#this is a stream of consciousness math so there's bound to be errors here

[swedebeast]

Wait, hold up. In the TNG episode "Bloodlines", the Enterprise is trying to cover the distance of 300 billion kilometers but even at Warp 9 it would take 20 minutes.

I know this is the nerdiest shit ever, but I am trying to do the math here because that immediately sounded wrong.

If light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, that also means it goes at 5000 kilometers per minute. So, Warp 1 is a speed of 5000 kilometers per minute. So at Warp 1 the Enterprise can cover 300 billion kilometers - or 300,000,000,000 divided by 5000 - in 60,000,000 minutes. Looking up how Warp factors actually increase from 1 to 2, to 2 to 3 is giving me mixed answers as I try to look it up - nobody seems to fucking agree. What I do see is that at least 500 times the speed of light seems rather doable and mid-cruise speeds. So!

60 million minutes divided by 500 is 120,000. And some sources state that even 1800 times the speed of light is possible. So, 60 million divided by 1800... nets 33,333 minutes. And I found one guy saying Warp 9 is 6,561 times the speed of light. So. ONE MORE TIME! 60 million divided by 6,561 is... 9,144 minutes. Or about 6 days.

The old adage really is true. Warp speed is as fast as what the writers need for it to be (or they simply do not have a sense of scale, which really is a fault in most science fiction writers).

Not to mention the entire Milky Way is about 105,000 light years. And going at 6,561 times the speed of light means it would take 16,000 years to cross the Milky Way. How far again was the Voyager from Earth when it started its 70 year journey?