So last week for my birthday, I went to Universal Studios for Fan Fest Nights. You can read all about it here.
I had a question that I wonder if it could be answered: how long would a trip from Earth to Vulcan be? The walking attraction Red Alert starts off at Spaceport Los Angeles which advertises shuttles to various places, one of them being Vulcan. According to NASA, Vulcan is 16.5 light years away. Can the length of this trip be calculated? I couldnāt find much information on Type 14 shuttlecraft featured in Picard season 3. Memory Alpha simply says they can go high warp speed.
I found this website that does warp speed calculations but I donāt know if it is accurate.
According to most calculators I can see online, weāre looking at about a month at warp 5, or around 15 days at warp 6. I think a traditional āshuttleā wouldnāt be up to the task - youād want a vessel with bunks and space to walk around, at the very least.
I think a traditional āshuttleā wouldnāt be up to the task - youād want a vessel with bunks and space to walk around, at the very least.
They can probably do it in a pinch. In Relics, Scotty is given a shuttle to roam around in, and itās doubtful that the Enterprise would have given him one if it was something that would only be capable of short-range operation.
But normally, Iād imagine that youād just rendezvous with a starship, who would take you the rest of the way, with or without the shuttle, which would get close enough, and then youād either have another ship, or use another shuttle to get you the rest of the way.
Sort of like a car using a ferry.
Yeah, if you go back and watch the video I posted on YouTube, the welcome message that plays when youāre in line specifically says shuttle. It wouldāve made more sense if they were runabouts but thereās no evidence that runabouts are even used during the period of Picard season 3.
Based on what I can remember from DS9, runabouts are faster and generally used for longer trips.
EDIT: Is the Federation even adhering to the warp five speed limit anymore? I know it doesnāt get addressed after āForce of Natureā, but is there anything suggesting that the speed limit has been dropped completely by the 25th century?
EDIT 2: The site I linked says 28.19 days.
EDIT: Is the Federation even adhering to the warp five speed limit anymore? I know it doesnāt get addressed after āForce of Natureā, but is there anything suggesting that the speed limit has been dropped completely by the 25th century?
Nothing explicit, though thereās behind-the-scenes materials. The nacelles on the Intrepid-class were designed to mitigate that for example, but that never made it on-screen.
On-screen, we just know that warp engines didnāt significantly change, and that the Enterprise was able to exceed those speeds after a bit, so it was presumably fixed behind the scenes.
I think the word āshuttleā could plausibly be applied to long-range, low-capacity transports - maybe even something as large as the USS Raven.
Is the Federation even adhering to the warp five speed limit anymore?
I just assume theyāve fixed that issue.
I mean, today, we use shuttle pretty broadly, to refer to anything from buses to a space vehicle that went to the ISS.
Not everyone works in Starfleet, so civilians might have a different definition of shuttle.
Yeah, I think in terms of a regularly scheduled passenger transport, something like a runabout or even larger could be considered a āshuttleā by civilian standards.
Voyagerās āvariable geometry pylonsā were designed to allow greater than warp 5 travel without the damage to subspace. Itās also entirely possible that Starfleet adapted the borg technology from the Delta Flyer to increase the travel speed of shuttles. The warp scale is logarithmic so even a fraction of a point increase can shave significant portions of time off a trip.
