Katra Station - Time to Talk

[Solluk]

Hey there,

This isn't a post about us needing to talk.  ;-)

Rather, it's about how long it takes to talk to people who aren't nearby.

It is highly doubtful that anyone other than myself thinks about such things, and it is probable that I myself have sometimes overlooked it in my posts.  However, due to the highly isolated nature of Katra Station on the frontier, I thought it might be worth mentioning.

Here is a helpful chart that was created way back when TNG was on the air, and mostly refers to the Enterprise-D before the Dominion War (I think the DS9 tech manual suggests that Galaxy Class starships were later upgraded to a maximum speed of Warp 9.9, which they could sustain for longer than 10 minutes.):

Katra Station is about 20 light years from the wormhole, and on the other side of the wormhole is DS9.  So, you could say we are on a 53 minute delay, one way, for a subspace signal to reach DS9.  For them to answer would be 53 minutes times two.  Or about 1 hour and 46 minutes.

Even a 1 light-year distance would create a delay of about 2 and a half minutes one way, five minutes for a reply, which probably makes any kind of live conversation impossible even at that small distance.  (Unless we enjoy twiddling our thumbs and sitting for long periods of time after each statement.   You could basically listen to two or three pop songs while waiting for a reply.)

The only time live conversations ought to be possible is within the same solar system.  The round-trip delay is less than a second in that case.

(A recent conversation with the Numati as they approached the Trialus system had them at .1 light-years away, giving those transmissions a delay of about 15 seconds one way, half a minute for a response, which is still pretty annoying for a live chat... but is something that can be glossed over in a post.)

In reality, this time delay is so frequently ignored by professional Trek writers that it probably wouldn't occur to most people who are writing in our sim, either.   If the pros aren't bothering with it, why should we?

Thus, I'm not going to enforce such details on our players.  (That would get pretty annoying in itself) But I did want to make everyone aware of how long it takes for a message to get anywhere, and encourage everyone to willingly embrace our relative isolation from the rest of the Federation and Starfleet.

After all, being out in the middle of nowhere is part of what makes our sim special.  :-)

Cheers!