Talk:Friendship 1

How did it get there?
How is it that this probe was able to travell all the way to the Delta Quadrant? Even with centuries to travel, it shouldn't even have been able to leave the Alpha Quadrant. Humans didn't devolop a Warp 2 engine until 2143, and it blew up only moments after achieving that speed. Thus, Friendship 1 would've been travelling at little (if at all) above Warp 1, which would mean it would take thousands of years to reach the Delta Quadrant. And that's if we disregard the fact that that it would eventually run out of fuel along the way. 71.203.209.0 13:51, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Contact was lost with the probe nearly two centuries after its launch, so it's possible that it ended up in a black hole or something, similar to what happened to the Voyager 6 probe. --From Andoria with Love 16:06, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Or even the Caretaker. I think enough time had passed for it to get to the badlands at Warp 1 when contact was lost, and the Caretaker has taken other unmanned devices, like the Dreadnought missile. --OuroborosCobra talk |undefined  17:30, 25 September 2006 (UTC)


 * User:71.203.209.0 is right. Starfleet gave Voyager its last known location and then Harry calculated its path and they found it very close to where it should have been. There was no black hole or caretaker or anything. In nearly the same scene Janeway mentions that the nearest starfleet ship is 30,000 light years away. Even at warp 2, which is the maximum speed that could be assumed for the time of its launch (considering the Warp 2 barrier), it would take 2,976 years to travel that distance. Furthermore, this is the distance to the Federation reach of 2377, not Earth, so add even more time. The story is absurd, but that is how Voyager works, you just have to accept it. I know, with things like and, it can be very hard. --Bp 18:05, 27 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Let me clarify that Star Trek is absurd. I simply hate when they are not at least internally consistent. --Bp 18:07, 27 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Heh, Voyager being inconsistent again. What a surprise. Thanks Bp. --OuroborosCobra talk |undefined  18:10, 27 September 2006 (UTC)


 * You know, the fact that it was still in contact with starfleet when it ultimately got lost does not rule out the possibility that it fell trough a wormhole; it might have, early on, and then just have automatically re-established contact. The caretaker theory is unlikely though, even besides the fact that it seemed like the caretaker had started kidnapping ships only recently, the probe would have traveled much the same way as voyager and should have been mentioned as a valuable source of cartographic data before (not to mention that it wouldn't have gotten trough Borg space). Anyway, the big inconsistency here imo is that a 21th century probe could communicate with earth from this distance while voyager couldn't (at least not without cutting edge technobable). -- Capricorn 14:59, 4 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Maybe the difficulty with the NX-Alpha and Beta was creating a useful Warp 2 field, one that would enclose a manned spacecraft; whereas Friendship was relatively small and didn't require life-support, so they could send it off at Warp Whatever at a time when this would have been impossible for a bigger craft which couldn't put all its power into propulsion. It's pure after-the-fact rationaliation, but it makes some kind of sense; self-powered missiles were able to break the sound barrier five years before Chuck Yeagar. 195.93.21.101 16:34, 17 October 2008 (UTC)


 * That makes a lot of sense actually

Removed
''It is however, unclear how the probe reached the planet featured in the episode, as it would most likely have been limited to a speed of just over warp 1, in which case it would have taken the probe at least 30,000 years to reach the planet in question. The probe would have needed to sustain a speed of nearly warp 5 to reach this position in the delta quadrant in the time allotted, a speed that would not be possible to earth science until nearly a century after the launch of the probe.''

Removed as a nitpick. - 20:58, December 21, 2010 (UTC)
 * I've made an attempt to re-include this info (in the bg section) in a more acceptable form. Feel free to disagree, but I think is a vast improvement. . -- Capricorn 22:17, December 21, 2010 (UTC)

My main problem is that there is no interpretation of any warp scale that works in canon, and we know the warp scale during ENT wasn't consistent with the TOS one at the very least, therefore we don't know anything about what is or isn't possible. This isn't something that is adding to the article by pointing out some glaring inconsistency, since the warp scale has never been consistent, so I don't see why we should be pointing it out at all. - 22:28, December 21, 2010 (UTC)


 * Three points: First of all, before making my main argument I'd like to contest your assertion that "we know" the ENT warp scale is different from TOS. Frankly we don't, because indeed the scale has never been consistently applied. Inconsistencies between ENT and TOS are arguably not worse then those between individual TOS episodes. I'm pretty sure production sources never said they were different, and I even seem to remember someone saying they were intended to be the same (though I can't find a quote for that). But in any case, that assertion shouldn't been treated as an indisputable "fact" in this discussion.


 * The rest of your argument makes more sense though, warp scales have always remained vague in actual canon, even though there is less discussion about them in background sources. However, the thinking that led me to consider my note valid is as follows: While warp scales may not be consistent in canon, the near-consistent support for them in technical manuals and the likes justifies pointing out the inconsistency, not between and canon, but between Friendship One and widely respected background sources. Though I agree that line of thought is debatable.


 * Thirdly, I'm really not trying to start an edit war here but I've put the part of the note on presumed speed back in. That part has nothing to do with your argument here, plus it's firmly rooted in canon and relevant.
 * (Complimentary rant: Which ultimately ties in with why I wrote a new note in the first place. When removing obviously bad notes there seems to be a general tendency to completely purge the offending text even though it might contain, or partially contain, perhaps badly presented but very valid information. (even if it's just one sentence in a paragraph). I'm all for removing bad notes, and I certainly emphatise with the desire to remove something clearly flawed as soon as possible. But bad but valid info should be rewritten, not deleted.) -- Capricorn 02:37, December 27, 2010 (UTC)


 * In which case, we might as well bring to the table the "chi factor" (from the widely respected Star Trek Maps) or, to a similar effect, the "warp lanes" from its successor Star Trek: Star Charts - both of which were meant to explain away the factor of up to some thousand between observed speeds and "official" formulae. With one of these factors in mind, adding the fact that we can't be totally sure about the probes' warp speed (see discussion above), the exact travel time (about 250 years, perhaps?) and considering other random occurrences along it way, I don't see how there's any valuable information in the speculation as presented above. That's not to say that no information whatsoever can be derived from what we know about the probe, though - perhaps there can be a note on Warp speed about it? -- Cid Highwind 12:49, December 27, 2010 (UTC)