Course Oblivion Question

[Eminence]

At the beginning of this Episode, Demon Janeway mentions that they're about to take some route that would pass through the center of the Milky Way and get them home in 2 years. How come the real Voyager crew didn't notice this shortcut home? Wouldn't they be able to pick it up with astrometric/long range sensors?

 

[Guy Gardener]

No, it was the enhanced warp Drive which cut the trip down to 2 years. Janeway was just reaching the center of the galaxy in season seven... Picard went there in season 5 TNG for a four day week end in the Nth Degree.

 

[Eminence]

Oh that's right, they were going to pass through the center of the galaxy, but that would have been because of the enhanced warp drive.

 

[Sisu]

Plus, Chakotay's spirit guide told him to stop off at Sha'Ka'Ree....

 

[Bill Morris]

No, it's nonsense. A Starfleet vessel wouldn't be able to do that, even with some sort of enhanced warp drive. The galactic core is massive black hole. The real Voyager's course was a curved path just inside the outer rim of what you see in this image from Voyager's Astrometrics Lab.

Image credit: CBS Paramount Television

 

[Guy Gardener]

I've read (fiction) which says the center of the galaxy is a vast stellar nursery. Which would explain why in that picture that the middle is yellow and not black.

 

[Christopher]

LCARS 24 said:
No, it's nonsense. A Starfleet vessel wouldn't be able to do that, even with some sort of enhanced warp drive. The galactic core is massive black hole. The real Voyager's course was a curved path just inside the outer rim of what you see in this image from Voyager's Astrometrics Lab.

Guy Gardener said:
I've read (fiction) which says the center of the galaxy is a vast stellar nursery. Which would explain why in that picture that the middle is yellow and not black.

Don't confuse the Central Bulge with the central black hole. The Bulge (which is actually now known to be bar-shaped) is over 20,000 light years across and contains about 90 percent of the stars in the galaxy. The central black hole (believed to be identified with the radio source Sagittarius A*) is far more compact, no more than 17 light-hours across, although it has thousands of stars clustered within a parsec of it. On the scale of the picture in LCARS 24's post, the central black hole would be invisibly small.

When Chakotay said the course would take them through "the center of the Milky Way," it would've been the Bulge that he was referring to. The stars would be pretty densely concentrated there, but not impassably so by a long shot. Within ten parsecs of the core, the stars would average maybe a tenth of a parsec apart, which is three trillion kilometers. Farther out, they'd be even less closely packed. A starship would have no trouble passing through the Bulge.

 

[Sisu]

What about Seven's massive bazookas? They would have trouble squeezing through a space of only three trillion kilometres....

 

[Bill Morris]

I would expect the greater and more complex gravitational forces, as well as higher particle density and radiant heat, to cause problems with maintaining a stable warp field, not to mention lack of hospitable planets for resupply and even long stretches clear enough of obstacles through which to sprint at high warp (especially with so many objects colliiding and some even exploding). Navigation might be another tough one.

 

[Christopher]

With stars still being on the order of a light-year apart in most of the Bulge, I really doubt there'd be any major navigation or warp-field problems. Remember, it's only within 10 parsecs (33 ly) of the center that the stars are as close together as 0.1 pc (1/3 ly). As close as 100 pc (326 ly), the average separation would increase to a light-year or so, and presumably in most of the Bulge (which, remember, is over 20,000 ly across), the separation would be greater still. We're talking about stars only 3 or 4 times closer together than they are in the galactic disk, not thousands or millions.

It is very difficult for the human mind to grasp how empty space truly is. Even the places where objects are concentrated most densely on a cosmic scale, they're still much farther apart than anything we've ever experienced or are capable of imagining. Even the core of our galaxy is mostly empty space. There would be few "obstacles," few collisions.

Heck, even in that central 10 parsecs, with a separation on the order of 1/3 ly, that's still over 3 trillion kilometers, which is several million times the diameter of a sunlike star. If you treat the stars as billiard balls, then they'd be an average of about 100 miles apart. Imagine that. A bunch of billiard balls rolling around on a table so huge they average 100 miles between adjacent balls. What would you say the odds of collision are?

 

[Guy Gardener]

You're almost infringing on Douglas Adams there I think...

 

[Bill Morris]

We've all seen the VOY Astrometrics displays showing the curved path toward Sector 001, in which cutting through the center was never even remotely considered by the real Voyager crew. These two aren't the best examples, but you get the idea.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Different methods of propulsion would require the creation of different kinds of shield technology, or the enhanced warp bubbles could reacted with reality differently which might have allowed for a completely different course plot.

Any course would have to allow for contact with others, and shore leave and shopping... However, by increasing the speed dramatically... what was once an insurmountable wasteland or stellar desert could suddenly be a two day stroll.

 

[Christopher]

Those images do not represent Voyager's path at all. They're both from "Message in a Bottle" and represent the network of subspace communication relays used by the Hirogen.

The show graphic reproduced at the start of the Delta Quadrant section of the book Star Trek Star Charts, which was often seen in the background in Astrometrics in later seasons, shows a more or less straight path that happens to skirt near the outer edge of the Central Bulge, while the book's own interpretation is an even straighter path.

Of course, most of that "path" was skipped over by Voyager's various jumps. It spent the first three seasons on the outer rim of the galaxy,then jumped over 40,000 light-years in the next two years, and spent the rest of the series somewhere around the 3-Kiloparsec Arm near the Central Bulge. So a "curving" path was never an issue, since their direct paths between jumps were never more than 2-3000 light-years long, not enough on the galactic scale to be "curving" around the Bulge at all.

Sadly, the show itself mostly ignored the issue of the galaxy's geography. After the jump in "Dark Frontier," they should've been in or near the Central Bulge, which means that at least half the sky should've been filled with a near-solid mass of stars. It would've been a gorgeous visual that would've made the look of the show very distinctive. Instead, they just treated one part of the galaxy like any other and used the same old starscapes throughout the series. SF TV and filmmakers miss out on so many opportunities by ignoring real science.

 

[Jack Bauer]

Eminence said:
At the beginning of this Episode, Demon Janeway mentions that they're about to take some route that would pass through the center of the Milky Way and get them home in 2 years. How come the real Voyager crew didn't notice this shortcut home? Wouldn't they be able to pick it up with astrometric/long range sensors?

Didn't the Demon Voyager go along a different route than the real one? If so Voyager was too far away.

 

[Guy Gardener]

You have to realize that in the beginning, these quicksilver people knew exactly what they were, and Earth wouldn't have been part of their agenda... At some time they decided to wipe their memories and refabricate memories of the crew in favour of continuing their own half lives... If it didn't happen by accident.

 

[Timo]

For all we know, it's their standard modus operandi, or something built into their quicksilvery genes.

That is, they can be anything, and usually are. But when they choose to be something, they totally immerse themselves in the role, mentally as well as physically. They are perfectly capable of warp travel, as shown, but when they are playing pools of mercury on a demon planet, they play it to the hilt, pretending they don't have any extra abilities. They'd also deliberately forget how they got to that planet in the first place - quite possibly by pretending to be some other starship crew?

Once getting into the make-believe of being Voyagerites, they would start to pretend that they can't be back to Earth immediately. But they'd also spice up their cosplay by at some point "inventing" a new, faster means of travel, and a new route to Earth.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Sisu]

^ Except, from my memory, they were nothing but pools of quicksilver until Tom and Harry blundered along and gave them something to copy.

 

[Crewman47]

Christopher said:

LCARS 24 said:
No, it's nonsense. A Starfleet vessel wouldn't be able to do that, even with some sort of enhanced warp drive. The galactic core is massive black hole. The real Voyager's course was a curved path just inside the outer rim of what you see in this image from Voyager's Astrometrics Lab.

Guy Gardener said:
I've read (fiction) which says the center of the galaxy is a vast stellar nursery. Which would explain why in that picture that the middle is yellow and not black.

Don't confuse the Central Bulge with the central black hole. The Bulge (which is actually now known to be bar-shaped) is over 20,000 light years across and contains about 90 percent of the stars in the galaxy. The central black hole (believed to be identified with the radio source Sagittarius A*) is far more compact, no more than 17 light-hours across, although it has thousands of stars clustered within a parsec of it. On the scale of the picture in LCARS 24's post, the central black hole would be invisibly small.

When Chakotay said the course would take them through "the center of the Milky Way," it would've been the Bulge that he was referring to. The stars would be pretty densely concentrated there, but not impassably so by a long shot. Within ten parsecs of the core, the stars would average maybe a tenth of a parsec apart, which is three trillion kilometers. Farther out, they'd be even less closely packed. A starship would have no trouble passing through the Bulge.

I'm no expert on Stars and all but if all the Stars at the center bulge were at least a light year apart then wouldn't radiation levels be so high that any travel between them would be impossible for any ship, even with improved Solar shields.

 

[Timo]

^ Except, from my memory, they were nothing but pools of quicksilver until Tom and Harry blundered along and gave them something to copy.

Or that's what they looked like. But somehow, they had gotten to that planet, and survived there against the explicated laws of nature. All this "pools of cool deuterium in a hellhole planet's cave" stuff sounds like a baited trap to me: the standard means for these pools to travel between planets. They trap passersby, copy them, and migrate in their form to the next planet.

I'm no expert on Stars and all but if all the Stars at the center bulge were at least a light year apart then wouldn't radiation levels be so high that any travel between them would be impossible for any ship, even with improved Solar shields.

Why? Earth is much less than a lightyear from the Sun, and we aren't dying of radiation.

Sure, it might be pretty "hot" in there. But nowhere near the hotness of what standard starships face during standard missions, I'd think.

Timo Saloniemi