HOW FAR IS VOYAGER FROM THE ALPHA QUADRANT NOW?

Well, they're HOME now, by the time you read this, thanks to the sequence of events in Voyager's finale, "Endgame."

Barring inconsistencies that have crept in along the way, here's how the mileage broke down:

Voyager started out approximately 70,000 ly from home, with mentioned estimates of the journey taking about 70 years (occasionally 75, but they eventually settled on 70). That means that the crew expects to cover 1,000 ly each year using conventional means (arguments about maximum warp and weekly stopovers aside); we'll use that as a base formula for what follows.

From "Caretaker" to "Scorpion," it would be safe to say Voyager traveled 3,000 ly, based on that estimate.

In "Scorpion," the Borg cube took Voyager an unspecified distance into Borg space. In "The Gift," Kes gave Voyager a 9,500 ly push into the outskirts of Borg territory...so it's not unreasonable to estimate that the distance covered in these two episodes combined is about 10,000 ly (57 Kly left).

Early in Season 4, Seven of Nine and Harry Kim plotted a new course for Voyager based on Seven's knowledge, shaving off 5 years from the original time estimate (52 Kly left). However, as a result of the time-meddling going on in this episode, these changes may not have occured, after all.

In "Hope and Fear," Voyager doubled back a little bit to chase Arturis' slipstream ship, but rode the slipstream back for some distance, putting them "three months ahead" (250 ly) of their original position.

In "Night," the spatial anomaly in The Void cut Voyager's journey by nearly two years (2 Kly).

Then, in "Timeless," the slipstream drive gave Voyager another 10-year boost (10 Kly).

The estimate at this point is about 40 kly...Voyager's "Gravity" appears to adjust that to closer to 50 kly (see the "Year of Hell" stuff above. Our estimates aren't dead-on, you know...little differences do add up).

Then Voyager's "Dark Frontier" shaves off fifteen more years thanks to a transwarp coil. (15 kly) So, assuming they use conventional means from this point on (which will probably not be the case, of course), it would take 35 years to get home. This very figure is corroborated by a line from "Equinox II."

Then, the underspace corridors in "Dragon's Teeth" popped them forward 200 ly, which is a couple of months' journey but on a scale of tens of thousands of light years is rather negligible, for now.

The "catapult" in the episode "The Voyager Conspiracy" sent the ship forward roughly three years' journey.

In "Live Fast and Prosper," the fake Tuvok pointed out that the Telsian system was 33,324 light years from the Federation. While this isn't exactly reliable since the characters were con artists, after all, they did have the data and the ability to figure it out, and it does fit in with our estimate.

Q gave Janeway a few helpful directions in "Q2" that would've taken off "a few years" from their journey.

(And let's not forget that Voyager has been conventionally trudging along in the neighborhood of 1 kilo-lightyear per year.)

And, finally, any remaining distance has been made up by what happens in "Endgame."
 
 
 

RELATED TOPICS
Warp 10, Transwarp, and "Threshold."

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