Okay, as I’m sure you know, the premise of the TV show Star Trek: Voyager was that the eponymous ship was hurled about 75,000 light years across the galaxy, a distance that would take about 75 years for a return trip.
Standard “Gilligan’s Island” setup, right? Each week, they try and escape, and each time it doesn’t work. Rinse and repeat.
Except, in VOY’s case, they actually were making some progress. Aside from the 1000 light years-a-year progress from normal travel, occasionally, they’d get little bumps. Some new technology would make the engines run faster, for awhile, or a friendly alien would toss them through vast areas of space in an instant, etc.
My question is, thus…how much farther did they get, over the run of the series? Counting only onscreen “canon” information, and discounting—at least for the moment—all the times where they stopped, backtracked, or took extra-long detours.
So, for starters, off the top of my head: In “The Gift,” a friendly alien (as mentioned above) sent them “ten years closer to home.” That, plus the assumed normal rate of travel, they were at least about…58,000 light years from Earth by series’ end.
But there was more than that. 'Anyone else want to weigh in?
This is one of the fan sites, suitably annotated with evidence from the series and even contemporary astronomy, to show the path: Star Trek Dimension - Star Trek Cartography
I was let down by the finale (well that’s not entirely accurate, I was let down by the entire series, but I digress…). I remember hoping to see Voyager have to make it through Romulan territory to finally make it back to Federation space. They could have had an alien entity/technology/whatever bring Voyager to 1000 light years from home, and the final season could be about the last leg of the journey.
So while we’re here… what would the subspace communication lag have been? It really doesn’t seem like it could have been more than a few years for the first SOS to reach known space.
In the latter seasons they were able to create a mini-wormhole to get limited communications through (with Reg Broccoli on the other side!) So Starfleet was aware that they were out there, eventually.
The final episode also detailed how much longer it took them to go the last 30,000 LY without the jump. You’d expect another five or six years, given that they started 70,000 LY away, but instead took 18 years (given that they met in 2404 for the 10th anniversary, and season 7 was set 2378.)
I figured there’d be a map or guide, but, so far, all I can find is this fan site that was never updated past season 4. (Maybe they didn’t like Seven of Nine and quit the show?)
They had the equipment (and used it once so the doctor could constantly monitor them while going through a radioactive nebula), but they needed to have a crew to avoid being lunch for hostile aliens.
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