Date: 02 Jul 2015 13:52 Title: Scientific Notation (Distance) - Adele Oyugo
I see you went with a downbeat story for this prompt. Adele's pain is very real and well-realized.
I think this is where Trek in particular is fictional. A lot of the magical stuff is, too, but the nuts and bolts of distance are truly wrong. Even if you hit Einstein upside the head and blow his theory away, space is still FAR. And it seems like only VOY and ENT really got that and tried to show it at all. I recognize that the demands of weekly television don't allow for showing the reality, but even a ship traveling at 1000 times the speed of light is going to take a month or so to traverse 100 light-years, and 400 or so light-years is still on the same galactic arm that we're on. Hence her comprehension that the distance is hard to fathom? Right on target.
Difficult and haunting; Adele is hurting in a way that's very relatable.
Author's Response:
Me? Downbeat? Never. (Heh.)
Voyager was definitely the best, IMO, about showing the insane distances involved with this kind of travel. At max cruising velocity, they could travel 1000 light years in a YEAR. Hence the 70-something year optimistic estimate for getting home.
In Tesseract, I try to keep the distance in perspective, even though the QSD means that under certain circumstances, they can cross the galaxy in a month. But they're not doing that every day. The insane energy levels and computational power needed to do that means that it's good for very large jumps and emergency escapes, and not much else -- it's just not worth the resources (they're not utilizing dark matter drives just yet ;-) ), and besides, their ability to see the universe around them is limited at that effective velocity ... meaning it's hard to really "explore" at slipstream speed. So they're at "regular" warp a lot of the time, and sometimes, they have to weigh whether the use of the QSD is worth it.
As for Adele, she's an empath who basically just lost the other half of her soul. Yes, she's hurting, and in some ways, she always will be.
Thanks for the review!
Date: 02 Jul 2015 11:23 Title: Scientific Notation (Distance) - Adele Oyugo
Truth spoken here in such few short words. You can definitely hear how thankful she is that Ken isn't a Borg, but you can hear her missing him all the same (as well she should).
Author's Response:
If he had been taken instead of killed, there's no way Adele would still be in Starfleet, except maybe on a suicide mission of vengeance. I can't imagine the assimilation of one's Imzadi would do anything but ruin a Betazoid. But yes, she missed him desperately ... and still does. There's a reason she hasn't married again in all this time.