AllenGould wrote:And if we push the speed from Warp 9 to 9.6, that brings the time to 17 hours, but the D is only rated to run that speed for 12 hours.
Sure, but every ship we saw built after 2370 was built to run several
times faster than that, indefinitely -- and THIS is taking place in 2387! You can really hammer that travel time down if you don't tie yourself down to stats that are a quarter-century out of date (just because we have better stats from back then).
And the shorter the trip, the higher your evac capacity. The Tech Manual capacity estimates were for a two-day round trip, which means you need sleeping facilities, you need food, you need sanitation, you need a place for people to stretch their legs.
But if you're only keeping people aboard for one hour instead of two days (which seems very realistic even
without any large advances in tech, just following whatever's the equivalent of Moore's Law for warp engines), you can pack 'em in standing-room-only, fill the cargo bays, the corridors, cetacean ops, everything -- and take two, three, maybe five times as many refugees as the ship's rated maximum. Life support may be strained, and it will be
very unpleasant for
everyone... but it'll work, and you have the entire hour-long trip home to replenish your air (and clean up any messes from kids who couldn't hold it for an hour).
Again: there is
zero chance that the Federation has never had to deal with a planetary evacuation of a large planet before. They will have support ships for this. The fact we don't have stats for them doesn't mean they don't exist. (It just means we can't make cards of them!) The people making the show have the canonical authority to wave them into existence, and that's not even cheating.
So my math looks like this:
Romulus and Remus have a combined population of 4 billion. 10% of those are rescued by personal transports that leave Romulus and don't return to help out more.
We're at 3.6 billion remaining. An armada consisting of the Federation military, the Romulan military, portions of the Klingon military, many Federation civilian ships conscripted into service (the capacity on those cargo ships!! the mothballed troop transports!!), every Romulan civilian spaceship that's remotely spaceworthy anywhere in the quadrant (except personal yachts), and a smattering of ships from minor powers (Tholia, Breen, Ferenginar) comes to rescue them. All told, there are some 15,000 starships here. Given what we saw during the Dominion War, and given a decade to rebuild after the War, this is plausible.
However, since most of those ships aren't
Galaxy-class or similar dreadnoughts, and many of them are MUCH smaller than dreadnoughts, this giant force is only equivalent to about 7,500 dreadnoughts. Many of them are stuck in support roles of various kinds, because this is a logistical nightmare. Our effective force is equivalent to 7,000 dreadnoughts.
The average dreadnought (or collection of ships equal to one dreadnought), when absolutely pressed to the wall, can support 25,000 evacuees, standing room only. With help from support ships, it can load 6,250 people per hour, so it's a 4-hour loading time.
It needs to drop them off on a planet one light-year away. While the fastest ships in the fleet can sustain speeds of Warp 9.9999+ (now called Warp 13), the
average maximum sustainable speed, in these enlightened times, is Warp 9.975 -- something even 15-year-old midrange explorers like the
Intrepid could manage. Ignoring online warp speed calculators -- which are rubbish because the warp scale, canonically, doesn't actually make sense -- we can reasonably assert, with canonical support, that this is equivalent to 9700 times faster than light. The round trip takes 108 minutes for the average ship in our ragtag fleet.
So, 4 hours loading, 50 minutes in transit, 4 hours unloading, 50 minutes in transit, that's 9.8 hours for a dreadnought to move 25,000 people to safety and return. We have the equivalent of 7,000 dreadnoughts working here, so that's 125 million Romulans moved every 9.8 hours, or 17.9 million Romulans per hour.
Romulus will be evacuated in 8 days, 9 hours, 7 minutes, 2 seconds.
Heck, go ahead and remove 90% of my fleet. Knock us down to just 1500 total ships from the entire galaxy, for an effective force equivalent to 750 dreadnoughts, with some of them in support roles. We'll still clear out Romulus in just over two months.
So this isn't crazy. It'd be a monumental humanitarian task, but it could be done -- if you make the set of perfectly valid, completely defensible assumptions about canon that happen to coincide with the assumptions that make these numbers work.
EDIT: Subspace Transporter relays are good, too -- better, even, but probably not as dramatic, ergo less likely to be the solution on The Picard Show.
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