Warp speed and travel times

[tonyg]

The reasons for "speed of plot" in a TV series is that:

1) With multiple writers and unrelated stories it becomes necessary for the ship to move all across the Federation (and beyond) in a relatively short time (i.e. in time to get to where it needs to be for next week's episode).

2) The producers really didn't have a good understanding on interstellar distances. Roddenberry did come up with the TOS warp scale where speed in multiples of light-speed was the warp factor cubed, but he failed to understand that even at warp 4-6 it would take weeks or months to get anywhere.

3) Roddenberry wanted it to be like it was for ship Captains during the Age of Sail. and that the ship was far away from civilization, and that the Captain had to deal with most problems on his own.


There were similar problems with Star Dates. It would probably have been better if they had just used the Julian Dating Method, perhaps adjusted to start with the founding of the Federation, but instead the ended up winging it.


Now a GM setting up a campaign can define the area where the campaign will take place (at least most of it) and do so in such a way that the travel times work for what he wants to accomplish in the campaign. But then, a single GM has a lot more creative control that the producer of a TV show. He also doesn't have as many people offering creative input, of have to deal with restrictions or limitation placed on him by the budget or technology available.

[WaveMan]

2) The producers really didn't have a good understanding on interstellar distances. Roddenberry did come up with the TOS warp scale where speed in multiples of light-speed was the warp factor cubed, but he failed to understand that even at warp 4-6 it would take weeks or months to get anywhere.

IMHO this is the crux of the problem. I honestly don't think they actually took the time to put interstellar distances into prospective. One thousand light years is a massive distance, ten thousands light years is almost unfathomable. The problem is only compounded later on as they didn't really address the issue in any of the other series either, as I demonstrated in the Farpoint episode of TNG.

TOS warp 8=[8x8x8] or 512TSL, while that might have been considered fast in the '60's (when TOS was current) in reality one need's to achieve a whole lot more TSL to actually get anywhere in the galaxy in a reasonable time frame.

[Karg]

the 1st set of star maps released in the 70's for Star Trek had a booklet that dealt with navigation and stellar distances. In the booklet, they introduced a concept called a Chi Factor which was and adjustment to the warp speed formula that adjusted the final velocity depending on the density of interstellar dust, gravitational eddys, nebulae, stellar clusters, ect. which resulted in the ship traveling a much higher multiple of c than the warp factor cubed formula.

[WaveMan]

they discuss such things in this article

http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor

[Karg]

they discuss such things in this article

http://en.memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Warp_factor

Yep, thats it