So this is for the writers here at DKos and, specifically, those who write and enjoy Star Trek fan fiction. And yes, I have decided to let my geek out, today.
I know that writing Star Trek stories is kind of a dead end. Who knows if we will ever see another series? And since the movies these days are all about the re-boot, who knows how much longer Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and the rest will be interested in doing them? Can Star Trek survive yet another reboot? Will we ever see another Spock as perfect as Nimoy and Quinto? Would we want to?
No, Star Trek writing lives in the hearts of the fans and, hopefully, will continue to do so for many years. And as writer of fan fiction, and a reader, I do notice one thing that I think needs to be addressed and explored in the stories we tell each other.
Follow below the great orange spiral nebula for what I'm talking about...
There are two acknowledged speeds in the Star Trek universe, warp speed and impulse speed. But there is also a third speed, less well known and far less obvious. Let’s call it the speed of plot.
The speed of plot is, by far, the more important. What it means is that a star ship gets to wherever it is going whenever it needs to based on the needs of the plot. If a ship needs to arrive in the nick of time, it does so. If it needs to be delayed, it little matters how powerful its warp engines or the distance to be travelled. It simply does not arrive. This is story telling 101; the ship only exists to serve the needs of the story being told. But what does that mean to us, the story tellers?
I believe it means that it behooves us to create our stories with believable time frames and speeds. We must acknowledge the enormous expanse of space and craft our stories to reflect that reality. We owe it to our readers to actually try to understand just how big space actually is and convey that vastness to our audience.
So, how big is space?
Let’s begin with the Sol system. We have no idea how representative our home system is, but it has the advantage of being real and knowable. It consists of eight planets and a number of planetoids, asteroids, comets, and miscellaneous flotsam. The most distant planet in our system is Neptune (let’s talk about Sedna some other time), orbiting at an average of 4.5 billion kilometers from the sun. By comparison, Earth orbits at a mere 150 million kilometers from the sun. It takes light from the sun, travelling at 300,000 kilometers a second, just over four hours to reach Neptune. Similarly, it would take a star ship travelling at warp one (the speed of light) the same amount of time, four hours.
Here is a chart of the standard warp speeds used in Star Trek, and their modifiers:
Warp 1 1xC (The speed of light)
Warp 2 10xC
Warp 3 39xC
Warp 4 102xC
Warp 5 214xC
Warp 6 392xC
Warp 7 656xC
Warp 8 1,024xC
Warp 9 1,516xC
Warp 9.6 2,438vC
Warp 9.9 3053xC
(So warp factor five is 214 times the speed of light)
So, if our star ship, travelling at warp one needs four hours to get to Neptune, warp two (ten times the speed of light) would take one-tenth that time, or about 25 minutes. At a standard cruising speed of warp factor six, the ship would arrive at Neptune in just over 41 seconds. That’s pretty fast! At warp factor 9.9, ten times faster still, it takes barely five seconds to cross the solar system. Therefore, assuming you have a fully functional ship that is capable of warp factor nine or so, you can get around a typical planetary system as fast as you need to. Getting from Earth to Neptune takes no more time than walking from your living room to your bedroom.
How does this compare to the speeds needed to travel around the galaxy? Ahh, now we are talking about distances that can only be expressed in light years, and this is important. A light year refers to a year. Let me hammer that home: A year. 365 long days, 8,760 hours. A year. This is a significant amount of time, and this is where so many Star Trek writers stumble.
We have a tendency to think of space travel much as we do automobile travel. How far is it to the supermarket? Five minutes? Ten minutes? A few towns away to a friend’s house is how long? 30 minutes, an hour? A long trip may be several hours. Too many Star Trek writers have a tendency to paint space travel in much the same terms.
Space travel is actually much more like travel around the world in sailing ships of the 17th - 19th centuries. Back then, travelling from China to England easily took as much as a year. In 1866, three tea clippers -- the warp nine star ships of their day -- took just 99 days to travel the 14,000 mile journey. From New York to London might take anywhere from two weeks to a month. Travel by sea took time. So does space travel.
This reality was touched upon by the writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation in their early stories, but largely forgotten after. The time required for space travel was why Wesley Crusher was on the Enterprise at all, and why it was full of other children and families. Even in the 24th century, space travel takes serious time. Travel around the Federation could take weeks, months, even years. People brought their families along.
Let’s look at some actual times based on canon sources.
Sol’s closest stellar neighbor is Alpha Centauri, around 4.5 light years away. At warp six, travelling to Alpha Centauri takes about four days. That’s right, our closest neighbor is a four day trip at standard warp speeds. For Jonathan Archer in the Enterprise NX-01, at warp three, it would take 42 days, or six full weeks of travel.
The planet Vulcan, typically understood to orbit the star we call 40 Eridani A, is about 16 light years away. At warp six, that translates to roughly two weeks (14.8 days), and six full months at warp three.
How about someplace really far? How about Qo’noS, the Klingon home world? The actual distance is never stated in any Star Trek show, but the published maps establish it as being around 4.5 sectors rimward (toward the outer edge of the galaxy), and five sectors into the beta quadrant. With each sector being 20 light years square, a little simple geometry tells us that Qo’noS is about 135 light years away (since the maps are all two-dimensional, we have no idea how far from the galactic plane Qo’noS is. It might be a good deal farther away if we have to go very far south or north. But let’s just take 135 light years as a given.
At warp six, Qo’noS is 126 days away, about 4.5 months. This reveals a major plot hole in many Star Trek stories, but significantly so in the pilot episode of the television show Enterprise, “Broken Bow.” In it, a wounded Klingon must be returned to Qo’noS by Captain Archer. In the NX-01, the cruising speed was warp 4.5 (Trip brags about this to Ensign Mayweather). At warp 4.5, Earth to Qo’noS would take 298 days, or the better part of a year! In the episode, Archer states it will take, “Four days there and four days back.” Even at warp 9.9 (a speed not available for another two centuries) it would take 16 days. To get to Qo’noS in four days at warp 4.5, the Klingon home world would need to be closer than Alpha Centauri, or about 1.85 light years away.
And thus we see the effects of the speed of plot. They needed an achievable mission that didn’t strain the audience’s idea of what space travel is (just like a car, only cooler) or their patience. An episode about how it took the Enterprise crew 300 days to achieve their mission would have been incredibly boring unless the story wasn’t really about the mission, but about the interactions among the crew over that extended period of time. That could have been an entire season of the show if it were written well. But that kind of in-depth character development is not really Star Trek’s metier, is it?
So how do we resolve the needs of plot and the reality of space travel? Do we just ignore them and assume no one will notice? I suggest we need to acknowledge the reality, not sweep it under the rug, and build our plots around it. How would we do that is an episode like “Broken Bow?” Actually, the writers gave themselves the solution at the same time as they ignored it.
The show is about a Klingon courier who crash lands on Earth after being attacked by the Suliban. So where did he come from? Well, to start, the Klingon is obviously a MacGuffin, a plot device intended to get the story going; he really has nothing to do with the actual plot. But he could have. Further, the Vulcan Attaché Tos, gives us yet another link to a better story line when he states, “You would have a fleet of war birds on your doorstep by the end of the week.” From where? We know the Klingons are at roughly the same level of technology as Earth, or only a bit further along; in 100 years, Captain Kirk will be fighting with them on an equal footing, so they can’t be running around the galaxy at warp 9 in 2151 (and even if they were, it would have still taken them two weeks to arrive at Earth from Qo’noS). Instead, there must be a fleet of Klingon ships somewhere within 1.85 light years of earth. So why not just make that the mission? Travel to meet the Klingons as they travel in their ships to Earth. They can even be farther away since they are travelling to us at, say, warp five while we go to them at warp 4.5 (you do the math problem: A Klingon ship is travelling to Earth...).
The need to go to Qo’noS is entirely unnecessary, except that someone thought it would be cool and didn’t give a damn about continuity or what space travel actually means. And this is what this article is all about, respecting the vastness of space and using it to tell better stories, or at least tell stories better.
A few final observations. The United Federation of Planets exists on the inner edge of the Orion Spur of the Milky Way galaxy (it surrounds Earth and that is where Earth really is). It is about 26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy and, thus, roughly 24,000 light years from the edge. The Federation spans an irregular diameter of around 300 light years according to the published maps. All of “known space” The Federation, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Empire, The Cardassian Empire, the Tholian Assembly, The Ferengi Alliance, etc. spans a diameter of around 500 light years. That represents only about 1/10 of the breadth of the Orion Spur and less than 1% of the diameter of the galaxy. By 2380, everything ever explored by humans and all the races they know, including the Dominion and the Borg, might cover 2% of the galaxy.
Known space is an incredibly tiny portion of what there is to explore. Use that in your stories. Stop thinking that the Alpha and Beta quadrants are fully known and explored and packed to the gills with Federation star ships so we just have to go zipping off into the Delta and Gamma quadrants. There are hundreds of millions of cubic light years of space still to explore in just the Alpha Quadrant. Consider doing that.
Just as a note: to travel from one side of the Federation to the other at warp seven, standard cruising speed for a late 24th century star ship, would take roughly six months (180 days, give or take). Earth to Vulcan is still nine days. Earth to Romulus (45 light years) is just under four weeks. Earth to Bajor (63 light years) is about 36 days. To travel from Earth to the closest edge of the Delta quadrant, keeping in mind that there is an area of deadly radiation (really) out to about 5-10,000 light years from the core which precludes human travel there, would take about 41 years at warp seven -- did you think they were kidding that it would take Voyager 75 years to make it home? Keep these numbers in mind as you write.
In closing, you would never write a story in which someone drives a car from New York to Los Angeles in three hours unless you created some explanation for how they did it. At least make the same effort when you tell your Star Trek stories. Use the vastness of space the same way you use every other element in your story: To make it better, stronger, more believable, more real. As Chekov noted, (no, not that one, the other one): If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there. Use space in the same way. It is there, you can’t avoid it (unless you set your entire story on a single planet), it should be used and, if used, used properly. The space surrounding your ship is every bit as important as the ship itself. Don’t ignore it.