Instead Voyager plods along at 1.0 SOP until the finale, whereupon they just wormhole the ship home and close down the show.
#Millennium falcon parsec series#
If the USS Voyager could travel in the same manner as the Millennium Falcon, then the whole of the Star Trek: Voyager series would have been quite short, with the pilot episode ending with them travelling from the Delta Quadrant to the Alpha ditto with ease and being home in time for Janeway's next coffee, and that would have been it. So it appears the Falcon is taking shortcuts or piggybacking on something that allows it to get to the destination in a time that makes for a higher average speed than the ship can actually propel itself. But - then - the Falcon manages to get half-way across the Far Far Away galaxy in a really short matter of time. In the case of the Millennium Falcon this certainly seems true in that - first - Solo claims the ship makes it "point-five past light-speed", not more than 1.5 c, which is nothing compared to any of incarnations of the Enterprise we know, from NX-01 and on-wards. But if you were to propel yourself on the other hand, with no machinery or vehicle to help you, then the maximum sustainable speed you could attain would be about 20 kilometers per hour at the very most. You can get from one town to another at an average speed of - say - 200 kilometers per hour if you go by train. Note that there is a huge difference between being able to get from one point to another, and to actually propel yourself at a certain speed. The difference between "getting from A to B", and "to travel at a speed" The numbers may be incomparable even within the same universe.Īlso, when trying to compare this, there is one more thing we need to consider. And once the hand-waving starts to try to make this come out right - "wormholes", "folding space" and what-not - then all bets are off and you cannot make any kind of comparison.
As Valorum points out in the comments: star ship speeds are easy prey for Early Installment Weirdness. This, in turn, means that if you start digging into it - as people have done starting with the very cryptic statement that The Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run in a number of parsec, which is a measure of distance and not time - you will find that the speeds are wildly inconsistent and do not actually make any sense.
Think about it, and ask yourself this rhetorical question: when was the last time that travel in fiction happened so fast that the characters were left with lots of dead time, or so slow that a plot-line was obstructed by it? For the most part, travel is mentioned only to maintain Willing Suspension of Disbelief, and speed is mentioned only if it is relevant for the plot or the set dressing.Īnother way of putting it is to paraphrase Gandalf's Principle of Wizardly Timeliness: a star ship is never late, nor is it early, it arrives precisely when the author means it to.
An unimportant inconvenience that must be dealt with, because the audience do not accept that characters just magically pop from one place to the other.Star ships always arrive on time, or suitably late for the plot What is important is: "will the ship get me where I am going in time?" And in science fiction, that answer is. Also they are irrelevant, because speed is not really important. This may sound snarky but the comment is serious it is meant to point out that the numbers are not comparable, even within the same universe. They travel at the same speed - 1.0 SOP - which is not comparableĪll star ships in all science fiction are always traveling at The Speed Of Plot.
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