It’s a day ending in Y so I am musing about Star Trek as is my thing at the moment.

The Delta Quadrant was an unknown when Voyager got stranded there.

Now I was a Stargate fan first and they have hyperdrive in that, not Warp Drive. Near as I can tell from google maximum Warp is 2-3 light years travelled per day. For a Stargate regular Asgard-Earth hyperdrive (as seen on the Daedalus) they can do more like 143,000 a day. If they pair it with a ZPM it’s 750,000. Now hyperdrive speeds do vary. The Goa’uld pre-Apophis (probably reverse engineered Asgard stolen) would have taken a year to make the trip to Earth. In the Season 1 finale they did it in a couple of days. Wraith hyperdrives are also slower and they have to stop (a bit like Warp) as the engines/ships take damage and need to rest. But regardless hyperdrive is ridiculously much faster than Warp Drive.

All alien races in Trek seem to use some iteration of Warp Drive. I mean achieving Warp is when a race is considered ready for first contact right? Well it’s FTL not Warp and as I understand it because Warp has to set a course around everything, they are still in normal space. It’s basically just like really fast, with some kind of something so that there isn’t a temporal issue. Which is a bit how Destiny worked in Stargate (which pre-dates every other ship seen). So it could be said that Warp is like “early development” when it comes to FTL but due to first contact, and then the federation, they never broke from it. They just kept going like with a mental block. Sort of an echo chamber thing due to working together the second any race started down FTL.

Anyway so Delta Quadrant is far away in terms of Trek travel times. Not really far enough but work with me. What if races here had developed something akin to hyperdrive?

This is a very long way of musing about what such a development could do to the federation. They have the Prime Directive right because introducing advanced tech to people who aren’t ready for it – they could destroy themselves. Fear leads to jealousy, leads to divisions, leads to fighting and boom it’s war. So if they encountered a race with hyperdrive how would Voyager feel being on the ‘other side’ of the Prime Directive? Knowing this race had a way to get them home but they were refusing for Voyager/the Federations own longterm good.

Or alternately what if they did agree to share? What would the Federation suddenly having such tech do? Comparing 2-3 light years per day with hundreds of thousands times more, is like some guy who has only ever walked anywhere, suddenly getting a supersonic jet. What would that do to the power relations/politics of the federation? Would it help areas that StarFleet had given up on as it could increase their reach as ships could move around more easily? Or would it increase the inequality? If the Federation had the tech but they wouldn’t share with say the Romulans, would that lead to a first strike war as the Romulans afraid of what the Federation could do, sought to weaken them preemptively and then of course the Federation would what? Expand with imperialism. As the Klingons in Discovery said the most dangerous of words “we come in peace”?

I don’t know. My mind is chewing on it.

Remembered something I forgot.

The blocking in that table scene in Picard’s last episode.

From lots of angles Worf was hidden.

It was really noticeable and weird. I kept wondering if maybe he actually wasn’t there/it was a stunt double or something on retakes. It felt like it had to have been done on purpose.