Kes died. And Andrew, with, say, a 30 year lifespan, would be much younger as well.

With romances between species with disparate lifespans, I think you have to be forgiving. And I think that it was cool that Voyager gave us one episode where they really explored how Kes's life and descendants might have played out.
 
This leads me on to something else that occurred to me recently:



This was at the end of Caretaker, earlier in which Lieutenant Stadi gave Voyager's maximum velocity as warp 9.975.
If we use the TOS scale instead of the weird TNG one then this equates to 992.5c, which means that a 70kly distance could be covered in 70.5 years, so Janeway's estimate looks reasonably accurate.

The problem, though, is that maximum velocity does not determine the duration of such a long journey, average velocity does. The ship's average velocity isn't going to be anywhere near warp 9.975. I don't know if the Interpid-class's cruising speed was ever established, but if we go with DITL's guess of warp 8 (and that I think is quite generous) then the journey time would be closer to 137 years.

Even that, of course, is far too low: Voyager isn't continuously at high warp in the direction of the Alpha Quadrant, but dithering about exploring planets and getting into fights with the Garbage Pail Kids. Without a conveniently-placed wormhole or transwarp conduit there's no way they're getting back to Earth within a human lifespan.

Why, then, do so many of the characters - and the creative team - keep referring to the 75 year figure as if that's a realistic expectation?

They rarely go at warp 9 and only for short trips when they're in a hurry. Usually, Janeway orders warp 6, so given the times when they're stuck somewhere for one reason or another or when they have to make a detour (like the planet of the brunali where they go once, stay there for some time and then return there to ask questions. That puts their average speed somewhere around warp 5 or even warp 4.
 
They rarely go at warp 9 and only for short trips when they're in a hurry. Usually, Janeway orders warp 6, so given the times when they're stuck somewhere for one reason or another or when they have to make a detour (like the planet of the brunali where they go once, stay there for some time and then return there to ask questions. That puts their average speed somewhere around warp 5 or even warp 4.
Sticking to the cubic scale warp 4 equates to 64c and warp 5 to 125c so the journey would take somewhere between 560 and 1093.75 Earth years.
 
Sticking to the cubic scale warp 4 equates to 64c and warp 5 to 125c so the journey would take somewhere between 560 and 1093.75 Earth years.

Indeed, IOW a lot longer than what we've seen. Near the ending they were 30, 000 light-years away, that is 45, 000 light-years in seven years!!! Even with Kes' boost that's a lot farther than they should have been.
 
Yeah they really didn't think that one out in the writers room, yes Earth is 75 years away at max cruise speed, but reality of space is, you never do that. Just like a road trip, gps says 13 hours, better plan for 15+ for breaks, gas, etc.

A generational ship episode would have taken away from the Finale, as in, that episode would have to do exactly what the finale done, Reset itself in some way, by time travel, message (Timeless) or some other technobable way to erase that future.
A good idea would be to have a switch out, say 1 episode in the future, 1 episode in the current, and swap for say 6 episodes leading to a crossover, and then find a way for the crews future children to survive ( i do hate the multitude of episodes where the reset vanishes people from existance) Maybe if theres like 30 or 40, that they transfer to the current voyager, and the future voyager sacrifices itself with the old crew.
This would give them new crew members, so more stories, bit of family drama, and new technology.
 
Some timeframes...

Warp 6 (about 400c) - 175 years.
Warp 8 (about 1000c) - 70 years.
Warp 9.975 (about 5000c) - 14 years.

I personally think they should have lowered Voyager's top speed to Warp 9.73, or 2250c, with the idea that it was like driving your car at its stated top speed of 135 mph: you can't do it for long. A long-distance cruising speed with maximum efficiency, equivalent to setting your cruise control at 60, is Warp 8, or 1000c (or about 45% of top speed). Going warp 8 in a ship that can hit 9.975 is more like driving your car at 27.
 
The so-called "official" warp speed tables have never come anywhere near the actual speeds depicted onscreen, so they're useless for any meaningful calculation. There's long been an assumption (alluded to in the Okuda reference texts) that the table figures are only a baseline and that the actual speed for a given warp factor varies depending on local space and subspace conditions. Although the figures are so much slower than the actual indicated speeds onscreen that I wonder why they even postulated they were that low.

I personally think they should have lowered Voyager's top speed to Warp 9.73, or 2250c, with the idea that it was like driving your car at its stated top speed of 135 mph: you can't do it for long.

Well, yes, that's always been a given. Even back on TOS, warp 6 was the maximum standard cruising speed and anything above it put a strain on the engines and couldn't be sustained indefinitely. In TNG, I think it was anything above warp 8. The tech manual says that at 9.9, the engines automatically shut down after 10 minutes.


A long-distance cruising speed with maximum efficiency, equivalent to setting your cruise control at 60, is Warp 8, or 1000c (or about 45% of top speed). Going warp 8 in a ship that can hit 9.975 is more like driving your car at 27.

It's not a linear relationship, though, given that the effective velocity increases exponentially in proportion to the amount of power applied (with the warp factors up to 9 representing a linear increase in power use). Also, warp 9 is the last stable warp shell configuration, which is why warp 10 is set at infinity. So the curve above warp 9 is totally different from the curve below it. So any attempt to draw an analogy to automotive performance is totally inapplicable.
 
It's not a linear relationship, though, given that the effective velocity increases exponentially in proportion to the amount of power applied (with the warp factors up to 9 representing a linear increase in power use). Also, warp 9 is the last stable warp shell configuration, which is why warp 10 is set at infinity. So the curve above warp 9 is totally different from the curve below it. So any attempt to draw an analogy to automotive performance is totally inapplicable.

The writers would like you, I think. You're effectively giving full license to "maximum speed is whatever the story demands". So it's perfectly Ok to say that a ship that can travel W9.975 will require 70 years, or 50, or 45, or 95, or 110, or whatever to cross the galaxy.

I, on the other hand, prefer that writers be a little more accountable.
 
The writers would like you, I think. You're effectively giving full license to "maximum speed is whatever the story demands". So it's perfectly Ok to say that a ship that can travel W9.975 will require 70 years, or 50, or 45, or 95, or 110, or whatever to cross the galaxy.

I am not a CBS or Paramount executive and thus have no authority to give "license" to anyone involved with Star Trek. (On the contrary, I am a freelance contractor of a publisher licensed by CBS.) Spectators cannot call the plays, merely discuss them after the fact.
 
They've always played fast and loose with how fast warp is, however, in the "Big Picture" mountain view, its been a bit more stable. In Enterprise, Warp 5 is about 1 light year a day, which they relatively, more than any other show, abided by most of the time.
Voyager done 3 ly a day at i believe warp 8 or so, so room for maximum warp to go much faster, but not as fast as depicted, which is fine, suspension of disbelief is one of the hallmarks of the show. To me its something they know, and that I hope they don't trash to hard or often.
 
They've always played fast and loose with how fast warp is, however, in the "Big Picture" mountain view, its been a bit more stable. In Enterprise, Warp 5 is about 1 light year a day, which they relatively, more than any other show, abided by most of the time.
Voyager done 3 ly a day at i believe warp 8 or so, so room for maximum warp to go much faster, but not as fast as depicted, which is fine, suspension of disbelief is one of the hallmarks of the show. To me its something they know, and that I hope they don't trash to hard or often.

Yet in TMP Vulcan was 4 days away from Earth. Vulcan is 16ly from Earth so a speed of 4ly per day. Bit hard to do a direct compare as we don't know what speed the Enterprise would have been doing But as you say they've played fast and loose with just how fast each warp factor is.
 
And the Federation is 8000 ly across, low estimate. At Warp 6, you'd need 20 years to cross it. And at Warp 8, Voyager would have been in friendly space 4 years before reaching Earth.
 
And the Federation is 8000 ly across, low estimate.

Not according to the Star Charts maps, which have been more or less canonized by the onscreen graphics based on them in recent shows. Those make it only a few hundred light years across. Picard claimed in FC that the Federation was "spread across 8000 light years," but there's no way to parse that line that makes sense. Heck, the galactic disk is only a thousand or so light years thick. And a mere 150 member worlds within an 8000-ly diameter would be almost homeopathically sparse.
 
150 in a 1000Ly block would be sparse, with 10's of lightyears between habitable systems. At listed trek speeds, going from 1 end to another would take a Year.
So it seems to me there are either ALOT of empty star systems like red dwarfs (which are a shed load), alot of worlds that aren't up Technology wise, or not everybody in that expanse is a member... probably both.
So lets say: A world in "Federation Space" achieves warp, and has had first contact. The federation has already cleared out say a 10ly radius for them to explore and colonize.
But lets say, they don't want to join after some time in the big leagues, does the federation now try to get atleast a trade treaty with them?
just thoughts.
 
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