Just rematch ed this episode and the Enterprise D refit goes to Warp 13 at one point.
So does the hospital ship
Pasteur. So it's unlikely to be superfast by the standards of the day. Hospital ships today are intended to be floating treatment facilities rather than ambulances, and few have high speed as a major design feature (although some are conversions of high volume container ships or tankers, for which high speed
is a design feature of sorts, albeit incidental and inherent in their long hulls). Hospital ships of the 24th century might be different, of course, but we don't really get the impression.
USS Voyager is the fastest ship in the fleet of it's time
Not really. She's fast, but not quoted with record speeds. The contemporary
Prometheus goes faster, as per "Message in a Bottle". The forte of the
Voyager is supposed to be her agility, as in the pilot episode where she uniquely can penetrate the Badlands.
which is obviously a couple of decades before All good things is set.
And so, apparently, is the construction date of the
Pasteur, or the E-D for that matter. How much a refit could really affect top speed can be debated.
That ship goes warp 9.975
...At "sustainable/stable cruising speed", whatever that means - dash speed is probably higher still. And nevertheless the
Prometheus goes faster.
and will take 70 years to go 70,000 light years.
To be exact, 75 years at "maximum speed". Which may or may not be the highest speed the ship can attain. After all, sustaining the highest speed for seven decades should be impossible - yet our heroes return to the seven-decade estimate after having begun their long voyage home, indicating it is an attainable goal, and thus that "maximum speed" should be read as "maximum attainable speed". Which may be much lower than either the dash speed of the ship, or the quoted stable cruising speed.
In the end, Barclay in "Pathfinder" calculates that the ship has been making headway at an average speed of warp 6.2. Which may very well be what Janeway based her initial guesstimate on.
Also warp 10 is considered to be transwarp at that time and isn't safely possible to starfleet (the borg and voth among others can go this speed though)
Warp 10 is considered infinite speed. No matter what the means, technologies or details, reaching this speed means zero travel time by definition. And doing better thus means arriving before you left, which may be what Riker is saying when claiming that besting warp 10 means time travel in "Time Squared".
So where does Warp 13 fit in?
In the future, apparently. Which is sort of the point.
In the 24th century, engineers and scientists are reputed to believe in nine "warp factors" where the engine works more smoothly than between those. The warp factors supposedly are a phenomenon of nature, which the warp engines exploit, not a feature of the engines themselves. Later folks may simply have discovered that there are more of these factors, at higher speeds (which the earlier engines could not attain and thus reveal the higher factors). Say, perhaps there's first a group of nine, then a bit higher up the speed curve a group of five, and warp 15 is now the going rate for infinite speed. Until the next group of six is found.
Real nature is weird like that. Would be fun if warp in Trek were, too.
Timo Saloniemi
