Trying to leave the void, Picard leaves under Impulse power.

TNG's Warp 9 would take 4243 seconds (71 minutes) to cover 1/16 parsec, hardly the 'seconds' that Chekov promised.1/16 parsec in 30 seconds is 214,329(c) or Warp 11.6 on the TOS-WF^5 scale.The Beagle's wreckage must have had a hell of a boost at the start, it 'drifted' 642 times faster!Īnyway, how fast does the Enterprise need to be to correspond to the episode: Sure enough, after only 30 seconds of continuous dialogue later they are in orbit!ġ/16 parsec = 1,928,548,500,000 kilometres, which the wreckage drifted in only 6 years! By contrast, the Voyager 1 probe has only gone 18,514,066,000 in 37 years. Tracking the wreckage of the SS Beagle, Chekov informs Kirk that the planet is 'only 1/16 of a parsec away' and that they should be there in 'seconds'.I suppose Spock could just be using flowery language, but that seems very large for a solar system!ĬONCLUSION: I don't thing a Starfleet 'parsec' is the same as ours. Incidentally, this is also the same episode where, having been stopped at the edge of the Metron solar system, Spock declares that Kirk could be out there anywhere 'within a thousand cubic parsecs of space'. Either they got flung WAY past the Cestus III system (I sure hope they left plenty of supplies for the medical staff there) or the Enterprise covered a hell of a lot more ground than we thought in pursuit of the Gorn ship! Even at WF7 using the WF^5 system, this distance would take 35 days to cover. Even if Cestus III was right on the edge of their charts and they were travelling Warp 6 most of the way, this would place Warp 6 at 44,276(c) - this meshes well with the WF^5 system but very badly with everything else!Īt the end of the episode the Enterprise is flung 500 parsecs (1,631 LYs) away from the Metron system. Mr DePaul then reports that they have travelled '22.3 parsecs beyond the latest chart limit'.Ģ2.3 Parsecs is 72.732 LYs.

This means that 0.6 SD units (maybe half a day) has passed since the first log entry.Increase speed to Warp 6 some time before SD-3046.2.The Enterprise then pursues the Gorn ship for a while at Warp 5.First captain's log is SD-3045.6, on the planet.I'll deal with those another time, so here are the significant uses and their problems: NOTE: I mentioned the 'significant' uses of parsec above as there many more uses where the term is just mentioned in passing, or in ways where specific times or distances were not a major problem. Speaking of speed and distance, here are the two Warp speed charts I will be consulting during this exercise, the standard TNG chart and the TOS Warp-Factor-to-the-power-of-five chart (it goes without saying that the TOS WF-cubed system is too slow for anyone's purposes and bears no resemblence to Warp speeds on any of the series): In Star Trek 'light year' (LY) was by far the more common term but it is interesting to see that in virtually all of Parsec's significant appearances it was used to express unusually massive units of distance enough to skew the Warp Speed charts and make TOS (as it occurred there most often) appear as a continuity orphan in terms of speed and distance that its ships travelled. The term often got bandied around in science fiction, probably to avoid the characters saying 'light years' all the time (and the associated misinterpretation that the latter were a measurement of time, not distance). The practical upshot of this is that 1 Parsec = 3.2615638 light years.

Parsec abbreviation