Without warp drive, it will take
17 years, 2 months, and 3 days to reach the nearest Federation starbase
from
"deep in Cardassian
space" in
"Time to
Stand."
"The Valiant" - Nog
and Jake drop to impulse to fight Jem'Hadar
fighters in order to gain an advantage in maneuverability.
In
"Emissary," we see
mass-lightening fields at work in an
ad
hoc impulse drive used to propel
DS9. The subspace field increases acceleration by a factor of
2,600-230,000.
Ordinarily,
the six working thrusters would bring DS9 to a position 160 million
kilometers away in two months; by using a subspace field, this time can
be cut substantially - to between 3 and 28 hours. (O'Brien's first
stated ETA is 3 hours to the wormhole; the Enterprise, originally
stated to be 2 days away, is still 20 hours away when the Cardassians
attack DS9 at the wormhole.)
For a fly-by intercept, the average accelerations given would then be
1.2
cm/s
2 and then 31-2740 m/s
2; for a zero-zero
intercept (necessary given the relatively stationary wormhole), the
accelerations are 2.4 cm/s
2 and then 63-5500 m/s
2.