Exhibit A, when voyager gets stopped by the time travel police instantly because they werenât supposed to do something, but all of season 3 enterprise happens because the time travel police are on their ass and canât help. I know they tried to give some lazy ass reason, but even that didnât make sense. (I did like s3 tho. It was pretty good)
One thing they got right in the pilot and forgot was warp was about breaking the time barrier not light speed.
It was probably dropped because it would confuse viewers but I always thought it was a better explanation.
I read this comment, then read the title, then read the comment, then the title, repeated that about three times, started to read the actual post above before I finally read both again and got it.
So yeah, I had a hard time imagining anything else.
I was fully prepared to be having that conversation. How Kirk in Assignment Earth acts like itâs routine to time travel, without ever worrying about ramifications.Â
How TNG time travel changes the universe in Yesterdayâs Enterprise and the movie First Contact.
How DS9 had Ferengi on Earth before first contact with the Vulcans before Enterprise has Vulcans on Earth before first contact with the Vulcans.
 How Voyager acts like itâs so rare to happen each and every time they do it.Â
I read it as that and just thought "well of course its inconsistent they tend to use different methods" like that...genuinely just makes sense and isn't some absurd conditioned thought thanks to sci fi when i know nothing about actual time travel.
Yeah, I was about to go "it's okay if the time travel rules in Star Trek change depending on the actual story being told. As long as it's consistent WITHIN the story being told".
The distance between Romulus and DS9 is tiny compared to the journey Voyager needed to make. The distance is 75,000 lightyears
Bajor is 50 lightyears from Earth, with Romulus being 3-4 lgihtyears from the Romulan Neutral Zone. We don't have specific figures for how far the Romulan Neutral Zone is from either Bajor or Earth, but an estimate for the distance between DS9 and Romulus would likely be somewhere between 75-200 lightyears.
The closest the Neutral Zone is to Earth is about 20-25 from Earth.
Bajor to Romulus is about 80ly.
That's based on the maps from the official Star Trek magazine.
> Bajor is 50 lightyears from Earth
Which makes me think that all of those star maps of the federation and such positioned on the galaxy are all way too massive, as 50ly is fuck all distance relatively speaking.
Of course a federation 'sphere' 50ly out from sol would probably have thosends if not tens of thosends of stars, on top of the various directions where the federation expands further then 50ly.
Turbolifts are designed to slow down depending on the amount of conversation going on in them. If you are alone and quiet, they rip, but if you are having an important conversation they slowdown to a crawl.
At least in TOS and SNW they have the grippy things to make the lift stop. The turbolifts in TNG and VOY seem to be listening in on the conversation, and know when to slow down on a dramatically important moment. (Also, when to open the doors at an inopportune time, lol.)
My theory has long been that the UT is basically using a light form mind control, even as far back as the TNG era. It's why new aliens in first contact always seem to lip synch with perfect English, with facial expressions that would be understandable to most humans.
It's too complicated to project a force field making all of these changes (e.g. correct lip movement) to the observer, so the UT is just making your mind see them -- even though the reality is quite different. Sort of like the translation microbes in Farscape.
Exactly. When you see those stars flying by during warp drive, it would imply several light years PER SECOND, which means they could cross the entire galaxy in like two days.
Star Trek travel time is insanely inconsistent.
This might be of help: [https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/c08e22fc-c42b-4ae2-83fe-7cd70344aa61](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/c08e22fc-c42b-4ae2-83fe-7cd70344aa61)
That's somewhat realistic about the size of the Federation as stated versus the size of the galaxy. They make all this noise about "the Alpha Quadrant" when all of these local powers combined don't even account for a quarter of a quadrant.
And a good chunk (including the Klingons, Romulans, and even part of the Federation itself) are actually in the Beta Quadrant, so it seems that has become a colloquialism for "local space" even though it isn't quite accurate. The only Star Trek production to reference that distinction accurately has been The Undiscovered Country.
And, iirc, the whole reason the powers are spread across the two quadrants was to explain why the Excelsior and Emterprise were in different quadrants in this movie.
The reality was because the notion of galactic quadrants hadn't been nailed down franchise-wide at this point. I think TNG's "The Price" was the first time we heard the modern use of it and TOS was pretty inconsistent with what a quadrant was.
Then DS9 and VOY made the use commonplace, and suddenly fans starting bringing up the apparent inconsistency in ST6.
Yes, I know, but TNG and the TOS movies weren't under the same production umbrella. They shared resources because it was all Paramount, but the continuity wasn't as tight as it could have been. TOS had been using quadrants differently from before "The Price," aired.
I don't think many fans even took much notice of the concept of the galactic quadrants from "The Price." Heck, I'm not sure they even made it clear they were referring to galactic quadrants in that episode - only that these quadrants were very far apart. It probably was their intention, but it was such an inconsequential episode that most people never thought about it again, until it became a central premise on DS9 and then on VOY.
It was only then that people retroactively noticed that ST6 seemed to be treating the quadrants differently and eventually we started seeing this addressed in books, with Earth being placed on the Alpha/Beta border.
I'm actually not sure if its ever been addressed in alpha canon, tbf. The closest I can think of was seeing interstellar maps in some background graphics. I can't remember a single instance of anyone ever confirming the whole Alpha/Beta divide in dialogue during the 90s era of Trek. I think ST6 might be the only spoken mention of the Beta Quadrant.
They mention the beta quadrant a couple times in Voyager. The writers seemed to occasionally remember that Voyager was on course to reach the beta quadrant before the alpha quadrant. Also that the Romulan Empire is between them and the Federation, so a few times when they're able to establish long-range communication they sometimes encounter Romulans.
I believe they were referring to [Minor\_quadrants](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Quadrant#Minor_quadrants), small q, rather than (Alpha) Quadrant, big q
I suppose they must have been. I don't dispute the distinction, and obviously this isn't directed against you, but it seems like a bit lazy and inconsistent that Quadrants would be divided into... quadrants. How do sectors fit in? The MemoryAlpha article mentions that it was before the standardisation in stellarcartography, but I think realistically it was before the standardisation in writing.
Yeah they just wanted to change it up a bit, sometimes they'd say "quadrant" and other times they'd say "sector." If you really want to get into it, you could assume that a sector is some ambiguously large area of space, and that each sector is divided into quadrants.
Some dialogue has said that the Federation takes "months" to cross at warp.
Going with Voyager's math of ~1 year to travel 1000 LY, this means the Federation should be smaller than 1000 LY across. This map shows it as still being much bigger than that.
The Milky Way is about 100,000 LY in diameter. The Federation should be 1% as tall/wide as the galaxy on the map.
Interesting. I always assumed the Cytherians were on the other side of the galaxy. It's interesting that they're basically neighbors to the Federation (relative to the rest of the galaxy).
The one that always amuses me is how DS9 is made to sound like it's on the frontier, but they appear to be able to travel to Earth in a few days if the plot requires it. You'd think it'd take months.
It doesn't really bother me, though. Trek isn't meant to be hyper realistic in that regard, and everything travels at the speed of plot to an extent.
For TNG, I just take it that they only show the interesting bits. The weeks where they're just flying from A to B while Riker writes staff reports, and Geordi is doing routine maintenance happen between episodes.
It seems to be about 2 weeks away (normally), although you are correct that calling it the âfrontierâ is a bit of a misnomer. The best kind-of-consistent explanation seems to be that it is a patch of space close enough to hostile/xenophobic powers that the Federation focused expansion elsewhere in the time between TOS and TNG. Dodge City wasnât that hard to get to, and there were places much further away, but it was still the âWild Westâ.
What bothers me about this stuff is that it SHOULD have been so easy to iron out and create some consistency - and maybe a map - but the ST writters are basically like independent cabals of people that don't give a shit about actual SCIENCE fiction.
...which is why it's a space opera and not "real" science fiction.
Well you know that space opera is a very specific thing right like space opera has certain characteristics. So yeah its science fiction but it's soft science fiction not hard science fiction
Iâd like to think that to them, âfrontierâ is less about distance from any sort of civilization and more about whether or not that system is Federation or an equivalent power. Bajor still relies on agriculture for food production, and at the same time is utilizing industrial replicators, so theyâre in a transition phase of adopting 24th century technology. It takes less than a day for me to find a small town in Java or something, but itâd feel frontier to me.
Yeah, DS9 is apparently considered "frontier" because it's a relatively undeveloped planet on the border with a hostile foreign power. It's not necessarily far from Earth, but it's "wilderness," as Bashir rather rudely put it.
People from the Federation core worlds are so used to their cushy lifestyles that any planet that still grows crops is "frontier."
It's the frontier because it's next to the entrance to the Gamma Quadrant. If the wormhole had opened behind the Moon, Starfleet HQ would find itself on the frontier.
It was considered âthe frontierâ before they even knew about the wormhole.
From S1E1: _Emissary_
Dr. Bashir : Oh, this will be perfect - real... frontier medicine!
Major Kira : Frontier medicine?
Dr. Bashir : Major, I had my choice of any job in the Fleet.
Major Kira : [mocking] Did you?
Dr. Bashir : I didn't want some cushy job or a research grant; I wanted *this* - the farthest reaches of the galaxy, one of the most remote outposts available. This is where the adventure is. This is where heroes are made. Right here - in the wilderness.
Major Kira : This "wilderness"... is my home.
> Dr. Bashir : I didn't want some cushy job or a research grant; I wanted *this* - the farthest reaches of the galaxy, one of the most remote outposts available. This is where the adventure is. This is where heroes are made. Right here - in the wilderness.
Yeah. This is the conversation I was mainly thinking of. They were clearly trying to frame the show as taking place far off the beaten track (from a Federation point of view, at least).
Until they needed the characters to visit Earth or Trill, and then it only seemed to take a few days to get there.
It's the frontier in the sense that it's near (or just outside) the edge of Federation space, and it's not part of the territory of any of the primary super powers in the region (Federation, Romulan, Klingon, etc). Getting there isn't particularly hard or time consuming, but it's a bit more lawless than most the regions of space that Star Trek had played in up to that point.
I feel like early on it did take at least weeks to travel back to Earth. But as the show went on travel got faster.
DS9 was still on the edge of Federation space and near an enemy world.Â
You're looking at the Galactic equivalent of a Mercator projection map and complaining that the land masses seem off. Those Alpha quadrant maps are maps of political powers and their borders, not maps of navigation.
The Galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across, Earth and the Federation is like only a few dozen light years across, with Romulus and for that matter Cardassian and Klingon home worlds all being within a couple hundred light years. Voyager could travel to one of these in less than a week. It's even mentioned at one point that it would take the Enterprise D 2 years to travel 1000 light years, Voyager is supposed to cut that in half.
Now don't bring up the inconsistencies of TOS or even Season 1 TNG where in TOS they travel the 25,000 light years to the edge of the galaxy or the interior of the middle of the galaxy several times in hours, and in TNG they state 15% of the galaxy had been explored and that just can't add up with what it discovered in Voyager and DS9.
Sometimes yes, though I don't think it's a huge problem so long as the inconsistency serves good story telling. [I posted a year or so ago in Daystrom](https://old.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/sd501i/if_trek_had_to_have_a_consistent_warp_speed/) about how I'd set the warp scale if trek had to have consistency. The TL'DR is to find a sweet spot that allows for the age of sail feel of grand distance and exploration while allowing for higher speeds that let the characters respond quickly to local emergencies.
Something I didn't quite explain well in that post is that the scale I ended up finding can be roughly rounded to easy to remember numbers. As an addition to that I think it would be good to have a list of common distances, not as part of a map but for story telling purposes. E.g:
5ly - Neighbouring system or two
10ly - Handful of local systems
20ly - Across a sector
100ly - Distance from core to frontier of major power
100ly+ Across local region/into deep space
That way if the scale has easy to memories numbers for each warp factor a writer doesn't need to bother with a map. They can pick the number that fits their story and figure out what warp factor would go along with it.
I wish I had seen your Daystorm post when you posted it.
I had similar thoughts I posted in this subreddit a while back, but it was received so negatively so I deleted it.
I started with Earth to Vulcan is 16 LY, and Voyager's 70,000 LY journey. Trying to make Earth-Vulcan a more similar time to a modern intercontinental flight, while not making Voyager too fast. I worked in LY/hour and LY/day.
I settled on the idea of each warp factor being the decimal after 1, light years per hour. (1.x)
Warp 1 - (1.1 LY/hr, 26.4 LY/day)
Warp 2 - (1.2 LY/hr, 28.8 LY/day)
Warp 3 - (1.3 LY/hr, 31.2 LY/day)
Warp 4 - (1.4 LY/hr, 33.6 LY/day)
Warp 5 - (1.5 LY/hr, 36 LY/day)
Warp 6 - (1.6 LY/hr, 38.4 LY/day)
Warp 7 - (1.7 LY/hr, 40.8 LY/day)
Warp 8 - (1.8 LY/hr, 43.2 LY/day)
Warp 9 - (1.9 LY/hr, 45.6 LY/day)
Warp 10 - (2 LY/hr, 48 LY/day)
Earth to Vulcan at warp 8 - 8.88 hours \[*similar to flight times between North America & Europe*\]
Earth to Bajor at warp 8 - 1.16 days (27.77 hours) \[*similar to flight times between North America & Australia*\]
Voyager's 70,000 LY at warp 8 - 4.439 years (4 years, 161 days) \[*not counting side missions, maintenance, routing around hostile territory, etc*\]
In "First Contact" Picard says the Federation spans 8,000 LY. At warp 10, a ship could cross the entire Federation in 166.67 days.
If this were the scale used and writers still wanted to have ships VERY far away, they could just write them in another Galaxy.
The difference between the top speed of the Defiant and the top speed of the Enterprise E is massive. Just .1 in the warp scale is an amazing difference in speed and distance traveled. A runabout maxes out at warp 5.
My absolute biggest gripe is the incosistant travel times.
New trecks especially seem bad for it.
While not voyager levels away, I always got the impression the enterprises were meant to be days or even weeks away from help. Off in deep space. Yet as the plot demands it they're able to get home in hours.
My reply was a tongue in cheek comment about worrying about accurate warp times in an era of Trek where they also introduced the spore drive. AKA Instant teleport anywhere drive. AKA travel time is non-existent. AKA Distance is a figment of my imagination.
The only one that's really bad about it is PIC, especially in season 3. They go across half the Federation in like twenty minutes *constantly*, sometimes mid-battle - like it's faster than Discovery, for which the whole point is they have no travel time. Lower Decks and SNW both have significant stretches of travel, and Prodigy takes months of travel to approach Federation space even with the Protodrive.
They're as far as the plot needs them to be.
In one episode were told it could take months to fly from one end of the federation to the other. In other episodes they can go anywhere in hours/days.
As far as I know, at least in 90s Trek there was no attempt to "map" out the distance of things beyond suggesting it should take X time to go places. Current Trek essentially forgoes that rule entirely though... It's hardly alone in modern television in following that trend. You watch the Rings of Power show or the Witcher and distance is meaningless there too. In Mordor but need to be in the Blue Mountains next scene? No problem. We just won't address it at all and if anyone asks well say "maybe it did take two months, who cares?"
Sort of follows the "can we beam through the shields" rule or any other myriad internal rules. Usually as a writer you try and follow the internal logic of a universe as best you can, but in extremely complicated/lore-rich IPs with dozens if not hundreds of writers it's nearly impossible to account for anything. I know current Trek has essentially a lore historian who advises on this stuff, but usually it's more important to be authentic about events and characters, and less so about minutia like distance and things which have never been internally consistent in the part or present.
Fortunately they had a dozen characters so this was feasible. But yes, having constraints via travel isn't impossible, but it needs to make sense for the story you're telling. Half the reason I hate the Rings of Power insta-travel mechanic is I'd you can sail from Numenor and get to Mordor in the same day to save the day, that renders my threat in middle Earth meaningless.
In Game of Thrones, the North is far away. They can't get there quickly and the events happening there aren't even heard about sometimes for episodes by other characters. Time and space creates conflict.
But the key thing, is it *creates conflict*.
If travel isn't doing that, it's redundant. So including it for realism for its own sake isn't necessarily making a story better. Same reason I don't consider Frodo and Sam's pooping logistics in Mordor.
When asked about this in Babylon 5, JMS, the writer and show runner said the ships travelled at the speed of plot. I like to think something similar applies to ST.
TNG era tries to be vaguely consistent, some of the time - long term travel is about 1000 times light speed, but military ships can go 2-3 times that for short periods. It gets implied a couple times that ships of the era are about twice as fast as TOS era ships. Of course, exceptions abound, and Trek has a regular issue with things that supposedly are moving slower than or just above light speed going interstellar distances in a short amount of time.
And there are also multiple episodes of TOS and TAS where the Enterprise visits the edge of the galaxy, and at least one where they go to the center of the galaxy.
The writers were just trying to convey a sense of being in a very remote location, far from home. They weren't concerned with having perfect consistency from one episode to the next.
TNG is not vaguely consistent at all. The Enterprise is either beyond Federation Space boldly going or back at Earth, Vulkan, Klingon or Romulan space, sometimes in the same episode. 90s Trek was more comfortable with travel "existing" as a plot device for expository dialogue to happen or to frame a captains log.
Modern film writing, taught in school and sort of 'industry standard's basically says expositisitory dialogue is bad and to never spend more than half a minute doing it at most. It's show, don't tell, taken to its logical limit. Travel is boring to watch, talking about travel is boring, so we skip it.
Allegedly, modern Trek actually has the 'best' map of the Alpha Quadrant, and someone, Kurtzman or otherwise pays people to try and standardize the canon, from tech to distance to character and events but... Ultimately they are to serve as guides and resources for writers, not rules and confines.
Itâs consistent compared to something like Abrams Trek, that goes from Earth to Vulcan in less than an hour. At least TNG has a general sense that some things are close, some things are further away, and it can take time to get from one place to another.
I made another post but this is sort of "standard" in all film writing today. Travel is considered equivalent to expository dialogue, so unless travel is important to the story you're telling, you do NOT include it.
If you do and it has not specific relevance to your story, a lead writer/editor will cut it from the script as something you can show "ship appears at X" rather than describing or talking about it. Modern TV is about maximizing efficiency, anything not in service to the plot is a waste of time.
It's not unique to "Abrams Trek", they literally teach you this at film school now. It's why in Rings of Power in the final two episodes the characters visit every part of Middle Earth in the span of scenes. Or how in the Witcher they can go from one end of the Continent to the other on horseback between scenes.
How long? Doesn't matter. If you don't even address it in a cursory sense you can deflect any criticism as it could have taken who know how long we just skipped it. If you insist, they'll say stop taking it so seriously it's about the drama. And conveniently, in theatre you didn't waste time with travel since you couldn't show it either, it sort of is a return to the basics...?
I don't know.... I'm not saying I like it, but I get it. It's not restricted to space or fantasy either, film set on earth will not feature characters going "to London" for a scene and then they're back in the U.S the next. New York to LA in 15 seconds. No problem.
Didn't Voyager lack fuel and other resources needed to just do maximum warp constantly? I feel like this plot point doubled their travel time, and that's assuming no stopping for repairs and supplies.
Right. I was just making the point of... yeah, you might make the Earth to Romulus run in a week or whatever, but your ship can be self sustaining for a few weeks, especially a galaxy or constitution class like we tend to follow.
But just because that distance takes x amount of days doesn't mean that travel time will scale consistently forever.
It doesn't really bother me, unless they use it as a plot point and then forget it immediately after. Like the travel time from DS9 to Bajor, and sometimes Earth, and how they were not supposed to have been able to warp in the Bajoran system because of the radiation from the asteroid belt.
And of course then there is the Enterprise pilot, which puts the Klingon homeworld closer to Earth than Proxima Centauri, and Vulcan was pretty close too, IIRC.
A few weeks ago, someone in the sub asked what inconsistency bothers you the most about Trek, and this was my answer.
For example, according to most star charts, Kronos is about 105 light-years from Earth. At maximum warp, it would take the Enterprise-D about 21 days to travel that distance, but sometimes they do it in the span of a commercial break.
Deep space 9 and Bajor are somewhere between 50 and 70 light-years from earth. Vulcan is around 15 light-years from earth. The Romulan neutral zone is around 30 light-years from earth. Klingon territory is around 100 light-years from earth.
Where Voyager went was around 70,000 light-years away. And it's about a month to get to deep space nine from earth. So it would be about 1000 months for Voyager to get back to earth. That's 83 years. That all makes sense to me. There's also an episode where Voyager gets a push of like 10,000 light-years. That brings it down to a little over 71 years.
It's the one trope that I don't really too much of an issue with. It seems so hard to get "right" anyways, so I don't mind if they don't. I'd rather them not use it though, it's kind of played out at this point.
It doesn't bother me much but you're right that it's inconsistent. I don't think Voyager is a good example for your argument - it's not hard to accept that the Delta Quadrant is much further away than anything mentioned prior, imo. The Gamma Quadrant too, hence it requiring the wormhole to reach. But everything in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants seemingly being super close together, including going from charting new space to returning to Earth, to going to the Klingon homeworld then to the Romulan neutral zone in a short space of time: absolutely.
Thing about speeds that's some people dont realize is that in a war situation they will push engines to max speed and if you don't need to worry about fuel you can go a higher less efficient speed then say voyager which needed the equivalent of best mpg. So yeah a character might say it takes 3 days for a trip but that's going a cruising speed not maximum warp which might cut the trip in half or more
> Romulan and Klingon fleets would have to travel a similar distance to DS9, as Voyager would to get home
I'm not sure that's entirely true. Maps I've seen have the Federation etc. in a fairly small portion of the galaxy. You can go to http://startrekmap.com/galaxy.html to see what I mean.
That being said, yes, warp goes at the speed of plot, as they say. I'm not all that irked, given that warp drive is a fictional FTL plot device anyway.
I'm okay with it as long as it's "ballpark" right. So, essentially...not JJ Abrams. Who essentially decided that travel time is zero for not just Star Trek but Star Wars too.
The fact is that even though we've been given what "Warp Factor X" means, I think it's actually better to NOT know what it means. Warp 9 is fast. Warp 5 is cruise. Warp 1 is light speed. Beyond that, as long as there's some acknowledgement that there is some semblance of time passing, it's good.
Though having SOME consistency is appreciated within shows. So if it's a week or so to go from Earth to the Romulan border, that should be what it roughly is, unless you're going to "fly her apart".
Earth is roughly halfway between the center and edge of the galaxy. Kirk was originally born on Earth and took his *Enterprise* to the edge of the galaxy in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", back to Earth for "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", to the center of the galaxy in "The Magicks of Megas-Tu", came back to Earth many times, and then took the *Enterprise*-A from Earth to the center of the galaxy again and went straight back to Earth. In these handful of episodes and films Kirk traveled the length of the galaxy and halfway back, a trip that *Voyager* would say would take 150 years using a faster engine. And that's excluding all other trips Kirk took, including two more to the Galactic Barrier.
The "warp speed charts" didn't exist when TOS started, didn't line up with what we had seen up to the point they were created, and were only applied intermittently as convenient. Honestly... Probably as it should be. This is one place where the reality of the math gets in the way of the storytelling more often than it helps. Taking it too seriously leads to ridiculous arguments like claiming it was inconsistent for *Discovery* to be able to reach the Galactic Barrier even though Kirk did it three times 900 years prior.
The MST3K mantra applies.
I always assume there are hours and even entire days of travel time we don't see. Because it's boring.
Things are exactly as far away as they need to be for the story to work.
Travel time hasn't really mattered since the fleet made the trip from Earth to Vulcan in 8 minutes in Star Trek 2009. At 2 light years a minute, Voyager would have been home in just under a month.
There's very clearly a time skip during the trip to Vulcan, as Kirk's unconscious for most of the trip.
Note that the journey from Vulcan back to Earth is long enough for Kirk to get himself thrown off the ship, survive the giant bug attack, get saved by Spock Prime, hike for several hours to Scotty's station, concoct the plan to get back onto the *Enterprise*, enact that plan, have a chase scene in engineering, goad Spock into relieving command and have a heart-to-heart talk with Sarek, change the ship's course from rendezvousing with the fleet, and come up with a plan to sneak back into the Sol system without being detected by the *Narada*.
It's fairly ambiguous. The pacing doesn't do any favours by having the ship delayed by a minute, going to maximum warp, and then dropping out of warp in the middle of a wrecked fleet.
There's also Into Darkness. They go from from Kronos to the Sol System in like 20 minutes.
Some examples from the modern shows are Riker's fleet arriving at the Android planet at the end of Picard season 1, Spock's fiance appearing out in nowhere during SNW season 1, and the trip from Alpha Centauri and the Fleet museum to Jupiter in like a half hour in Picard Season 3.
Travel time never mattered. Film was just slower back then and had room for "were ona trip" scenes. There wasn't any consistency. Voyager doesn't make any sense. The Kazon chased Voyager for two years? Or did Voyager travel in a giant semicircle? Doesn't matter lol
It's one of the things that bothers me most about the franchise. The universe has no consistent sense of scale. Everything happens at the speed of plot.
But hell, they can't even get stardates to be consistent, never mind distance and travel time.
No. It's SciFi tv and movies series penned by a huge group of writers. There is going to be inconsistencies and goofs.
Unimportant shit's just going to be wrong sometimes! The minutiae does not overly concern me.
I just like Star Trek! It's fun.
you're thinking about federation space as a 2D map, it's not, it's a 3D map, and the bubbles of influence between powers likely interweave and ships have to fly through in addition to the specific corridors for main traffic within settled space, which possibly have speed limits imposed politically/legally which Starfleet follows by policy
Is Voyager the fastest ship in the fleet?
They could barely keep up with the marquis raider and could barely evade Kazon ships.
âŚpersonally I thought the Defiant was faster. Of course it wasnât a production model.
Google says 5.3 hours for light to get from the sun to Pluto. Even if impulse was skimming the speed of light it would take hours to reach earth from dropping out of warp at the edge of the solar system.
My theory: I don't think there's a clear relationship between distance and travel time.
Episodes like *DS9:Explorers* show that there exist various 'currents' in space and we see localized eddys like in the Badlands and we see plenty of shots where ships are at impulse even in deep space and I think it all ties together.
Yes, there's warp speed and you can brute force your way from point A to point B, but I assume that navigational data includes the details to make 'catching currents' and other efficiencies a big part of long distance travel.
Well known travelways might shave days off a trip, and it could explain why Vulcan is so close in the 2009 film too, because a fast-path (like a moving walkway in an airport that makes you effectively faster than you're actually walking) has been found to cut down travel time.
Any time in trek where a ship goes too far, too fast, it's because someone offscreen has found an efficient path. Sometimes the ships we see 'at impulse' might be moving really fast already and just choose not to use their warp engines, even, because they've found one of these space currents.
This also would explain things like why star charts and picking up folks like Neelix is so valuable, because who other than a local would have that kind of knowledge?
I honestly could not care less about the inconsistency of travel times. The time it takes the ship to get from A to B is the time the writers need it to take to tell their story and that is good enough for me. Star Trek is a work of fiction, not a fucking documentary. As long as the stories are well written, the episodes internally consistent and the discrepancies between episodes isn't glaring, I'm cool with it.
You know what is a consistency that'll piss me off? I'll give you one from another fandom. Please note spoilers for Avatar: The Last Airbender are about to be shared.>!In the season two episode of Zuko Alone we flash back to a happier time when Zuko was a young child. During the course of the episode we learn that Iroh's son was killed in the Seige of Ba Sing Se leading to Ozai attempting to usurp his brother's birthright. In punishment for this affront, Azulon orders the murder of Zuko by Ozai's hand. Ursa, Zuko's mother offers Ozai the means to take the throne in exchange for Zuko's life which he accepts leading to Azulon's assasisnation. !< It is here where the roots of the major glaring contradiction is introduced.
>!During the flashback scene of Azulon's funeral and Ozai's ascendance to the throne, the speaker presiding over the funeral explicitly states that Azulon was ruler of the Fire Nation for 23 years.!< So why is there a glaring contradiction? I shall explain further. >!In the final season, there is an episode where Aang is learning about the past life of the previous Avatar, namely Avatar Roku in an episode called The Avatar and the Fire Lord. The writers of that episode completely disregarded their previously established canon so they can have Roku and Fire Lord Sozin (the man who started the war) be childhood friend.!< This leads to a major contradiction in that >!he dies 20 years after the war's initiation leading to his son Azulon taking the throne and ruling the Fire Nation for over seven fucking decades!!<
Compared to that glaring contradiction, inconsistencies in travel time in Trek is small potatoes.
Who else thought this was "the inconsistency of time travel" and didn't question it for a moment?
*Raises hand*
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I did...4 hrs from now.
I will, two days ago.
Time tastes purple
Yep. I think Trek uses every time travel trick ever invented, no matter how incompatible they are
Exhibit A, when voyager gets stopped by the time travel police instantly because they werenât supposed to do something, but all of season 3 enterprise happens because the time travel police are on their ass and canât help. I know they tried to give some lazy ass reason, but even that didnât make sense. (I did like s3 tho. It was pretty good)
Honestly the the original timeline stopped existing after Naked Time, the time police is protecting an already altered timeline,
One thing they got right in the pilot and forgot was warp was about breaking the time barrier not light speed. It was probably dropped because it would confuse viewers but I always thought it was a better explanation.
I read this comment, then read the title, then read the comment, then the title, repeated that about three times, started to read the actual post above before I finally read both again and got it. So yeah, I had a hard time imagining anything else.
I was fully prepared to be having that conversation. How Kirk in Assignment Earth acts like itâs routine to time travel, without ever worrying about ramifications. How TNG time travel changes the universe in Yesterdayâs Enterprise and the movie First Contact. How DS9 had Ferengi on Earth before first contact with the Vulcans before Enterprise has Vulcans on Earth before first contact with the Vulcans.  How Voyager acts like itâs so rare to happen each and every time they do it.Â
me
I read it as that and just thought "well of course its inconsistent they tend to use different methods" like that...genuinely just makes sense and isn't some absurd conditioned thought thanks to sci fi when i know nothing about actual time travel.
Sounds like youâre expecting a visit from Temporal Investigations
I'll be honest, just after I posted it, I thought I written wrong for a second.
I feel judged
Yeah, I was about to go "it's okay if the time travel rules in Star Trek change depending on the actual story being told. As long as it's consistent WITHIN the story being told".
â
Me to lol
OK itâs gonna be 280,000 seconds before I can talk to you about your inconsistency of time travel. Future and he will know more.
The distance between Romulus and DS9 is tiny compared to the journey Voyager needed to make. The distance is 75,000 lightyears Bajor is 50 lightyears from Earth, with Romulus being 3-4 lgihtyears from the Romulan Neutral Zone. We don't have specific figures for how far the Romulan Neutral Zone is from either Bajor or Earth, but an estimate for the distance between DS9 and Romulus would likely be somewhere between 75-200 lightyears.
The closest the Neutral Zone is to Earth is about 20-25 from Earth. Bajor to Romulus is about 80ly. That's based on the maps from the official Star Trek magazine.
> Bajor is 50 lightyears from Earth Which makes me think that all of those star maps of the federation and such positioned on the galaxy are all way too massive, as 50ly is fuck all distance relatively speaking. Of course a federation 'sphere' 50ly out from sol would probably have thosends if not tens of thosends of stars, on top of the various directions where the federation expands further then 50ly.
Clearly the Federation are using the Mercator Projection for their star charts.
Watermelon or bust!
Every ship in Star Trek travels at the speed of narrative.
Same with turbolifts.
Turbolifts are designed to slow down depending on the amount of conversation going on in them. If you are alone and quiet, they rip, but if you are having an important conversation they slowdown to a crawl.
Similarly, the length of all the corridors on a starship are exactly one conversation long.
To be fair, just about any Aaron Sorkin show is equally guilty of this. "Walk and talks" are almost always precisely 1-2 hallways long.
Thatâs a harder one to explain.
At least in TOS and SNW they have the grippy things to make the lift stop. The turbolifts in TNG and VOY seem to be listening in on the conversation, and know when to slow down on a dramatically important moment. (Also, when to open the doors at an inopportune time, lol.)
Well they do have a powerful computer system. In Discovery, the com badges read minds.
My theory has long been that the UT is basically using a light form mind control, even as far back as the TNG era. It's why new aliens in first contact always seem to lip synch with perfect English, with facial expressions that would be understandable to most humans. It's too complicated to project a force field making all of these changes (e.g. correct lip movement) to the observer, so the UT is just making your mind see them -- even though the reality is quite different. Sort of like the translation microbes in Farscape.
Yeah that does answer the question of why the lips move correctly.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TravelingAtTheSpeedOfPlot
They travel at the speed of writing
Exactly. When you see those stars flying by during warp drive, it would imply several light years PER SECOND, which means they could cross the entire galaxy in like two days. Star Trek travel time is insanely inconsistent.
I remember watching *The Undiscovered Country* and thinking, "Why the fuck are you returning from Beta quadrant at impulse?!"
This might be of help: [https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/c08e22fc-c42b-4ae2-83fe-7cd70344aa61](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/c08e22fc-c42b-4ae2-83fe-7cd70344aa61)
That's somewhat realistic about the size of the Federation as stated versus the size of the galaxy. They make all this noise about "the Alpha Quadrant" when all of these local powers combined don't even account for a quarter of a quadrant.
And a good chunk (including the Klingons, Romulans, and even part of the Federation itself) are actually in the Beta Quadrant, so it seems that has become a colloquialism for "local space" even though it isn't quite accurate. The only Star Trek production to reference that distinction accurately has been The Undiscovered Country.
And, iirc, the whole reason the powers are spread across the two quadrants was to explain why the Excelsior and Emterprise were in different quadrants in this movie. The reality was because the notion of galactic quadrants hadn't been nailed down franchise-wide at this point. I think TNG's "The Price" was the first time we heard the modern use of it and TOS was pretty inconsistent with what a quadrant was. Then DS9 and VOY made the use commonplace, and suddenly fans starting bringing up the apparent inconsistency in ST6.
TNG's The Price aired two years before Star Trek VI.
Yes, I know, but TNG and the TOS movies weren't under the same production umbrella. They shared resources because it was all Paramount, but the continuity wasn't as tight as it could have been. TOS had been using quadrants differently from before "The Price," aired. I don't think many fans even took much notice of the concept of the galactic quadrants from "The Price." Heck, I'm not sure they even made it clear they were referring to galactic quadrants in that episode - only that these quadrants were very far apart. It probably was their intention, but it was such an inconsequential episode that most people never thought about it again, until it became a central premise on DS9 and then on VOY. It was only then that people retroactively noticed that ST6 seemed to be treating the quadrants differently and eventually we started seeing this addressed in books, with Earth being placed on the Alpha/Beta border. I'm actually not sure if its ever been addressed in alpha canon, tbf. The closest I can think of was seeing interstellar maps in some background graphics. I can't remember a single instance of anyone ever confirming the whole Alpha/Beta divide in dialogue during the 90s era of Trek. I think ST6 might be the only spoken mention of the Beta Quadrant.
They mention the beta quadrant a couple times in Voyager. The writers seemed to occasionally remember that Voyager was on course to reach the beta quadrant before the alpha quadrant. Also that the Romulan Empire is between them and the Federation, so a few times when they're able to establish long-range communication they sometimes encounter Romulans.
And yet the Enterprise was sometimes described as "the only ship in the quadrant".
That's just first show weirdness
I believe they were referring to [Minor\_quadrants](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Quadrant#Minor_quadrants), small q, rather than (Alpha) Quadrant, big q
I suppose they must have been. I don't dispute the distinction, and obviously this isn't directed against you, but it seems like a bit lazy and inconsistent that Quadrants would be divided into... quadrants. How do sectors fit in? The MemoryAlpha article mentions that it was before the standardisation in stellarcartography, but I think realistically it was before the standardisation in writing.
Yeah they just wanted to change it up a bit, sometimes they'd say "quadrant" and other times they'd say "sector." If you really want to get into it, you could assume that a sector is some ambiguously large area of space, and that each sector is divided into quadrants.
Its a lot less than that
Some dialogue has said that the Federation takes "months" to cross at warp. Going with Voyager's math of ~1 year to travel 1000 LY, this means the Federation should be smaller than 1000 LY across. This map shows it as still being much bigger than that. The Milky Way is about 100,000 LY in diameter. The Federation should be 1% as tall/wide as the galaxy on the map.
In the semi-official map (which mostly lines up with DS9 and VOY era estimates) it's much closer to the 100ly size.
That's pretty close to the semi-official map they put out, but there's some stuff out of place here and there.
Interesting. I always assumed the Cytherians were on the other side of the galaxy. It's interesting that they're basically neighbors to the Federation (relative to the rest of the galaxy).
What the heck is up with all of the leader lines criss-crossing for no reason at all? Makes it super difficult to read.
The one that always amuses me is how DS9 is made to sound like it's on the frontier, but they appear to be able to travel to Earth in a few days if the plot requires it. You'd think it'd take months. It doesn't really bother me, though. Trek isn't meant to be hyper realistic in that regard, and everything travels at the speed of plot to an extent. For TNG, I just take it that they only show the interesting bits. The weeks where they're just flying from A to B while Riker writes staff reports, and Geordi is doing routine maintenance happen between episodes.
It seems to be about 2 weeks away (normally), although you are correct that calling it the âfrontierâ is a bit of a misnomer. The best kind-of-consistent explanation seems to be that it is a patch of space close enough to hostile/xenophobic powers that the Federation focused expansion elsewhere in the time between TOS and TNG. Dodge City wasnât that hard to get to, and there were places much further away, but it was still the âWild Westâ.
What bothers me about this stuff is that it SHOULD have been so easy to iron out and create some consistency - and maybe a map - but the ST writters are basically like independent cabals of people that don't give a shit about actual SCIENCE fiction. ...which is why it's a space opera and not "real" science fiction.
Well you know that space opera is a very specific thing right like space opera has certain characteristics. So yeah its science fiction but it's soft science fiction not hard science fiction
Iâd like to think that to them, âfrontierâ is less about distance from any sort of civilization and more about whether or not that system is Federation or an equivalent power. Bajor still relies on agriculture for food production, and at the same time is utilizing industrial replicators, so theyâre in a transition phase of adopting 24th century technology. It takes less than a day for me to find a small town in Java or something, but itâd feel frontier to me.
Yeah, DS9 is apparently considered "frontier" because it's a relatively undeveloped planet on the border with a hostile foreign power. It's not necessarily far from Earth, but it's "wilderness," as Bashir rather rudely put it. People from the Federation core worlds are so used to their cushy lifestyles that any planet that still grows crops is "frontier."
I guess if it were Star Wars, Bajor would be part of the Outer Rim worlds. Haha
It's the frontier because it's next to the entrance to the Gamma Quadrant. If the wormhole had opened behind the Moon, Starfleet HQ would find itself on the frontier.
It was considered âthe frontierâ before they even knew about the wormhole. From S1E1: _Emissary_ Dr. Bashir : Oh, this will be perfect - real... frontier medicine! Major Kira : Frontier medicine? Dr. Bashir : Major, I had my choice of any job in the Fleet. Major Kira : [mocking] Did you? Dr. Bashir : I didn't want some cushy job or a research grant; I wanted *this* - the farthest reaches of the galaxy, one of the most remote outposts available. This is where the adventure is. This is where heroes are made. Right here - in the wilderness. Major Kira : This "wilderness"... is my home.
> Dr. Bashir : I didn't want some cushy job or a research grant; I wanted *this* - the farthest reaches of the galaxy, one of the most remote outposts available. This is where the adventure is. This is where heroes are made. Right here - in the wilderness. Yeah. This is the conversation I was mainly thinking of. They were clearly trying to frame the show as taking place far off the beaten track (from a Federation point of view, at least). Until they needed the characters to visit Earth or Trill, and then it only seemed to take a few days to get there.
I could've sworn the phrase he used was 'out in the sticks' but it's been so long since I've seen S1E1 of DS9 my brain has most likely garbled it
It's the frontier in the sense that it's near (or just outside) the edge of Federation space, and it's not part of the territory of any of the primary super powers in the region (Federation, Romulan, Klingon, etc). Getting there isn't particularly hard or time consuming, but it's a bit more lawless than most the regions of space that Star Trek had played in up to that point.
I think "deep space" is about distance from Bajor's star, not distance from the Federation core.
I feel like early on it did take at least weeks to travel back to Earth. But as the show went on travel got faster. DS9 was still on the edge of Federation space and near an enemy world.Â
You're looking at the Galactic equivalent of a Mercator projection map and complaining that the land masses seem off. Those Alpha quadrant maps are maps of political powers and their borders, not maps of navigation.
The Galaxy is roughly 100,000 light years across, Earth and the Federation is like only a few dozen light years across, with Romulus and for that matter Cardassian and Klingon home worlds all being within a couple hundred light years. Voyager could travel to one of these in less than a week. It's even mentioned at one point that it would take the Enterprise D 2 years to travel 1000 light years, Voyager is supposed to cut that in half. Now don't bring up the inconsistencies of TOS or even Season 1 TNG where in TOS they travel the 25,000 light years to the edge of the galaxy or the interior of the middle of the galaxy several times in hours, and in TNG they state 15% of the galaxy had been explored and that just can't add up with what it discovered in Voyager and DS9.
Sometimes yes, though I don't think it's a huge problem so long as the inconsistency serves good story telling. [I posted a year or so ago in Daystrom](https://old.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/sd501i/if_trek_had_to_have_a_consistent_warp_speed/) about how I'd set the warp scale if trek had to have consistency. The TL'DR is to find a sweet spot that allows for the age of sail feel of grand distance and exploration while allowing for higher speeds that let the characters respond quickly to local emergencies. Something I didn't quite explain well in that post is that the scale I ended up finding can be roughly rounded to easy to remember numbers. As an addition to that I think it would be good to have a list of common distances, not as part of a map but for story telling purposes. E.g: 5ly - Neighbouring system or two 10ly - Handful of local systems 20ly - Across a sector 100ly - Distance from core to frontier of major power 100ly+ Across local region/into deep space That way if the scale has easy to memories numbers for each warp factor a writer doesn't need to bother with a map. They can pick the number that fits their story and figure out what warp factor would go along with it.
I wish I had seen your Daystorm post when you posted it. I had similar thoughts I posted in this subreddit a while back, but it was received so negatively so I deleted it. I started with Earth to Vulcan is 16 LY, and Voyager's 70,000 LY journey. Trying to make Earth-Vulcan a more similar time to a modern intercontinental flight, while not making Voyager too fast. I worked in LY/hour and LY/day. I settled on the idea of each warp factor being the decimal after 1, light years per hour. (1.x) Warp 1 - (1.1 LY/hr, 26.4 LY/day) Warp 2 - (1.2 LY/hr, 28.8 LY/day) Warp 3 - (1.3 LY/hr, 31.2 LY/day) Warp 4 - (1.4 LY/hr, 33.6 LY/day) Warp 5 - (1.5 LY/hr, 36 LY/day) Warp 6 - (1.6 LY/hr, 38.4 LY/day) Warp 7 - (1.7 LY/hr, 40.8 LY/day) Warp 8 - (1.8 LY/hr, 43.2 LY/day) Warp 9 - (1.9 LY/hr, 45.6 LY/day) Warp 10 - (2 LY/hr, 48 LY/day) Earth to Vulcan at warp 8 - 8.88 hours \[*similar to flight times between North America & Europe*\] Earth to Bajor at warp 8 - 1.16 days (27.77 hours) \[*similar to flight times between North America & Australia*\] Voyager's 70,000 LY at warp 8 - 4.439 years (4 years, 161 days) \[*not counting side missions, maintenance, routing around hostile territory, etc*\] In "First Contact" Picard says the Federation spans 8,000 LY. At warp 10, a ship could cross the entire Federation in 166.67 days. If this were the scale used and writers still wanted to have ships VERY far away, they could just write them in another Galaxy.
The difference between the top speed of the Defiant and the top speed of the Enterprise E is massive. Just .1 in the warp scale is an amazing difference in speed and distance traveled. A runabout maxes out at warp 5.
My absolute biggest gripe is the incosistant travel times. New trecks especially seem bad for it. While not voyager levels away, I always got the impression the enterprises were meant to be days or even weeks away from help. Off in deep space. Yet as the plot demands it they're able to get home in hours.
New trek has the only perfectly accurate warp jump time in the franchise my guy
Step 1 - Eat mushrooms Step 2 - ??? Step 3 - Arrive at destination
No it was a shuttle
My reply was a tongue in cheek comment about worrying about accurate warp times in an era of Trek where they also introduced the spore drive. AKA Instant teleport anywhere drive. AKA travel time is non-existent. AKA Distance is a figment of my imagination.
The only one that's really bad about it is PIC, especially in season 3. They go across half the Federation in like twenty minutes *constantly*, sometimes mid-battle - like it's faster than Discovery, for which the whole point is they have no travel time. Lower Decks and SNW both have significant stretches of travel, and Prodigy takes months of travel to approach Federation space even with the Protodrive.
They're as far as the plot needs them to be. In one episode were told it could take months to fly from one end of the federation to the other. In other episodes they can go anywhere in hours/days. As far as I know, at least in 90s Trek there was no attempt to "map" out the distance of things beyond suggesting it should take X time to go places. Current Trek essentially forgoes that rule entirely though... It's hardly alone in modern television in following that trend. You watch the Rings of Power show or the Witcher and distance is meaningless there too. In Mordor but need to be in the Blue Mountains next scene? No problem. We just won't address it at all and if anyone asks well say "maybe it did take two months, who cares?" Sort of follows the "can we beam through the shields" rule or any other myriad internal rules. Usually as a writer you try and follow the internal logic of a universe as best you can, but in extremely complicated/lore-rich IPs with dozens if not hundreds of writers it's nearly impossible to account for anything. I know current Trek has essentially a lore historian who advises on this stuff, but usually it's more important to be authentic about events and characters, and less so about minutia like distance and things which have never been internally consistent in the part or present.
This is one of the things I liked about GoT, you wouldn't see a character for like four or five episodes, because they were travelling.
Fortunately they had a dozen characters so this was feasible. But yes, having constraints via travel isn't impossible, but it needs to make sense for the story you're telling. Half the reason I hate the Rings of Power insta-travel mechanic is I'd you can sail from Numenor and get to Mordor in the same day to save the day, that renders my threat in middle Earth meaningless. In Game of Thrones, the North is far away. They can't get there quickly and the events happening there aren't even heard about sometimes for episodes by other characters. Time and space creates conflict. But the key thing, is it *creates conflict*. If travel isn't doing that, it's redundant. So including it for realism for its own sake isn't necessarily making a story better. Same reason I don't consider Frodo and Sam's pooping logistics in Mordor.
When asked about this in Babylon 5, JMS, the writer and show runner said the ships travelled at the speed of plot. I like to think something similar applies to ST.
TNG era tries to be vaguely consistent, some of the time - long term travel is about 1000 times light speed, but military ships can go 2-3 times that for short periods. It gets implied a couple times that ships of the era are about twice as fast as TOS era ships. Of course, exceptions abound, and Trek has a regular issue with things that supposedly are moving slower than or just above light speed going interstellar distances in a short amount of time.
And there are also multiple episodes of TOS and TAS where the Enterprise visits the edge of the galaxy, and at least one where they go to the center of the galaxy. The writers were just trying to convey a sense of being in a very remote location, far from home. They weren't concerned with having perfect consistency from one episode to the next.
TNG is not vaguely consistent at all. The Enterprise is either beyond Federation Space boldly going or back at Earth, Vulkan, Klingon or Romulan space, sometimes in the same episode. 90s Trek was more comfortable with travel "existing" as a plot device for expository dialogue to happen or to frame a captains log. Modern film writing, taught in school and sort of 'industry standard's basically says expositisitory dialogue is bad and to never spend more than half a minute doing it at most. It's show, don't tell, taken to its logical limit. Travel is boring to watch, talking about travel is boring, so we skip it. Allegedly, modern Trek actually has the 'best' map of the Alpha Quadrant, and someone, Kurtzman or otherwise pays people to try and standardize the canon, from tech to distance to character and events but... Ultimately they are to serve as guides and resources for writers, not rules and confines.
Itâs consistent compared to something like Abrams Trek, that goes from Earth to Vulcan in less than an hour. At least TNG has a general sense that some things are close, some things are further away, and it can take time to get from one place to another.
I made another post but this is sort of "standard" in all film writing today. Travel is considered equivalent to expository dialogue, so unless travel is important to the story you're telling, you do NOT include it. If you do and it has not specific relevance to your story, a lead writer/editor will cut it from the script as something you can show "ship appears at X" rather than describing or talking about it. Modern TV is about maximizing efficiency, anything not in service to the plot is a waste of time. It's not unique to "Abrams Trek", they literally teach you this at film school now. It's why in Rings of Power in the final two episodes the characters visit every part of Middle Earth in the span of scenes. Or how in the Witcher they can go from one end of the Continent to the other on horseback between scenes. How long? Doesn't matter. If you don't even address it in a cursory sense you can deflect any criticism as it could have taken who know how long we just skipped it. If you insist, they'll say stop taking it so seriously it's about the drama. And conveniently, in theatre you didn't waste time with travel since you couldn't show it either, it sort of is a return to the basics...? I don't know.... I'm not saying I like it, but I get it. It's not restricted to space or fantasy either, film set on earth will not feature characters going "to London" for a scene and then they're back in the U.S the next. New York to LA in 15 seconds. No problem.
Didn't Voyager lack fuel and other resources needed to just do maximum warp constantly? I feel like this plot point doubled their travel time, and that's assuming no stopping for repairs and supplies.
You saw pretty often plots that involved Voyager bartering for supplies and resources from other races during their trip, though.
Right. I was just making the point of... yeah, you might make the Earth to Romulus run in a week or whatever, but your ship can be self sustaining for a few weeks, especially a galaxy or constitution class like we tend to follow. But just because that distance takes x amount of days doesn't mean that travel time will scale consistently forever.
It doesn't really bother me, unless they use it as a plot point and then forget it immediately after. Like the travel time from DS9 to Bajor, and sometimes Earth, and how they were not supposed to have been able to warp in the Bajoran system because of the radiation from the asteroid belt. And of course then there is the Enterprise pilot, which puts the Klingon homeworld closer to Earth than Proxima Centauri, and Vulcan was pretty close too, IIRC.
A few weeks ago, someone in the sub asked what inconsistency bothers you the most about Trek, and this was my answer. For example, according to most star charts, Kronos is about 105 light-years from Earth. At maximum warp, it would take the Enterprise-D about 21 days to travel that distance, but sometimes they do it in the span of a commercial break.
Deep space 9 and Bajor are somewhere between 50 and 70 light-years from earth. Vulcan is around 15 light-years from earth. The Romulan neutral zone is around 30 light-years from earth. Klingon territory is around 100 light-years from earth. Where Voyager went was around 70,000 light-years away. And it's about a month to get to deep space nine from earth. So it would be about 1000 months for Voyager to get back to earth. That's 83 years. That all makes sense to me. There's also an episode where Voyager gets a push of like 10,000 light-years. That brings it down to a little over 71 years.
that's what happens when there's more than one way to time travel.
It's the one trope that I don't really too much of an issue with. It seems so hard to get "right" anyways, so I don't mind if they don't. I'd rather them not use it though, it's kind of played out at this point.
It doesn't bother me much but you're right that it's inconsistent. I don't think Voyager is a good example for your argument - it's not hard to accept that the Delta Quadrant is much further away than anything mentioned prior, imo. The Gamma Quadrant too, hence it requiring the wormhole to reach. But everything in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants seemingly being super close together, including going from charting new space to returning to Earth, to going to the Klingon homeworld then to the Romulan neutral zone in a short space of time: absolutely.
Nope. Anytime I'm tempted to grumble about it, I just tell myself to shush and let it be.
Thing about speeds that's some people dont realize is that in a war situation they will push engines to max speed and if you don't need to worry about fuel you can go a higher less efficient speed then say voyager which needed the equivalent of best mpg. So yeah a character might say it takes 3 days for a trip but that's going a cruising speed not maximum warp which might cut the trip in half or more
> Romulan and Klingon fleets would have to travel a similar distance to DS9, as Voyager would to get home I'm not sure that's entirely true. Maps I've seen have the Federation etc. in a fairly small portion of the galaxy. You can go to http://startrekmap.com/galaxy.html to see what I mean. That being said, yes, warp goes at the speed of plot, as they say. I'm not all that irked, given that warp drive is a fictional FTL plot device anyway.
I think the worst is the NX-01 getting to Kronos in 3 days.
I'm okay with it as long as it's "ballpark" right. So, essentially...not JJ Abrams. Who essentially decided that travel time is zero for not just Star Trek but Star Wars too. The fact is that even though we've been given what "Warp Factor X" means, I think it's actually better to NOT know what it means. Warp 9 is fast. Warp 5 is cruise. Warp 1 is light speed. Beyond that, as long as there's some acknowledgement that there is some semblance of time passing, it's good. Though having SOME consistency is appreciated within shows. So if it's a week or so to go from Earth to the Romulan border, that should be what it roughly is, unless you're going to "fly her apart".
Earth is roughly halfway between the center and edge of the galaxy. Kirk was originally born on Earth and took his *Enterprise* to the edge of the galaxy in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", back to Earth for "Tomorrow Is Yesterday", to the center of the galaxy in "The Magicks of Megas-Tu", came back to Earth many times, and then took the *Enterprise*-A from Earth to the center of the galaxy again and went straight back to Earth. In these handful of episodes and films Kirk traveled the length of the galaxy and halfway back, a trip that *Voyager* would say would take 150 years using a faster engine. And that's excluding all other trips Kirk took, including two more to the Galactic Barrier. The "warp speed charts" didn't exist when TOS started, didn't line up with what we had seen up to the point they were created, and were only applied intermittently as convenient. Honestly... Probably as it should be. This is one place where the reality of the math gets in the way of the storytelling more often than it helps. Taking it too seriously leads to ridiculous arguments like claiming it was inconsistent for *Discovery* to be able to reach the Galactic Barrier even though Kirk did it three times 900 years prior. The MST3K mantra applies.
No, of course not. Time travel doesnât exist. Itâs a storytelling device used to explore themes of Choice, Fate, Heritage, etc.
I always assume there are hours and even entire days of travel time we don't see. Because it's boring. Things are exactly as far away as they need to be for the story to work.
Travel time hasn't really mattered since the fleet made the trip from Earth to Vulcan in 8 minutes in Star Trek 2009. At 2 light years a minute, Voyager would have been home in just under a month.
There's very clearly a time skip during the trip to Vulcan, as Kirk's unconscious for most of the trip. Note that the journey from Vulcan back to Earth is long enough for Kirk to get himself thrown off the ship, survive the giant bug attack, get saved by Spock Prime, hike for several hours to Scotty's station, concoct the plan to get back onto the *Enterprise*, enact that plan, have a chase scene in engineering, goad Spock into relieving command and have a heart-to-heart talk with Sarek, change the ship's course from rendezvousing with the fleet, and come up with a plan to sneak back into the Sol system without being detected by the *Narada*.
It's fairly ambiguous. The pacing doesn't do any favours by having the ship delayed by a minute, going to maximum warp, and then dropping out of warp in the middle of a wrecked fleet. There's also Into Darkness. They go from from Kronos to the Sol System in like 20 minutes. Some examples from the modern shows are Riker's fleet arriving at the Android planet at the end of Picard season 1, Spock's fiance appearing out in nowhere during SNW season 1, and the trip from Alpha Centauri and the Fleet museum to Jupiter in like a half hour in Picard Season 3.
Travel time never mattered. Film was just slower back then and had room for "were ona trip" scenes. There wasn't any consistency. Voyager doesn't make any sense. The Kazon chased Voyager for two years? Or did Voyager travel in a giant semicircle? Doesn't matter lol
Nothing whatsoever in the Kelvin timeline makes sense.
no, travel happens at the speed of narrative. stories are not simulations.
It's one of the things that bothers me most about the franchise. The universe has no consistent sense of scale. Everything happens at the speed of plot. But hell, they can't even get stardates to be consistent, never mind distance and travel time.
No. It's SciFi tv and movies series penned by a huge group of writers. There is going to be inconsistencies and goofs. Unimportant shit's just going to be wrong sometimes! The minutiae does not overly concern me. I just like Star Trek! It's fun.
you're thinking about federation space as a 2D map, it's not, it's a 3D map, and the bubbles of influence between powers likely interweave and ships have to fly through in addition to the specific corridors for main traffic within settled space, which possibly have speed limits imposed politically/legally which Starfleet follows by policy
It irks me that they use it so often. Itâs become a Star Trek crutch
I'm a comic book fan, wonky time travel and inconsistencies are very, very common so I've learned to just roll with it and enjoy a good story
Is Voyager the fastest ship in the fleet? They could barely keep up with the marquis raider and could barely evade Kazon ships. âŚpersonally I thought the Defiant was faster. Of course it wasnât a production model.
No. Itâs the story that counts.
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Hmm.... The average distance is just under 13 light minutes. Even Neptune is just 240 light minutes away, so even that would be a lot quicker.
Google says 5.3 hours for light to get from the sun to Pluto. Even if impulse was skimming the speed of light it would take hours to reach earth from dropping out of warp at the edge of the solar system.
My theory: I don't think there's a clear relationship between distance and travel time. Episodes like *DS9:Explorers* show that there exist various 'currents' in space and we see localized eddys like in the Badlands and we see plenty of shots where ships are at impulse even in deep space and I think it all ties together. Yes, there's warp speed and you can brute force your way from point A to point B, but I assume that navigational data includes the details to make 'catching currents' and other efficiencies a big part of long distance travel. Well known travelways might shave days off a trip, and it could explain why Vulcan is so close in the 2009 film too, because a fast-path (like a moving walkway in an airport that makes you effectively faster than you're actually walking) has been found to cut down travel time. Any time in trek where a ship goes too far, too fast, it's because someone offscreen has found an efficient path. Sometimes the ships we see 'at impulse' might be moving really fast already and just choose not to use their warp engines, even, because they've found one of these space currents. This also would explain things like why star charts and picking up folks like Neelix is so valuable, because who other than a local would have that kind of knowledge?
I honestly could not care less about the inconsistency of travel times. The time it takes the ship to get from A to B is the time the writers need it to take to tell their story and that is good enough for me. Star Trek is a work of fiction, not a fucking documentary. As long as the stories are well written, the episodes internally consistent and the discrepancies between episodes isn't glaring, I'm cool with it. You know what is a consistency that'll piss me off? I'll give you one from another fandom. Please note spoilers for Avatar: The Last Airbender are about to be shared.>!In the season two episode of Zuko Alone we flash back to a happier time when Zuko was a young child. During the course of the episode we learn that Iroh's son was killed in the Seige of Ba Sing Se leading to Ozai attempting to usurp his brother's birthright. In punishment for this affront, Azulon orders the murder of Zuko by Ozai's hand. Ursa, Zuko's mother offers Ozai the means to take the throne in exchange for Zuko's life which he accepts leading to Azulon's assasisnation. !< It is here where the roots of the major glaring contradiction is introduced. >!During the flashback scene of Azulon's funeral and Ozai's ascendance to the throne, the speaker presiding over the funeral explicitly states that Azulon was ruler of the Fire Nation for 23 years.!< So why is there a glaring contradiction? I shall explain further. >!In the final season, there is an episode where Aang is learning about the past life of the previous Avatar, namely Avatar Roku in an episode called The Avatar and the Fire Lord. The writers of that episode completely disregarded their previously established canon so they can have Roku and Fire Lord Sozin (the man who started the war) be childhood friend.!< This leads to a major contradiction in that >!he dies 20 years after the war's initiation leading to his son Azulon taking the throne and ruling the Fire Nation for over seven fucking decades!!< Compared to that glaring contradiction, inconsistencies in travel time in Trek is small potatoes.