Thread by @GabrielBFonseca

@galaxy_map I've been working on trying to map Star Trek to real stars on-and-off for a few years now, with the ultimate goal of perhaps plotting out the course taken by the Enterprises on their respective series.

The scale of the show is, partly, due to the speed of warp (1/?)

@galaxy_map Warp travel obviously doesn't exist, and the writers have played loose with it, but *originally* it actually had a very specific range:

In TOS, the speed of a ship in warp is given by

Speed (in xC) = (WarpFactor)^3

So the TOS Enterprise normally pulls of 7^3 = 343c (2/?)

@galaxy_map Important to observe that at this point, there was no warp 10 barrier. An Orion scout pulled off Warp 11, and the Enterprise once got up to Warp 14 for brief moments due to alien meddling.

This same scale also applied to Star Trek Enterprise, with the NX pulling off 125c (3/?)

@galaxy_map In TNG, Gene wanted to limit such warp escalation, so Michael & Denise Okuda (I believe) came up with a revised scale:

(Speed in xC) = (WarpFactor)^(3.3333...) where WarpFactor (0, 9)

From 9 to 10 there's a muddier assymptote. Some have tried to calculate it. (4/?)

@galaxy_map Long story short, a friend and I came up with a back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure out the size of the Federation's known space.
We call it "The Five-Year Edge".

Assume a ship could, somehow, travel outwards from Sol for 2.5 years at maximum speed, and return. (5/?)

@galaxy_map This allows us to calculate some ranges for the different eras:

ENT: Warp 5 = 125c -> 312.5 LY
TOS: Warp 7 = 343c -> 857.5 LY
TNG: Warp 9 (TNG Scale) = 1516.38c -> 3790.95 LY

This are the absolute maximum distance ships of the era could reasonably go. (6/?)

@galaxy_map Of course, none of this actually matters because the writers didn't want to actually do the math and didn't particularly care, but this exercise gives us an idea of the *intended* scale of Trek.
(7/7)