Galactic Scale SW vs ST

[The Kernel]

That would be perfectly acceptable, except there's also the travel times to take into account. The E-E makes it from the neutral zone to Earth in three days.

Yes.

Defiant gets from Bajor to Earth in a matter of days.

When have we ever seen a time period placed on this? They make occasional trips to Earth, but we have no idea how long it takes.

The Breen got to Earth before any Starfleet units were able to intercept (though not, admittedly, so fast that Starfleet couldn't get into position to hit them on the way out).

Starfleet isn't exactly great about patrolling their borders. And for all we know, the Breen have some sort of stealth technology. Also, remember that they had captured Betazed by this point, which was said to be "within striking distance of Earth".

V'Ger made the trip from Klingon space to Earth within a matter of days. And this isn't including Enterprise, which put Quo'nos somewhere near the outer edge of Sol's Oort cloud.

We have no idea how fast V'Ger was able to travel. As for Enterprise, can we just declare that non-canon and get it over with?

Obviously, the homeworlds of the major warp civilizations are clustered in a relatively small area, and the empires have spread out away from each other. It's concievable that one or two warp civilizations (I'd imagine the Vulcans were one) arose and the technology spread deliberately or accidentily to the others. That would go a long way towards explaining the uniform tech level among the major players in the AQ, too.

It just seems so damn unlikely. You would think they would want buffer zones between their homeworlds and their neighbors borders.

[RedImperator]

When have we ever seen a time period placed on this? They make occasional trips to Earth, but we have no idea how long it takes.

I'm not sure, because I never watched the show much. Quark, Rom, and Nog, made the trip in a shuttlecraft, though, so there's a limit as to how far away it can be (that shuttle couldn't have held much in the way of supplies for a long trip).

Starfleet isn't exactly great about patrolling their borders. And for all we know, the Breen have some sort of stealth technology. Also, remember that they had captured Betazed by this point, which was said to be "within striking distance of Earth".

The Breen have never demonstrated any kind of cloak. Starfleet border security is porous, but if the Breen are coming from the other end of the Federation, that would mean keeping the strike force hidden for weeks.

The capture of Betazed brings up another point, though: if it's within striking distance of Earth, it can't be that far away (obviously). And the Dominion can maintain a supply line between their territory and Betazed. I know the war wasn't going well, but I don't recall hearing that the Dominion had captured thousands of light years of territory between Cardassian space and the interior of the Federation.

We have no idea how fast V'Ger was able to travel. As for Enterprise, can we just declare that non-canon and get it over with?

V'Ger wasn't going so fast that the E-nil couldn't keep up (once they met).

As for ENT, I don't consider it canon. I just thought I'd mention how I didn't mention "Broken Bow" and the four day trip to Quonos to show you what a nice guy I am.

It just seems so damn unlikely. You would think they would want buffer zones between their homeworlds and their neighbors borders.

It's not like they have much choice in the matter. If Earth is only a few days away from Romulus, it's not like they can move.

[The Kernel]

I'm not sure, because I never watched the show much. Quark, Rom, and Nog, made the trip in a shuttlecraft, though, so there's a limit as to how far away it can be (that shuttle couldn't have held much in the way of supplies for a long trip).

Not only was this ship very fast (faster then a "Romulan Interceptor" according to Rom) but it was much larger than a Starfleet shuttle and could have easily carried provisions for three people for an extended period of time.

The Breen have never demonstrated any kind of cloak. Starfleet border security is porous, but if the Breen are coming from the other end of the Federation, that would mean keeping the strike force hidden for weeks.

The capture of Betazed brings up another point, though: if it's within striking distance of Earth, it can't be that far away (obviously). And the Dominion can maintain a supply line between their territory and Betazed. I know the war wasn't going well, but I don't recall hearing that the Dominion had captured thousands of light years of territory between Cardassian space and the interior of the Federation.

We didn't hear much about the amount of territory the Dominion captured, so I'm not sure what we can deduce from this.

V'Ger wasn't going so fast that the E-nil couldn't keep up (once they met).

V'Ger obviously dropped to sublight when the E-nil approached, unless you honestly think the Enterprise was moving at high warp when it intercepted them. They were interested in the Enterprise, so it isn't inconcievable that they slowed to meet it.

It's not like they have much choice in the matter. If Earth is only a few days away from Romulus, it's not like they can move.

How do we know Earth is only a few days from Romulus? Remember the TOS episode "Balance of Terror"? They were almost on top of Romulus in that episode (it was on the starchart Spock brought up) and according to Kirk, it would have taken hours for their transmission to reach the nearest Federation installation, never mind Earth.

[Illuminatus Primus]

look up Hyperons

Hyperons have positive mass and belong to "Real Life" hypermatter.

Search tachyons.

(And the amusingly appropriate hypermatter, which is lots of Hyperon particles together).

"Star Wars" hypermatter is a bunch of tachyons together, not hyperons.

[Jon]

It saddens me how inconsistent the producers, script writers, brannon Bragdickhead-a were with things like this, scale and distance between worlds.

I heard it quoted on various occasions, by Sisko etc that DS9 was a good two weeks away form Earth at maximum 'sustainable' warp speeds.

As for the breen breaching borders, it seems to much though is going into a 2-dimensional playing field. I doubt starfleet could have covered every degree of entry into federation space with manned detection sites, so amidst a war, if unmanned border patrols were lost, there proabbly wasn't much they could do etc etc, especially with most ships being tied up on the front lines.

Shame that we are forced to take the cockups of producers and writers who contradict each other on so many occasions as Canon, I guess that's where star wars gets one over on Trek, there isn't a library of 600 or so episodes that haven't been bounced off each other to create the amount of cock ups trek has.

[Drooling Iguana]

i believe he did. compared to SW communications ST stuff is like snail mail vs. email.

Although the second season ENT episode "Horizon" implies that the speed of subspace radio is not a constant thing, and can vary according to how its transmitted.

[Darth Wong]

Why do we need to accept something so ridiculous as to assume that the border between three of the surrounding empires is so close to Earth as to allow instantaneous contact when other areas require weeks for the message to travel?

Look at a map of Canada sometime. All of the population centres are close to the borders with the US. It's hardly unreasonable.

[Darth Wong]

"Stewart from SDI"'s wanking to RSA's website has been split to the HoS. At least he's finally admitted where he's really coming from: he's obviously some teenaged rabid Trekkie who found RSA's website and decided that it was Gospel.

[The Kernel]

Why do we need to accept something so ridiculous as to assume that the border between three of the surrounding empires is so close to Earth as to allow instantaneous contact when other areas require weeks for the message to travel?

Look at a map of Canada sometime. All of the population centres are close to the borders with the US. It's hardly unreasonable.

Close to ONE neighboring country. But the suggestion made here is that the Capital of the Federation is within spitting distance of at least THREE major (hostile) powers. That stretches reasonability more than a little.

[Darth Wong]

Why do we need to accept something so ridiculous as to assume that the border between three of the surrounding empires is so close to Earth as to allow instantaneous contact when other areas require weeks for the message to travel?

Look at a map of Canada sometime. All of the population centres are close to the borders with the US. It's hardly unreasonable.

Close to ONE neighboring country. But the suggestion made here is that the Capital of the Federation is within spitting distance of at least THREE major (hostile) powers. That stretches reasonability more than a little.

One neighbouring country which is bigger than a dozen European countries. It is hardly unreasonable, particularly since the entire Romulan Empire was formed by a breakaway splinter group from Vulcan.

[The Kernel]

One neighbouring country which is bigger than a dozen European countries. It is hardly unreasonable, particularly since the entire Romulan Empire was formed by a breakaway splinter group from Vulcan.

Alright fine, let's do a little math on the issue then. If you figure that the Federation is about 2000LY across in the TOS days (an extremely conservative estimate given Picards statement in First Contact) and we saw during "The Enterprise Incident" that a message could take up to three weeks to reach Starfleet (I'll assume that they were trying to contact Starfleet Command on Earth instead of just the nearest outpost) then we are looking at a transmission speed of around 100 LY per day (assuming Earth was 2000LY away). This also fits with Voyager, which said that it would take years for the transmissions to Earth to travel the 70,000 LY's distance (1500 days by my estimate).

In order to have the near instantaneous transmission between Earth and Bajor that we have seen in DS9, you would need a transmission delay of only a second without in being perceptable to us, the viewers. THat means that at a speed of ~2LY per hour, DS9 would need to be somewhere inside the Sol System in order to get latencies like that.

I like the "Subspace Net" theory because it explains away all the inconsistencies we see in the speed of subspace transmissions. When you are inside the net, you have instantaneous communication to anyone else in the net. If you are outside, then you need to transmit by a much slower medium to a relay station. This works well because all the times I can remember seeing transmission delays, the Enterprise-nil/A/D was either on the border, or outside Federation space.

[The Kernel]

EDIT: Excuse me, that's 700 days @ 100 LY/day.

[Darth Wong]

Alright fine, let's do a little math on the issue then. If you figure that the Federation is about 2000LY across in the TOS days (an extremely conservative estimate given Picards statement in First Contact) and we saw during "The Enterprise Incident" that a message could take up to three weeks to reach Starfleet (I'll assume that they were trying to contact Starfleet Command on Earth instead of just the nearest outpost) then we are looking at a transmission speed of around 100 LY per day (assuming Earth was 2000LY away). This also fits with Voyager, which said that it would take years for the transmissions to Earth to travel the 70,000 LY's distance (1500 days by my estimate).

In order to have the near instantaneous transmission between Earth and Bajor that we have seen in DS9, you would need a transmission delay of only a second without in being perceptable to us, the viewers. THat means that at a speed of ~2LY per hour, DS9 would need to be somewhere inside the Sol System in order to get latencies like that.

Or that subspace transmission speeds have improved between TOS and TNG. In "Balance of Terror", I believe there was a three hour delay for voice messages to Starfleet from the Romulan Neutral Zone. In STFC, they were speaking in real-time. This would imply a fairly large increase in speed.

I like the "Subspace Net" theory because it explains away all the inconsistencies we see in the speed of subspace transmissions. When you are inside the net, you have instantaneous communication to anyone else in the net. If you are outside, then you need to transmit by a much slower medium to a relay station.

So in the absence of other data, you just assume it must be instantaneous?

This works well because all the times I can remember seeing transmission delays, the Enterprise-nil/A/D was either on the border, or outside Federation space.

Actually, it's more reasonable to imagine that relay stations have much more powerful transmitters and that subspace transmission speed is related to power output. This dichotomy between "instantaneous" relay transmissions and slow-as-molasses starship transmissions doesn't make much sense; they're both using subspace!

[The Kernel]

Or that subspace transmission speeds have improved between TOS and TNG. In "Balance of Terror", I believe there was a three hour delay for voice messages to Starfleet from the Romulan Neutral Zone. In STFC, they were speaking in real-time. This would imply a fairly large increase in speed.

What about Voyager? Their transmissions were said to take years to reach Earth (they hadn't reached them by the third season, since they were still looking for a way to send letters home at that point. It fits just perfectly with established TOS subspace speeds.

So in the absence of other data, you just assume it must be instantaneous?

Well, we have the Voyager-TOS link and the simple fact that the Enterprise-D routinely communicated with Starfleet Command from all over the Federation. Too many coincidences for me.

Actually, it's more reasonable to imagine that relay stations have much more powerful transmitters and that subspace transmission speed is related to power output. This dichotomy between "instantaneous" relay transmissions and slow-as-molasses starship transmissions doesn't make much sense; they're both using subspace!

It isn't that unreasonable considering that subspace is an undefined buzzword that is dropped left and right. They two transmitters could be based on completely different principles with the relays carrying large equipment that simply wouldn't fit on Starfleet vessels.

[The Kernel]

EDIT: Excuse me, I was mistaken about the episode they tried to send letters home (it was in the first season) but the point is still valid. Let's assume for a second that Bajor is around 100LY from Earth (which is perfectly reasonable if it is indeed on Earth's front doorstep) and Sisko has contacted his father on several occassions from DS9 (in "Call to Arms" for example) which means that transmission speeds under your theory would need to be 100LY per second minimum.

That doesn't fit with Janeway's quote in "Eye of the Needle" (in which she stated that transmissions home would take years) since at 100LY per second, Voyager could send a transmission to Earth in roughly 12 minutes.

[consequences]

EDIT: Excuse me, I was mistaken about the episode they tried to send letters home (it was in the first season) but the point is still valid. Let's assume for a second that Bajor is around 100LY from Earth (which is perfectly reasonable if it is indeed on Earth's front doorstep) and Sisko has contacted his father on several occassions from DS9 (in "Call to Arms" for example) which means that transmission speeds under your theory would need to be 100LY per second minimum.

That doesn't fit with Janeway's quote in "Eye of the Needle" (in which she stated that transmissions home would take years) since at 100LY per second, Voyager could send a transmission to Earth in roughly 12 minutes.

Subspace relay network, with a working network in place, messages can be sent faster, without it, the signal would probably dissipate and scatter.

[The Kernel]

Subspace relay network, with a working network in place, messages can be sent faster, without it, the signal would probably dissipate and scatter.

I'm not exactly sure what you are suggesting here. Janeway's quote specifies that they CAN send messages home, it will just take years to do so. How would a subspace relay network speed this up in such a way that is different from the theory I proposed, but fits these facts?

[consequences]

Basically, the theory that a short ranged transmission could be sent at a higher speed, possibly in a different subspace domain, that would have to be received and retransmitted every (unknown distance), or else disperse into the subspace ether. It is also possible that there is no relay network, and the distance this technique can be used obver just happens to encompass Earth and Bajor.

[The Kernel]

Basically, the theory that a short ranged transmission could be sent at a higher speed, possibly in a different subspace domain, that would have to be received and retransmitted every (unknown distance), or else disperse into the subspace ether. It is also possible that there is no relay network, and the distance this technique can be used obver just happens to encompass Earth and Bajor.

And this differs from my theory about a subspace relay network how?

[consequences]

Not at all, my apologies for the wasting of time, anger at others' stupidity cloud vision sometimes, my bad.

[Darth Servo]

Close to ONE neighboring country. But the suggestion made here is that the Capital of the Federation is within spitting distance of at least THREE major (hostile) powers. That stretches reasonability more than a little.

Considering that the Federation met two of those empires very early in its history, its not surprising at all. Upon meeting them, the Feds obviously couldn't expand any farther in that direction of space. However there was no such impediment to expansion in the opposite directions and they can't exactly move Earth.

[PainRack]

Close to ONE neighboring country. But the suggestion made here is that the Capital of the Federation is within spitting distance of at least THREE major (hostile) powers. That stretches reasonability more than a little.

Turkey then.Its capital world is close to 3 major powers too, all which had been hostile to it in the past.

Geography can do wonders. Especially when the first hostile race they met were the Romulans, followed by the Klingons.

[Drooling Iguana]

Actually, they met the Klingons roughly a year before their first contact with the Romulans.

[DaveJB]

Actually, they met the Klingons roughly a year before their first contact with the Romulans.

I was going to say that Klingon first contact was in the early 23rd century, while Romulan first contact would have been at some point in the 22nd. Then I remembered 2 things:

• 1. The 23rd century date for Klingon first contact was from the Star Trek Chronology, and thus not neccesarily canon.
  2. Enterprise

[The Kernel]

Close to ONE neighboring country. But the suggestion made here is that the Capital of the Federation is within spitting distance of at least THREE major (hostile) powers. That stretches reasonability more than a little.

Turkey then.Its capital world is close to 3 major powers too, all which had been hostile to it in the past.

Geography can do wonders. Especially when the first hostile race they met were the Romulans, followed by the Klingons.

Who cares? It still doesn't fit with subspace speeds set by Voyager. And if this is the case, then there goes the evidence that Earth is close to the three major powers.