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star trek - How far did the Botany Bay travel in "Space Seed", and how?


In "Space Seed" the Enterprise is traveling somewhere unspecified in interstellar space when it detects Khan's ship, the SS Botany Bay.


Kirk states that the ship has been traveling for



"two centuries, we estimate"




Since we know from later in the script that the ship left Earth in the late 1990s, this implies that it's been in in flight for somewhere between 105 to 286 years (taking into account human vagueness)



This leads me to several linked questions




  • Where was the Botany Bay found? (the script indicates they were heading to the Ceti system which some fans take to be Alpha Ceti, some 249 ly from Earth)




  • How fast could Earth ships travel before 2018? (again, the script indicates that they were traveling substantially below lightspeed).





  • If the Botany Bay could only travel at sublight speeds, how did it get so far out into deep space?






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