A triple-post is probably not a good way to get a yellow response that isn't "/closed". They didn't reply in the Tribble forums as far as I remember and they probably wont here. Concerning the reason: In Voyager using the QSD for a longer amount of time almost ripped the ship apart. Since we are playing at a greatly accelerated rate (being promoted from ensign to admiral within a week, reaching the opposite end of the quadrant in a few minutes etc) 30 seconds is already a lot.
Also time is not the same in sector space.... in the trek show warp drive is kinda slow and to travel from say ds9 to earth would take a day or so, not the 3 - 5 mins it takes ingame...
so when you activate quantum slip stream from your little ingame peoples perspective the 30 seconds would be more like hours to half a day of use !
If someone were to be travailing these long distances they would have things to do. They wouldn't sit there and watch the occasional ship fly by or sit in their captains chair the whole time. They had stuff to do. Until we get better things to do than sit in wait in my opinion we should be able to use this thing indefinably and at warp 40. If and when Cryptic gives us sector space mini-games I'm all for space travel taking a significant amount of time. As it stands sector space is a major pain and is anything but fun. Before you say space travel wasn't fun remember that this is a game and games are supposed to be fun before they are realistic.
Comments
The Game-Design response; because if you can travel too fast for too long the universe starts to feel too small.
The In-Game possible explanation; Slipstream does not safely work for more than a few moments because of the same phase issues Voyager encountered.
So those are my 2 cents.
so when you activate quantum slip stream from your little ingame peoples perspective the 30 seconds would be more like hours to half a day of use !