Flare Sci-Fi Forums: This is a huge increase. Is it realistic?

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Posted by targetemployee (Member # 217) on :

According to the Bible, humans had charted 18 inhabited worlds doing warp 2. At warp 5, the speed of the SS Enterprise NX-01, humans are able to visit 10,000 inhabited worlds.

Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :

There's kinda of a mixing of terms in the Enterprise Bible. The number of worlds that are possible to be visited are dependent on the range and fuel efficiency of the vessel, not really the speed. Range roughly means how far a ship can go based on its maximum capacity of storing fuel and the efficiency at which the vessel can convert the fuel into propulsion power.

For example, a Chevy Cavalier with a 10 gallon fuel tank and an average fuel efficiency of 25 mpg will not go as far as a Saturn SL2 with a 9 gallon fuel tank and an average fuel efficency of 30 mpg. The Cavalier will get 200 miles of range and the SL2 will get 270 miles of range.

Thus, the Enterprise could visit 10,000 worlds if the engines are efficient, there a decent storage capacity for the matter and antimatter, and if the crew has a lot of time on their hands.

However, the other side to this problem is the number of planets within proximity to the Earth. Are there 10,000 planets within range of Earth given the range of the Enterprise? Possibly. When you count in all of the M class worlds and all of the non-M class worlds and the planetoids and the like, there will be a lot of them. 10,000 though? I don't know, that may be stretching it a good bit.

As for the 18 planets within the range of previous vessels, I think that number is sorely underestimated. I mean, there are already 8 planets in the Sol System that could be explored. Then there has to nearby systems on the way to Alpha Centauri, Arcturis Prime, and Vulcan. Not to mention there has to a few planets in each of those three systems I mentioned. I find this number to be a bigger problem than the 10,000 number.

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

I think they said "inhabited planets", but I might be wrong. However, I do know they said it was the number of planets reachable within a certain time. So, within a year at warp 5, or something like that.

Posted by The_Tom (Member # 38) on :

Tim's right. Exact quote:

quote:
At warp 5, 10,000 inhabited planets are within one year's journey, compared to only 18 at warp 2.

Might Sternbach's tables have been used after all?

Posted by Siegfried (Member # 29) on :

I guess it might have actually helped if I read the Enterprise Bible thoroughly before posting a response.

Anyway, what's this about Sternbach's tables?

Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :

It's where he keeps all the older books of his, gathering dust, when he writes new and completely different ones.

In any case, the "within range" issue could be modified by tactical considerations. You can't send a starship so far away that it cannot return to take part in an interstellar war you might feel like having. A fast ship can go farther out and still be back by dinnertime. And if you have a greater number of ships, you can spare more of them for long-duration exploration.

Also, early exploration efforts would make use of Vulcan knowledge. Their existing records would reveal which places were not worth a visit, and might thus speed up exploration. Then again, the records might be pessimistic or outright rigged, deliberately slowing down human expansion.

Doing the math, warp 5 in Okudaic-cubic terms ought to be about 15 times faster than warp 2, and the volume covered by a series simple straight-out exploration runs then 15^3 times larger, or about 3500 times. The Bible suggests 5000 times, assuming constant star density (or, rather, constant density of class M planets), so we're in the ballpark. If we assume that Earth was in a low-density region (explaining how we could stay undisturbed so long), we're talking business.

But it's all theoretical business. One ship cannot explore a sphere all at one, just one radius of the sphere at a time. And the bigger your sphere, the more ships you need to fill in the gaps between the radii. Archer wouldn't meet 10,000 alien races in his lifetime (duh - he has, what, fifty years of life to look forward to, so he'd have to meet an alien every second day for the rest of his life), nor would a Starfleet of a hundred Enterprise-like ships.

Timo Saloniemi

Posted by Ryan McReynolds (Member # 28) on :

I think it goes without saying that the figure refers to the number of worlds available to visit in one year, not the number of worlds one could visit in that year.