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One of the first things the alien leader says, and kudos to Star Trek for recognizing this, is that Andromeda is so far that modifications to the ship will need to be made to enable it to travel fast enough to reach our neighbor in 300 years -- this means the ship would be traveling at something like 10 thousand times the speed of light.

But the scene in which The Enterprise went through the barrier at the edge of the galaxy shows that even the Kelvans looked concerned about succeeding in this. Does this imply that even with Kelvans modifications getting out of the galaxy is dicey or that the Kelvans had not made such modifications?

I recall at least one other episode mentions the barrier and in real life, I think one of our probes, I guess Voyager, encountered a region of very high temperature as it was going through some very distant point in the Solar system. (Was anything known about this region in the 1960s? If not, quite remarkable that Star Trek somehow sort of predicted this.)

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  • The second half of the fourth season of ST:Discovery also addresses the challenges of breaching the galactic barrier.
    – Lexible
    Commented Oct 9, 2022 at 15:34

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Nothing specific, but one could say it was implicit as part of the speed modifications - especially as the Kelvans had their ship entirely destroyed by the barrier, one would assume they'd be concerned about it. The only other time the Enterprise hit the barrier it turned around, so it's hard to say if a Constitution class could do it without modification.

Captain's log, stardate 4657.5. Work is proceeding on the Enterprise as my crew is forced to make the required changes in the ship for intergalactic travel. I can't forget the picture of Yeoman Thompson crushed to a handful of dust

Episode Transcript

It may be worth noting that the Warp 11 of the TOS cubed formula is roughly TNG warp 9. So when the Excelsior was set to break some classic speed records, perhaps Starfleet learned something from the events of this episode. Anything above Warp 8 should be concerning on the TOS scale.

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  • Don't forget to put quotes in, y'know, quotes
    – Valorum
    Commented Oct 9, 2022 at 6:52

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