Star Trek Warp Distance Calculator

If you remember the Star Trek Role-playing Game from FASA, then you’ll remember how good the writing was. The game developers had everything figured out, right down to the coordinates for different planets and the actual speeds of the various warp factors. I’ve made a cute little utility to work out the time it takes to go from here to there at a given speed. I now present The Star Trek Warp Distance Calculator.

Bridge hit on Star Trek
The bridge of the Enterprise had very few safety features.

There were maps of just about everything, so if you you’re lucky enough to have all the source books then you can get coordinates for just about everything and everywhere. Just enter the coordinates for the planets in question, add the warp factor and you’re set. If you don’t have the coordinates, then you can just enter a number for the parsecs and that will be used instead. Keep in mind that South and West should be negative values. Yes, yes, I know. It was space, but they had compass directions. Let’s just move on.  🙂

After you hit the button, the utility will tell you how many days it takes to travel that many parsecs at the warp factor indicated. Just a bit of simple math, but you didn’t have to do it  yourself. Well, assuming that you were going to do this math in the first place. It’s kind of a niche…

About the Speed Multiplier

The idea was that you cube the warp factor, and that’s how many times the speed of light you’re going. (So warp 2 would be 8 times the speed of light.)  It was mostly fantastic! I say “mostly” because there were two major problems.

  1. It was a two-dimensional map. Of course it was, it was published in the 80’s. It’s not like they could post a 3D map online.
  2. Warp speed was too slow. Even at the crazy speeds we’re talking about, those maps were just too big for one person to visit things in any kind of pattern. If you were in the Triangle doing a trade circuit, you would spend most of your time in transit and make very few trades. There would be no “favorite pub” on a planet, because you only show up there once every couple of years. To correct this, I’ve doubled the final result by default. If you prefer the original speeds, then just uncheck that box.

So there  you are. I hope you enjoy it. If you look around Google then maybe you can get some maps or coordinates to play with. Just remember that this stuff isn’t in print anymore. Paramount dropped FASA and the game went out of print. The stories in the old game were clearly superior to the stuff Paramount produced later, but now you can only get the books on eBay. Sadness. 🙁