• Warp speeds... yet again....

    From John Crane@21:1/5 to All on Wed Oct 28 11:04:38 2020
    I remember the 'Outline for Star Trek' written by Roddenberry from
    Chapter 1 of the 'Making of Star Trek' book. I recently came across
    another version of it here: https://b-ok.cc/book/1682284/8d20e7

    The key difference for me is the top speed of the Enterprise (then
    called the Yorktown) is mentioned in the latter. 0.73 light years per
    day. I'm assuming that's WF 6 - which seems about right to me. That's
    very different from the speed of light cubed business Whitfield mentions
    in the MoST. Maybe that's why he saw fit to 'edit' GR's words.

    I'm just thinking all that consternation in the fan community over the
    years trying to figure out what the warp speeds actually are could have
    been avoided if Whitfield put GR's full text in his book.

    And if you are unfamiliar with the debate, it all started because the
    speed of light cubed business does not work - it's far too slow: several
    times a freighters top speed is mentioned as WF 2. Well, 2 cubed is 8
    times the speed of light. That's 2 YEARS to make a cargo run from Earth
    to Vulcan 16 ly distant. And TOS mentions 900 to a thousand light years
    on a few occasions - that's 1 YEAR of travel at Warp 10. If Scotty
    can't hold the ship together at Warp 8 for more than 10 minutes in an
    episode, there's no way he could do it for a year.

    And then there are the shuttlecraft... Even if they travelled Warp 6,
    that's 7.6 days from Earth to our nearest star Alpha Centauri. Warp 8
    would take 3.2 days. A WEEK in a shuttle? In Menagerie, Kirk mentions
    a limited life support capability in the shuttle - when it should be
    good for at least a week - or more given an adequate safety margin in
    the design. And a take off without a preflight checklist? - not in
    Starfleet. GR was a pilot - he knows that. Anyone would agree it's a
    valid assumption that Starbases would have prepped shuttles on the pad
    for emergencies at all times. Surely something was not right... and so
    the debate went on...

    Of course we're all arguing about fiction - we know that. But from a
    literary stand point, even fiction needs to be internally consistent and
    'make sense' at a basic level.

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