Illuminati-R-Us

I tried to think up a title pun, but was weft without any ideas...

SO I was watching Star Trek Voyager, and they mentioned the show premise - they were thrown 70,000 light years away, and it would take many years to get back, even at top warp speed. OK, sounds reasonable.

Watching next Generation, they have windows, and you can see the stars whipping by out there as they travel at warp speed. I see on average about two or three a second. Now around here, the nearest star is about 4LY away, so two or three stars a second going by means we are travelling at roughly 10LY/sec. Let me know if I am screwing up the math.

Some parts of the galaxy are more dense than others, but I figure our part is probably fairly typical for our area of the galaxy - our quadrant.

So at 10LY/sec, 70,000LY ought to take about 7000 seconds. That is 116 minutes. Not quite two hours.

OK, so maybe my density estimate is off. What if most stars are only 1LY apart. That would knock me down to say 2LY/sec. That still pushes me up to only ten hours.

An hour at a time,that doesn't even fill one season.

I guess hypothesis B might be they got carried away with the visuals out the window. If we only went 1LY/hr, then it would take four hours for a star to cross the window, not visually interesting. 70,000 hours is about 8 years then.

I am sure Trek Geeks know all about warp speed and how fast it is. I don't, just working with the visual forensics. I could easily be wrong, but it seems to me they went faster than 1LY/hr.

The reason you see the stars move is so you know the ship is moving.

Halcyon Dayz, FCD wrote:The reason you see the stars move is so you know the ship is moving.

aka "the script calls for it" - which is my constant answer to all of his posturing about movies, tv shows.

Exactly. Smeared stars zipping by look cool so fuck the math.

However, they are not totally inconsiderate about this. In the prequel series that nobody seemed to like, the one with Cpt. Archer, the stars swoosh ny considerably slower than in the other shows ecause the Enterprise of the day could only do Warp 4 or so.

I admit I had exactly the same thought as Enzo, many times, in my nerdy little mind.

Speaking of Star Trek. I watched Into Darkness the other night, the one with Sherlock Cumberbitch as Khan. It was really fucking awful, but at least I know about the artistic value of lens flare now. And their warp CGI is a lot worse than even in the TV series. All of them

Arneb wrote:I watched Into Darkness the other night, the one with Sherlock

Oh, one of the new "Star Warek" installments?
In the word of the Supreme Idiot, "sad".