Voyager and warp speed: Consistent?

[Mr. Oragahn]

You missed the point overly critical one; "Caretaker" was quoted from as an illustration of the problems with the characters' quotes about how far they were from home and how long they have to travel to get home.

The 75 year figure is repeated again in the second episode "Parallax" by Chakotay at the begining of the episode:

"Rest of the trip, seventy five years"."

The 70k ly number is repeated in "Eye of the Needle" with Janeway rounding down again... unless they very quickly passed through the extra distance in just three episodes time:

JANEWAY: I assure you I am telling you the truth. We are in the Delta quadrant, seventy thousand light years from you.

So thus far they had one single estimation and pretty much maintained it. 75 years to cross 70K LY.
933.33 c.

It's not until "Prime Factors" in the first season that the 75 year travel time starts to take a hit:

TORRES: Forty thousand light years. Even if that’s as far as we could go, it would still knock about four decades off our trip.

So for the first few episodes it was 75 years over 70k ly, and now it is 1k per year over a distance of 70k. Hello...

They were thinking about using a platform that could throw them over 40K LY, its maximum range.
Torres' comment means at that point, they had managed to refine their estimation and enhance their estimated average speed to 1000 c.

Then we suddenly in "Dreadnaught" get back up to 75k ly:

DREADNOUGHT: The probability of being in the Delta quadrant, seventy five thousand light years from last confirmed location is negligible. The target is located in the Alpha quadrant. Target lock has been established. There will be no further warnings. Terminating communications link.

Are they 70k or 75k ly? Does it take 75 or 70 years? Which is it, and especially after about a year and a half of travelling.

But aren't you assuming that the Dreadnaught's target was on the border between the AQ and DQ?
If the Dreadnaught's target was several thousand LY beyond the frontier between the AQ and DQ, it would explain why even if Voyager would be like 65K~69k LY from the AQ's nearest point on the border, the missile would spout a higher distance.

Then in "Message in a Bottle" in season 3 after Kes' gift we're back to 75k ly when the Doctor tells the EMH Mark-II the following:

"If you disengage your vocal subroutines for one second, I'd explain. I was transmitted onto this ship by a Starfleet vessel over sixty thousand light-years from here."

Err... it reads 60,000 LY, not 75,000 LY.
Am I missing something?

This is after the 5 years shaved off in YOH, which is just after Kes' boost in "The Gift". So we're back to 75k ly for Voyager's starting distance.
And on and on it goes...

Based on the ratio from Prime Factors, shaving off 5 years would correspond to a gain over 5000 LY, which fits. Of course, since the distance doesn't disappear, it means the speed has increased, again.

[Mike DiCenso]

Yes, all you have done is reaffirm the inconsistancies. Sure you can explain away some of it as adjustments. But that should have not continued to flip-flop so much as the series went on. Suffice to say, the writers were getting confused over whether it was 70k ly distance and 75 years to get home, or 75k ly and 70 years to get home. That's all.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Yes, all you have done is reaffirm the inconsistancies. Sure you can explain away some of it as adjustments. But that should have not continued to flip-flop so much as the series went on. Suffice to say, the writers were getting confused over whether it was 70k ly distance and 75 years to get home, or 75k ly and 70 years to get home. That's all.
-Mike

I'm sorry, but strictly going from the bits I replied to, there's no sign of inconsistency if you consider that the only bit that may be a problem, the Dreadnaught's reply, was based on a destination that was deeper into the AQ, and not the AQ's frontier itself.

Question is: what was its original target?

TORRES: I got inside it and reprogrammed the computer. Hell, I didn't just reprogram it, I changed its identity. I made it forget about being Cardassian. Now it was working for the Maquis.
CHAKOTAY: And we gave it a new mission. To destroy the Cardassian fuel depot on Aschelon five. But it never made it out of the Badlands. We thought it had been destroyed in one of the plasma storms.

So from the Badlands to some place out there called Aschelon Five.

Due to some malfunction or else, its true target became some class M planet:

TORRES: It's heading for a planet in a system over 10 light years away. At its current speed it'll get there in about three weeks.
CHAKOTAY: The planet is class M. I'm reading several heavily populated areas.

The thing is, Cardassian space being close to Federation space and all that pretty much means it was far from the core, where all quadrants meet.
Even more, looking at all maps I found for Trek, the Cardassian union is on the opposite side of the Federation, from where Voyager started.
So there's no reason to consider that this is an error.

The missile's warp speed would be around 194 c.

What was puzzling, however, was just how fast it seems the missile arrived there, but the episode made things clear

TORRES: I recognise it's signature because, because I know this weapon very well. Chakotay and I got our hands on it when we were fighting the Cardassians.
KIM: How did it get here?
CHAKOTAY: Probably the same way we did.
TORRES: The last time we saw it, it was heading in the same direction in the Badlands where the Caretaker picked us up.

Btw, that's a cool page for VOY scripts.

Completely unrelated:

TORRES: No, that's only a sensor echo. Dreadnought's programmed to deflect it's up to one hundred thousand kilometres from it's true location. The next time you get a heading look for a brief surge in neutrino emissions within a one hundred thousand kilometre radius. That'll be the real thing.

An absolutely minimal sensor range for the Voyager.

[Mike DiCenso]

So from the Badlands to some place out there called Aschelon Five.

Due to some malfunction or else, its true target became some class M planet:

Um, no. The starting place for Dreadnaught is not that far away from where Voyager started. Both vessels were grabbed by the Caretaker and brought to the same location. So a few tens or even hundreds of light years will not make much of a difference.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

So from the Badlands to some place out there called Aschelon Five.

Due to some malfunction or else, its true target became some class M planet:

Um, no. The starting place for Dreadnaught is not that far away from where Voyager started. Both vessels were grabbed by the Caretaker and brought to the same location. So a few tens or even hundreds of light years will not make much of a difference.
-Mike

No no, I'm talking about two things. First, the original flight plan: out of the Badlands, to that Asch thing planet. That was some time ago.
Then I speak of the new target, some planet weeks away from where Voyager was or so, that's more recent.

The point is that it's possible, although I didn't pick the ruler yet, that the original target, which Dreadnaught thought it was headed at, was thousands if not tens of thousands of LY beyond the galaxy core, explaining the 75K LY distance the computer mentions, despite all the distance Voyager had already covered towards the Alpha Quadrant during all these years.

[Praeothmin]

The point is that it's possible, although I didn't pick the ruler yet, that the original target, which Dreadnaught thought it was headed at, was thousands if not tens of thousands of LY beyond the galaxy core, explaining the 75K LY distance the computer mentions, despite all the distance Voyager had already covered towards the Alpha Quadrant during all these years.

It isn't possible, because the Maquis had reprogrammed it to hit a Cardassian target, of which there were none "tens of thousands of LY beyond the galaxy core"...

[Mike DiCenso]

No no, I'm talking about two things. First, the original flight plan: out of the Badlands, to that Asch thing planet. That was some time ago.
Then I speak of the new target, some planet weeks away from where Voyager was or so, that's more recent.

No, it does not work since Dreadnaught was stated to have been lost in the Badlands, it was thought due to one of the storms there, and so no one expected anything to unusal there. However, this is where Voyager was also snagged by the Caretaker, and brought to the Delta Quadrant. When the two ships get there, they proceeded on their way from the same starting point. Dreadnaught, not being able to find it's Cardassian target just kind of wandered for a while until it decided upon a planet that met the parameters.

The point is that it's possible, although I didn't pick the ruler yet, that the original target, which Dreadnaught thought it was headed at, was thousands if not tens of thousands of LY beyond the galaxy core, explaining the 75K LY distance the computer mentions, despite all the distance Voyager had already covered towards the Alpha Quadrant during all these years.

No, they did not start off in the Alpha Quadrant all that far away (in the Badlands), and so were not distance-wise anything appreciably different. Both ships encountered each other at a point only maybe a thousand or so light years closer to the Alpha Quadrant. They also had to inform Dreadnaught of where it was, too. That is why it refused to accept the information, and decided that Torres was compromised by Starfleet.
-Mike

[Mr. Oragahn]

Sorry, I got the thing I constantly missed: the initial 75,000 LY distance was Badlands <-> Point of arrival in the DQ.

So a question, how wide the UFP is?

[Praeothmin]

About 8000 LY, if memory serves...

[Mike DiCenso]

That's correct, as per Picard's statement in ST:C, the Federation spans 8,000 ly. Some of the soft-canon maps seen in various episodes generally tend to support a Federation of at least several thousand light years wide. We've been over this before, so here's a refresher on the issues in this thread.
-Mike

[Mith]

I would say that it is mostly an issue with the limited resources, but the issue of lack of knowledge of the area can also have a great deal of effects as per what they're doing. It's a great deal easier to travel through the forest if you know where to go so you can avoid wasting time entering areas that make it nearly impossible to travel or force you to double back a bit. Same thing I imagine happens with Voyager on a daily basis, probably more out of territory issues if anything else.

Of course, due to some other instances, we have to now ask how warp speeds work. Clearly we see that there is a variation in them, but it seems to me that when someone says warp 1, they may not be exactly claiming an actual speed, but the power put into the the ship. It would account for some of the massive variations we see. I mean, surely with a properly mantained ship and fuel, we should be seeing that it is rather even.

Even more interesting is the TOS and TNG warpscales and what Janeway herself has said about their ships now being twice as fast. The very fact of the matter is that when you match up the scales, TNG speeds is nearly double that of TOS speeds. That leads me to conclude that warp power may not be per say the speed, but rather the power behind it. So this would explain why the warp speeds were adjusted during that time, rather than stacking on warp 10 or warap 11. Of course, this might prompt to ask why they would adjust the speeds for each warp factor, but this could be answered in that as technology progressed and efficiency of the warp drive grew, you may not say, need to put in the equel power of warp 8 to travel at say, 150c (as an example), but as technology progressed, you might only need the power generation of warp 4 to reach that or higher. Therefore, the speeds were changed simply for the point of how much power is generated.

Other things factor in as well. We know that warp relies on subspace, but we also know that from some ST green episodes, that subspace can be damaged and without it, warp travel is impossible. I suspect that this might occure naturally and less dramatically as well. Some areas may not be as reliable for warp travel. So you may be traveling at Warp 6, but due to the subspace issues around you, your speed can basically crawl to warp 2's equel in speed. This might also explain why in Enterprise, they wanted the Vulcan maps so badly. Although humanity at that point should have been able to use new high powered telescopes to map the areas, subspace scanning might actually require going out there with a ship. This would in fact indicate that without these maps, Enterprise would be going slower, despite her ability to normall travel faster in favorable conditions.
In a way, it's like sailing; your hardware isn't the problem, its the wind issue.

Now, you add these problems on top of warp coils that are slowly breaking down due to extended use, pushing them to the limit, battle damage, and just all around crazy shit that happens to Voyager and your result is a ship that is not going to be going anywhere very soon compared to the Chase where the Enterprise D is able to move around very quickly, but doing so places some heavy taxing on her engines. I've seen Voyager do some similar things during her run and she didn't have the luxury for repairs and her chief engineer was a grease monkey who couldn't identify shit without a tricorder (proven fact actually...).

[l33telboi]

I don't know if this has been brought up yet, and I'm a little pressed for time to check at the moment, but I recently started watching Voyager again and I noticed that their average speed seems to be between warp 7 and warp 6, despite the Voyager having a stable cruise velocity of 9.9 something.

[Praeothmin]

As Stated in the Voyager premiere, Voyager's maximum cruise velocity (although it is not mentioned how long this can be sustained) is Warp 9.975.

Please note that this has not been stated as her maximum speed, but as her maximum cruising speed, which would imply that this is sustainable for a long time, under "normal" (i.e., not liost far away from repair installations or refuelling stations) circumstances.

[Mike DiCenso]

Interestingly enough, in "Dreadnaught", the missle takes off towards it's mistaken target planet at a stated speed warp 9, and it will cover that distance in 51 hours. That is 1,716c. Also interesting is that is approximately 202c faster than what the TNG TM states for warp 9. However, 1,716c for warp 9 is at odds with some of the stated speeds for lower warp factors in ST:ENT, TOS, and TNG. The 4 billion miles per second (21,400c) statement from "The 37s" is 7 times faster than the TNG TM's given 3,053c, but is still vastly lower than the highest observed speed from the supposedly slower E-D in "The Chase" (1 million c). Even if warp 9.975 were 10 times faster than warp 9 (214,000c), it would still only be an average speed compared some some of the other Trek series!
-Mike

[Mith]

As Stated in the Voyager premiere, Voyager's maximum cruise velocity (although it is not mentioned how long this can be sustained) is Warp 9.975.

Please note that this has not been stated as her maximum speed, but as her maximum cruising speed, which would imply that this is sustainable for a long time, under "normal" (i.e., not liost far away from repair installations or refuelling stations) circumstances.

I had actually forgotten about that. That would make the incident in DS9 of an Intrepid crossing UFP space so quickly. Warp 9 wouild easily allow for quick travel. That gives me the impression that the series was more of a cheetah design; it was focused on short sprints with nearby facilities to assist her. Without a nearby starbase, she probably would have torn her nacelles apart after a few thousand lightyears.

Add that in with the subspace issue and we can quickly see that it makes perfect sense for Voyager to be out so long. I also find it interesting that according to The Sound of Her Voice:

O'BRIEN
Speed's not the problem. I could
increase the warp plasma ninety-
seven gigahertz. That would
increase our velocity to warp nine
point five and save us almost a
full day.

WORF.
But the problem on the Defiant is
how to maintain structural
integrity when we go above warp
nine.

O'BRIEN
Exactly. The ship literally
starts tearing herself apart at
those speeds.

SISKO
Is there any way of strengthening
the structural integrity field?

O'BRIEN
Not without bleeding power from
some other system.

Well, I assume that O'Brien meant to say gigawatts (otherwise, we'd have to assume that UFP has some really, really weird shit going on with plasma and their computers...some really weird shit). Assuming that's waht O'Brien meant, we can analyze the situation. I've been trying to find how fast the Defiant can go on average, but I can't find anything. The most I get is warp 8.7 or warp 9.5 (which is wrong, as that is really inaccurate due to design issues). However, since Worf and Obrien claimed that they can't go higher than warp 9 because the ship would tear itself apart, it sounds reasonable that they'd be traveling at warp 9 (if anyone else has information that would give us an accurate idea of the Defiant's, I'd be happy to hear it). However, it's possible that since it would take six days to reach her, they weren't moving at warp nine, so I'll do calcs for warp 8 and warp 9.

Now, assuming a linear scale for reaching each warp factor, we can get two calculations. Going with the warp 8 idea, that would suggest that each warp factor would be about 64.66 gigawatts (basically, 97 divided by three and then double the figure). Using the warp nine scale, we simply double 97 gigawatts to 194 gigawatts.

Since it's best to go with the lower numbers, and logic seems to suggest that the distance and drastic increase in speed performance as suggested in the episode, it would seem sound to accept the former. Assuming a linear scale, tha twould mean that the following scale can be derived:

Warp 1: 64.66 gigawatts
Warp 2: 129.32 gigawatts
Warp 3: 193.98 gigawatts
Warp 4: 258.64 gigawatts
Warp 5: 323.3 gigawatts
Warp 6: 387.96 gigawatts
Warp 7: 452.62 gigawatts
Warp 8: 517.28 gigawatts
Warp 9: 581.94 gigawatts
Warp 9.5: 614.27 gigawatts
Warp 10(?): 646.6 gigawatts

Unfortuantely, we run into a bit of a problem. This scale assumes that said scale is linear (although I personally have little problem with this), but this only applies to the Defiant. Logically, larger ships would require a greater amount of energy while smaller ones would require less. This means that at warp 8, the Defiant would go through one kilgram of matter/antimatter in 96.65 hours or about four days. For a lower use of warp 6, it would take around 128.87 hours or about five days for the Defiant to go through that much antimatter.

It would also suggest that Wesley's antimatter pod had no more than 129.32 joules worth of energy in her in order to get that old hulk moving in TNG. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting point. It might give us some insight into how much energy a starship can go through.

EDIT:

Actually, using the mass of the ship is a good way of determining it. Using this idea, the galaxy class would require 819.633803 gigajoules a second to mantain warp 1. That means the same amount of antimatter that can keep the Defiant at warp 6 for five days is only enough to keep the Enterprise D at warp 1 for half that time. Warp 9 would demand 7,376.67 joules a second and would last for a bit over two hours in that regard.