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Hayes: "We've dispatched two deep space explorers to your location. With any luck, they could rendevous with you in 5 to 6 years."
In those 5 to 6 years, Voyager could travel 5,000 lys further towards the UFP, and those deep space exploeres could travel 5,000 lys out. They would rendevous at some point 25,000 lys from Earth. this means that those deep space explorers were locatyed 20,000 lys from Earth when they were dispatched to rescue Voyager!!! Now, if we take it that the UFP is 8,000 lys across, then that 20,000 lys distance would be 16,000 lys from the UFP. Those ships were real far out....However, one must note that according the Picard, the 150 MEMBER worlds were spread across 8,000 lys. the actually colonies, outposts, and starbases could extend much further. The "core" of the AQ, where DS9 took place, would be the point where the Cardassian Union, the UFP, the Romulan Empire, and the Klingon Empire met in space. If the feds had starships 20,000 lys from Earth, they must've knwon of the cardassians a lone time ago. Perhaps the cardassian were known, but just weren't a major power yet.
This "core" of the AQ would be something like Western Europe in the year 1800, with colonies spread across much larger distances, all around the world. The dominion war would be like a world war faught in the ago of european colonialism, with the main fighting near the origins of the major powers, either europe of the core AQ, with the fighting itself spread across a much larger distance, either the planet Earth or thousands of lys out into the galaxy.
It looks like this one remark in voyager could change our entire view of the star trek galaxy.....
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Boris
However, I cannot understand how Starfleet could have given new instructions to ships 20,000 ly away from Earth. Were they contacted by the superduper pulsar-boosted hypersubspace radio, too? (must have been a surprise...) Or have they been laying comm relay buoys along their route? I'm visualizing a ship that looks like a toad pregnant with a zillion eggs which it lays one by one - how small can you make a subspace relay, and still be sure it will work 40 years from now? How sparsely can you risk laying them?
If, OTOH, the ships were near Earth and were dispatched to the rendezvous with the help of their superfast drive systems - why haven't we heard more of these drives? A footnote in DS9 TM really isn't the correct place for such groundshaking relevation.
The third possibility is one of shortcuts. Perhaps Starfleet knew of wormholes or other anomalies that would either allow the explorers to reach the rendezvous point faster, or allow for communications with explorers already en route. Or then Starfleet was counting on the Voyager finding further shortcuts of her own, and maintaining her real average speed from the past six years instead of her nominal cruise speed?
In any case, I feel sorry for the explorers if Voyager fails to keep the rendezvous date...
Timo Saloniemi
I sertainly hope we get to see Voyager meet with two Prometheus class ships
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Meddle not in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!
(-=\V/=-)
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"A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
Aban's Illustration www.thespeakeasy.com/alanfore
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"Life's a bitch, then you die"
-USS Luzon, Vanderbuilt Class starship
But you've got to admit, 2 Prometheus Class ships would look very cool!
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Meddle not in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!
(-=\V/=-)
[This message has been edited by Altair (edited May 13, 2000).]
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"Life's a bitch, then you die"
-USS Luzon, Vanderbuilt Class starship
It seems to me that the line "deep space explorers" was meant to explain how Starfleet can reach Voyager in a couple of years. Such ships would probably be optimized for speed, or otherwise be already located far enough to be near Voyager. In addition to communication problems, the former seems more likely for the additional reason that we've never seen Starfleet ships coming back from *decades* of exploring unknown space. Even Kirk's Enterprise remained within 200 light-years of Earth for the most part.
The Prometheus is the canon design closest to at least one type of fast courier ships, and that is the four-nacelled pathfinder with two alternating warp cores, one for each set of nacelles. Once the Prometheus' secondary hull splits into two halves, the lower half of the sec-hull warp core powers the lower nacelles while the upper half powers the upper nacelles. It seems conceivable that the two core-halves could alternate between the nacelles even during connected travel, providing for greater speed.
Boris
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I don't know at what speed Voyager begane to shake during 'Treshold', but I do know that in the episode the Prometheus was said to be the fastest ship in the fleet...
Also the Prometheus was build for deep space tactical assignments. CAn someone explain to me what tactical in this sence means?
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Meddle not in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!
(-=\V/=-)
[This message has been edited by Altair (edited May 13, 2000).]
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"The search and the arrest provided several hours of entertainment in the neighborhood."
-"Worm Suspect Arrested", Wired News
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However, with the end of the Dominion War, the Prometheus-class ships that Starfleet would have indoubtedly built to refine the design seen in 'Message in a Bottle' (remember, it was boarded and taken-over by the Romulans) might be lying around with nothing else to do. What better that to assign these kick-ass ships to rescue the Fed's longest lost ship (that they know is around, that is!).
Brand-new spanking-gorgeous ships wouldn't go astray either, though.
*pictures the U.S.S. Nightmare, or a cargo pod with a worp core and eight nacelles*
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Remember December '59
The howling wind and the driving rain,
Remember the gallant men who drowned
On the lifeboat, Mona was her name.
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"Who wouldn't be the one you love
Who wouldn't stand inside your love." - Stand Inside Your Love, The Smashing Pumpkins
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Meddle not in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!
(-=\V/=-)
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"The search and the arrest provided several hours of entertainment in the neighborhood."
-"Worm Suspect Arrested", Wired News
Ahem, you get the point
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Meddle not in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!
(-=\V/=-)
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"A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
Aban's Illustration www.thespeakeasy.com/alanfore
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"The Starships of the Federation are the physical, tangible manifestations of Humanity�s stubborn insistence that life does indeed mean something."
Spock to Leonard McCoy in "Final Frontier"
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"A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
Aban's Illustration www.thespeakeasy.com/alanfore
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"The search and the arrest provided several hours of entertainment in the neighborhood."
-"Worm Suspect Arrested", Wired News
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"A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
Aban's Illustration www.thespeakeasy.com/alanfore
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"Life's a bitch, then you die"
-USS Luzon, Vanderbuilt Class starship
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"We set sail on this new sea because their is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won" John F Kennedy
members.aol.com/mfwan/index.htm
The ships 20 years (or more) out of home port would be very different from those exploring closer to home - they would operate completely independently, probably mostly outside communications range. Life aboard them might be hard, and the risks immense, but surely the UFP would be willing to take those risks if it allowed for greater knowledge of the neighboring space.
And we know the UFP has already sent ships to other quadrants. "Emissary" mentions the Quadros-1 probe that explored the Gamma quadrant closely enough to allow Sisko and Dax to identify a star system near the wormhole end. A probe would not be different from a starship - both would have to cope with identical fuel and range requirements, even if one was unmanned and the other manned. The probe would probably be slower than a manned ship, to reduce wear and tear in the absence of repair crews.
How do these probes send back their data? Either they have to sail all the way back to comm range, or they deploy their own commnet behind them as they move on. Such a commnet is probably a very narrow thread of relay buoys, useless for ships not following an identical course.
Timo Saloniemi
Obviously the crews would have to be willing to make a sacrifice.
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"A gathering of Angels appeared above my head. They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said..." -Styx
Aban's Illustration www.thespeakeasy.com/alanfore
I think probably after the problems with the E-D and the Yamato - 'fleet were a bit wary and kept a bit of a close eye on the Galaxy fleet and let them get over their teething problems for a few years - THEN send them out on some of their 'grand missions'.
The Challenger from "Timeless" was/is probably under way on a mission of its own.
Andrew
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"Who wouldn't be the one you love
Who wouldn't stand inside your love." - Stand Inside Your Love, The Smashing Pumpkins
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"Not so fast, Space Clown! My time-space manipulator has assembled an army of invisible cavemen to block your reverse polarity ray!"
- Future Man, Curses, Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.
And the ships rescuing Voyager don't need to already be out 20,000 lys....If we take the value of the federation MEMBER WORLDS being spread across 8,000 lys, then ships alunched from a more ditant member world would be only 16,000 lys from Voyager. Now if the federation has colonies up to 5,000 lys from earth in either direction (from the value of the UFP being 10,000 lys across) this distance is reduced to 15,000 lys.
However, this is still a 30 year trip out to 20,000 lys from earth and back to the UFP. I think is is plausible that in the UFP's expansion, they've made freinds with powers much further out. Let's say another 5,000 lys out, or 10,000 lys from earth. At this point it would be only 10,000 lys to reach a distance 20,000 lys from earth, or 10,000 lys from Voyager. A vessel on a 20-year deep space mission could have reached its turn around point 10,000 lys from its base, or 20,000 lys from earth, when it was reassigned through that midas array com system to rescue Voyager. Or perhaps the vessel was only on a ten year mission. here's how: a wormhole opens up near that base 10,000 lys from earth. The wormhole extends to a point 10,000 lys further out. An expedition might be sent through, traversing 10,000 lys in seconds. The expedition would then spend 10 years getting back to base, reducing the mission time to 10 years. From Janeyway's comment that voyager could use wormhole shorcuts on its way home, perhaps wormholes are more commong then we might have thought, just that voyager hasn;t been lucky enough to find any that would take time off of its trip.
well, that was kinda long, i hope it makes sense.....
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"If at first you don't succeed, skydiving isn't for you."
Federation Starship Datalink - On that annoying Tripod server.
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"How's your 13th chromosome? Missing a couple of base pairs in gene 178?"
The web page is not completed yet, but come by and check it out. :)
Quantum Threshold
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"The search and the arrest provided several hours of entertainment in the neighborhood."
-"Worm Suspect Arrested", Wired News
So far, Voyager has traveled to within 30,000 ly of her goal in six years, from a starting point that appears to have been 75,000 ly away from the goal. So the ship has traveled AT LEAST 45,000 ly in six years. At that rate, she should be back home in five years or less - so the said deep-space explorers could actually be deployed to meet her in Earth orbit!
However, I'm sure the admiral would be making a slightly more conservative estimate. Some of the boosts the Voyager has gotten have been flukes that are unlikely to be repeated during the remainder of the journey (hitchhiking with the Borg, getting boost from Kes). Others can very well be repeated (another transwarp experiment, various small jumps from wormholes and minor boosts from random alien cultures). it would suffice for Voyager to move at *half* her current speed to be at the 20,000 ly milestone in five years. The deep-space explorers could be anywhere between 5,000 and 20,000 ly from home, assuming they move at 1000 ly per year and are supposed to perform their mission using just one generation of human crew...
Timo Saloniemi
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[This message has been edited by Obi Juan (edited May 24, 2000).]
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"We set sail on this new sea because their is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won" John F Kennedy
members.aol.com/mfwan/index.htm
I take back what I argued earlier: standard Starfleet ships should be sufficient for these deep-space assignments, with minor modifications. I guess Starfleet sends a certain percentage of all the big ship classes to such missions, while leaving the majority to perform nearspace missions in the style of the various Enterprises. There could still be a couple of Ambassadors in deep space returning from a mission begun in 2339 or so...
Timo Saloniemi
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:-D
I'm making that my personal canon! ;-) *LOL*
Ambassadors must *not* be forgotten - as the ST:Magazine would lead us to believe. :-P
Screw them...! *LOL*
~ Jason :-)
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STAR TREK: BEYOND - http://stbeyond.homestead.com
Get ready for a dual-ship series dealing with multiple timelines.... *grins*
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Everybody except for one person that is.
The evil opposite of Elvis.
The anti-Elvis."
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