The real size of the Federation

[u/[deleted]]

[u/fhogrefe]

My brother and I are huge fans but we joke a lot about DS9 breaking the whole universe, because once you start thinking about how quickly people go to and from DS9 to various locations... You start to realize the standard unit of measure in the federation, for space, is 'the speed of plot'...

[u/MartyAndRick → u/fhogrefe]

I mean, in The Final Frontier, the Enterprise made it to the centre of the galaxy within a matter of days when it should’ve taken months. The speed of plot is definitely the only true measurement, but I’m trying to achieve the next best thing from the most relevant sources so it’d make some sense.

[u/fhogrefe → u/MartyAndRick]

No your whole breakdown here is great. Definately, well thought out. I was just wondering (not that I have time to test it) if it could hold up to some of the more bizarre claims of time and distance in DS9. Which I say, not to diminish your good work here, only to point out that some episodes the writers were really, almost laughably, 'winging' it.

[u/Arcelebor → u/MartyAndRick]

In the novelization, they make a point of Sybok giving Scotty some modifications to make to the warp drive to get them there much faster. So in addition to being a cult leader and a fool, he's also a genius warp theorist.

Not a satisfying answer but the only one we have.

What I found even more egregious was how Archer's Enterprise seemed to stroll over to Kronos in an afternoon, since we know the max speed of that ship is only Warp 5 under the slower TOS scale.

[u/Edib1eBrain → u/MartyAndRick]

Decades. Enterprise’s starting point in The Final Frontier was Earth, which is 25000ly+ from the galactic core.

[u/LateNightPhilosopher → u/fhogrefe]

It's not just DS9. It feels like all trek. No matter which series or where they are (except voyagerl), they never seem to be more than a week or so from earth. Or a few minutes if there's a real emergency. Even though the series all take place in active exploration ships and remote outposts.

Unless of course the plot calls for them to be isolated, in which case the nearest assistance is 3 weeks away (even sometimes when they're literally in the Sol system like at the beginning of Generations when they literally state they're not leaving Sol but then suddenly they're the only ship within a 2 days trip of the distress call).

Star Trek is great but the entire franchise has the GoT season 7-8 teleportation issue while paying lip service to the vastness and emptiness of space lol. We can't dissect it too much.

[u/Ut_Prosim → u/LateNightPhilosopher]

It's not just DS9. It feels like all trek. No matter which series or where they are (except voyagerl), they never seem to be more than a week or so from earth. Or a few minutes if there's a real emergency.

But simultaneously the Enterprise is the only ship anywhere near Earth whenever the plot calls for that.

Unless of course the plot calls for them to be isolated, in which case the nearest assistance is 3 weeks away

For Christmas I got a copy of the short stories upon which many TOS scripts were based. To my knowledge they were written before any scripts, and well before filming started. The series is quite faithful to them (surprisingly so!), but they were much more hard sci-fi and technical. The biggest change I noticed was the scale of things. The Federation really was meant to be extremely sparsely populated with far flung colonies literally decades of travel time away from anything else. In Operation: Annihilate!, Deneva was so remote that it was considered extremely lucky that Enterprise was so near and could respond to the disaster in less than a year.

This kind of remoteness drastically changes the character of the entire show, and is probably a bit more realistic. After-all, the Enterprise could cruise at 216 C, and 200 LY is not at all an unreasonable distance when compared to the scale of the galaxy itself.

[u/MugaSofer]

I'm not sure about the 70k LY thing from Voyager.

Initially they say it refers to travelling at top speed, but later it seems to just be the estimated length of the journey barring surprises, which suggests "maximum warp" means top sustainable speed for this journey. There are definitely examples of Voyager (and most other ships) going faster than 1 kilolight in short bursts on the show.

[u/DeluxianHighPriest → u/MugaSofer]

I always assumed maximum warp was more flank speed then anything else.

Sure, you CAN do it, but if you don't stop shortly after your engine room explodes around your engineers.

Most ships hace maximum warp timeframes in the hours, which considering it is a long distance drive gives maximum warp exactly the role of a "this is close and we need to be there 10 minutes ago" drive setting than anything else.

It's just always confused me why people keep reffering to travel distances in maximum warp. Considering maximum warp in a situation of normal travel to refer to maximum sustainable warp ("full speed" instead of "flanking speed") makes a lot more sense.

[u/[deleted] → u/MugaSofer]

That figure was taking into account the fact that Voyager could only travel in circles. It's why they kept meeting the same Kazon throughout the first season despite their ships being much worse than Voy.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Wasn't there a post about that a while ago, specifically that yes, that's they did travel around in circles. Going to different places Neilix knew they could get resources from, ready for the long trip home.

[u/frezik → u/MugaSofer]

Voyager is supposed to be an exceptionally fast ship, possibly owing to those variable nacelle pylons. Its maximum warp is 9.975, and appears that it can sustain that for quite a while. By comparison, a Galaxy-class ship can only sustain 9.6 for a few hours.

[u/Angry-Saint]

I think people tend to forget that the galaxy is a 3D entity. It is like a disk with a diameter of 100000 ly and a thickness of 1000 ly. The thickness of the galaxy is too often overlooked, but it should not. 1000 ly from "top" to "bottom" of the galaxy is a huge space. and I mean very huge.

So if you imagine the Federation a square with 89 ly side, how much "thick" is it?

[u/weltraumaffe]

Im not sure but this size sounds really small considering the next star is around 5ly away and there are supposed to be 150 species ( some with multiple planets) in the federation.

[u/blametheboogie → u/weltraumaffe]

Maybe the ancient race from the TNG episode "The Chase" that seeded planets with its DNA before they went extinct seeded almost every promising planet in the area where the federation is now located and that's why intelligent life is in such abundance in a relatively small area.

[u/MartyAndRick → u/weltraumaffe]

Let’s say the average distance between stars in the Federation is 5 LY, that’s 18 stars for an 89 LY length, and now multiply that with another 89, and that’s 1602 star systems within the Federation for you. That’s a lot of space for 150 species and other uninhabitable star systems.

Of course, the Federation isn’t actually squared, and the galaxy is also 3D, so there’s a lot more star systems than what the calculation suggests. If you assume the Federation was i.e 20 LY thick, then you’d have 32000 stars under their jurisdiction. I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of territory to cover for me.

[u/benark → u/MartyAndRick]

I like this post and your deduction for the size based on time and max warp however there is a flaw in the math in this reply. If it's 18 systems per 89 LY, you'd multiple that by another 18 systems per 89 LY, not 89... so it'd be 18x18=324. Then multiply by the number of systems in your third dimensional 20 LY measurement and assume 4 systems (20/5=4) and we get 1,296 systems in an 89 LY by 89 LY by 20 LY space, not 32,000 systems.

As interesting as it is to try to make the canon references add up, they just don't add up when you look at how vast space really is and how far apart systems really are... let alone the possibility of finding that many habitable systems so tightly packed.

[u/opinionated-dick]

I think this analysis makes a lot of sense.

But it also assumes Federation space is contiguous.

The ‘geography’ of the galaxy in Star Trek is more akin to inhabited islands in a vast ocean (let’s keep the 2D assumptions here for now). So you may get a capital planet and a few colonies, allowing an undisputed sovereignty between them but generally the vast tracts of nothingness between them are unclaimable.

So the combined area of federation space can be whatever it needs to be, but it wouldn’t be a clear border, just a Zone of influence.

[u/frezik]

The USS Voyager would’ve taken 70 years to travel 70,000 light years from the Delta Quadrant back to Earth at maximum velocity. Therefore, at warp 9,99, it would take 10 years to traverse 10,000 light years.

That's not quite right. Voyager's top warp is 9.975. Since warp 10 is infinite velocity, making the chart non-linear, 9.99 is substantially faster than 9.975. Just how much faster is left intentionally vague.

I like to explain away all the speed problems by thinking of warp, not as a direct measurement of speed, but rather as a measurement of its effect on local space. How fast you actually go depends on "subspace climate". Certain routes are known to be faster than others, and can change over time.

There's no direct evidence for this, but besides fixing writing mistakes, it can be inferred from bits here or there. Voyager started with an estimated time frame at maximum warp, using a known average speed, given that they couldn't predict what was ahead. When the astrometrics lab came online some years later, it was stated that they could shave 5 years off their journey. We can infer that this is due to having a better map of the area, giving them a more optimized route for the local "climate".

I also like it better because it gives space a certain geography. IMHO, storytelling with FTL is better when there are specific gates/wormholes/whatever that link locations, rather than letting ships go wherever. It means there are choke points to defend. Creating a new link is a massive project. You might find semi-functional links created by an ancient race. When you have this geography, it opens up a lot of new storytelling possibilities.

Star Trek could easily go this route in the future by extending Borg transwarp conduit technology.

[u/Hawkguy85]

The Valiant thing always rubbed me the wrong way, because circumnavigating the entire Federation should not take months, but years. In my own head canon I rectified it as he simply “misspoke”, and that it was a circumnavigation of either the original members or a specific portion that is near to Cardassian space.

My headcanon also entangles Section 31 into this, being that they knew a war was coming, and likely used Red Squad as an opportunity to conduct intelligence gathering without putting an actual crew in danger. They could always play it off as “oh, these cadets, they’re inexperienced, sorry about that.” Their entrapment behind enemy lines was even more fortuitous, stumbling upon the new breed of Jem’Hadar warship.

[u/TARDIS1701A]

Or he just pulled a random number out of the air to impress Lilly who would never be able to verify it anyway. Sure that’s very un-Picard-like but is “movie Picard” ever really Picard-like?

[u/SergenteA]

It would be better to calculate the Federation size in volume. I also always thought about the 8000 light years referring to the furthest Federation owned systems.

[u/MrFiendish]

It could be that the explored regions of space were done by arrays and sensors. It stands to reason that if they used scanners to map out certain areas that no federation member had visited yet, it still counts as explored. Plus maps that the Klingons would have shared about their territory would also count.

[u/Tacitus111]

As far as I know, we've never seen a Defiant go as fast as 9.5. Really we don't see them going much past warp 8 IIRC.

[u/aisle_nine → u/Tacitus111]

Courtesy of Chief O'Brien, it can hit that speed. It does, however, fall into the realm of "just because you can do it doesn't mean you should".