Star Trek Maps (1980)

[Mytran]

Could you expand on that a little - too big for what? The WFcubed system? The WFtng system? The published maps and charts? All have their strengths and problems, after all.

FWIW, I am currently looking at references to "light years" in the TNG transcripts and there's frequent suggestions that the E-D travels significantly faster than their "official" speeds.

 

[BK613]

The US government wouldn't have to negotiate with St. Louis for permission to use its facilities. They would have to negotiate with a distant foreign land.

St. Louis was still under Spanish governorship when the The Lewis and Clark expedition showed up at the Mississippi River in 1803. It wouldn't be until the next year until the US formally took possession and L&C did have to wait on this formal process. Look up Three Flags Day for more info. But the political is irrelevant anyway; the discussion was about the physical distance. It's why I used St. Louis as the illustrative analogy*; formerly on the borders of the U.S. and recently acquired, and beyond which lay the vast unexplored continent.
Captain's log, stardate 41153.7. Our destination is planet Deneb Four, beyond which lies the great unexplored mass of the galaxy.

There is no ambiguity here, just some people misremembering the details of the episode.

Like misremembering the relationship between the Bandi and Starfleet at the end? Not only do I know where the transcript site is LOL but BBC America just ran these episodes a few days ago.

*(and it was an analogy; all analogies break down in the details.)

 

[Novak Senkovic]

Could you expand on that a little - too big for what? The WFcubed system? The WFtng system? The published maps and charts? All have their strengths and problems, after all.

FWIW, I am currently looking at references to "light years" in the TNG transcripts and there's frequent suggestions that the E-D travels significantly faster than their "official" speeds.

If 8000 light years is linearly spread and does not include volume than it would make the UFP bigger than any published map and very big indeed. One length of it could be 2 or three thousand light years while another could be a thousand LY. Somehow this doesn't seem right. It would also mean that the other distances are 2000LY.

 

[Mytran]

Well I suppose the 8,000ly figure could be the circumference of the Federation (if circular, thats 1275ly radius) However, that still seems overly large because the cadets in Valiant were going to circumnavigate the Fed as part of their field trip and I doubt they were planning to be gone years!

Taking everything into account (and given that Picard is a seasoned space traveller) I think that an irregular shaped 8,000 cubic light years is probably the right answer, at least for the Federation proper (ie not including allies)

 

[Timo]

Why complicate things by adding the word "cubic" when it's not there originally?

Picard could well be boasting that the UFP equivalent of the South Georgia Islands is 8,000 ly away from the seat of the government in purely linear terms - an impressive but utterly uninformative figure that leaves us complete freedom to interpret the shape and size of the UFP in terms that best match all the other evidence.

In TOS, we saw Kirk making friends with supposedly distant worlds, possibly ballasting the UFP with allies and even members at the very fringes of the explored zone and far away from the next UFP assets. In TNG, our heroes consider a multi-thousand-ly trip a years-long one (say, "Q Who?"). A model where the UFP sprouts South Georgias literally left and right, 4,000 very inconvenient lightyears away from Earth, leaves Picard factually correct and the UFP with Ardana-style isolated members who may do as they please even when what they do might not please Earth much.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Novak Senkovic]

If 8000 light years is linearly spread and does not include volume than it would make the UFP bigger than any published map and very big indeed. One length of it could be 2 or three thousand light years while another could be a thousand LY. Somehow this doesn't seem right. It would also mean that the other distances are 2000LY.

However, if you include area, then one part of the Federation only needs to be 200LY by 40LY to equal 8000LY. Somehow, I don't think Picard was talking about one portion.

 

[Novak Senkovic]

Why complicate things by adding the word "cubic" when it's not there originally?

Picard could well be boasting that the UFP equivalent of the South Georgia Islands is 8,000 ly away from the seat of the government in purely linear terms - an impressive but utterly uninformative figure that leaves us complete freedom to interpret the shape and size of the UFP in terms that best match all the other evidence.

In TOS, we saw Kirk making friends with supposedly distant worlds, possibly ballasting the UFP with allies and even members at the very fringes of the explored zone and far away from the next UFP assets. In TNG, our heroes consider a multi-thousand-ly trip a years-long one (say, "Q Who?"). A model where the UFP sprouts South Georgias literally left and right, 4,000 very inconvenient lightyears away from Earth, leaves Picard factually correct and the UFP with Ardana-style isolated members who may do as they please even when what they do might not please Earth much.

Timo Saloniemi

I agree Timo

 

[Novak Senkovic]

Why complicate things by adding the word "cubic" when it's not there originally?

Picard could well be boasting that the UFP equivalent of the South Georgia Islands is 8,000 ly away from the seat of the government in purely linear terms - an impressive but utterly uninformative figure that leaves us complete freedom to interpret the shape and size of the UFP in terms that best match all the other evidence.

In TOS, we saw Kirk making friends with supposedly distant worlds, possibly ballasting the UFP with allies and even members at the very fringes of the explored zone and far away from the next UFP assets. In TNG, our heroes consider a multi-thousand-ly trip a years-long one (say, "Q Who?"). A model where the UFP sprouts South Georgias literally left and right, 4,000 very inconvenient lightyears away from Earth, leaves Picard factually correct and the UFP with Ardana-style isolated members who may do as they please even when what they do might not please Earth much.

Timo Saloniemi

Why complicate things by adding the word "cubic" when it's not there originally?

Picard could well be boasting that the UFP equivalent of the South Georgia Islands is 8,000 ly away from the seat of the government in purely linear terms - an impressive but utterly uninformative figure that leaves us complete freedom to interpret the shape and size of the UFP in terms that best match all the other evidence.

In TOS, we saw Kirk making friends with supposedly distant worlds, possibly ballasting the UFP with allies and even members at the very fringes of the explored zone and far away from the next UFP assets. In TNG, our heroes consider a multi-thousand-ly trip a years-long one (say, "Q Who?"). A model where the UFP sprouts South Georgias literally left and right, 4,000 very inconvenient lightyears away from Earth, leaves Picard factually correct and the UFP with Ardana-style isolated members who may do as they please even when what they do might not please Earth much.

Timo Saloniemi

On the other hand Picard did say that in 2364 explored space extended to 1400LY

 

[Mytran]

In Season One? Do you happen to remember which episode.
I've been searching the transcripts for time and distance references but I must have missed that one.

 

[Timo]

Might that be in reference to Deneb IV, and with the assumption that it orbits the star Alpha Cygni, which back in the 1980s was thought to lie about 1,400-1,600 ly from Earth? Current guesses put it at more like 2,600 ly instead, though. And there's nothing solid about Deneb IV (Picard actually pronounces it Daneb or whatever) being related to a particular star with the rather ubiquitous definer "deneb" in its name.

In any case, this would be neither here nor there, as Deneb IV could be the outer border in one direction, while the borders might extend much farther out in several other directions.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[PCz911]

http://imageshack.us/a/img9/4403/uxy8.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img198/4140/acf.bmp
http://imageshack.us/a/img823/8100/u627.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img69/8489/svig.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img203/600/wcst.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img839/2264/mnn9.jpg

Here's some of what I was looking at. I have a better version of some of these, but the files were too big to upload.

This is great. I haven't seen this before. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Mytran]

Picard could well be boasting that the UFP equivalent of the South Georgia Islands is 8,000 ly away from the seat of the government in purely linear terms - an impressive but utterly uninformative figure that leaves us complete freedom to interpret the shape and size of the UFP in terms that best match all the other evidence.

So, with the two extremes of the Federation a nice 8,000ly away from each other, and yet only 150 worlds (i.e. member systems) overall, we have a "federation" that's actually a bit of a sprawl:

BTW, each of those "stars" represents a solar territory 20ly in diameter. These are HUGE distances we're talking about!

That centre "core" has a circumference of about 3,000ly (1,500ly for the really central bit). A bit of a long trip for our Valiant cadets, but not impossible

It's also easy to see how the Fed could "own" certain parts of the cosmos without actually being fully aware of what they've got or even with a proper political alliance (hence the situation in ST:INS) - all they have to do is have allied members more or less encompassing a region!

 

[drt]

I've often thought that instead of being distinct, compartmentalized territories (as first popularized by the Technical Manual and adapted for Maps and Charts) it's probably more likely that there are a multitude of much smaller spheres of influence, somehat intermixed between the various galactic powers, with areas of unclaimed open space between them.

 

[Unicron]

FASA liked that idea as well, with some planets in Federation space being only associate members with more limited voice and rights compared to full members, and other planets not being members at all but within the sphere of influence, in part to protect some cultures from enemies like the Klingons or the Romulans. Part of the story hook in a lot of FASA stories was that some planets weren't always eager to see the Federation as the good guys and needed to be convinced that they were a better option.

 

[Mytran]

That sounds a lot more interesting than the simplified version we tended to get in TNG

 

[Timo]

So, with the two extremes of the Federation a nice 8,000ly away from each other, and yet only 150 worlds (i.e. member systems) overall, we have a "federation" that's actually a bit of a sprawl.

We know for a pseudofact that many of the members control several star systems, and not just neighboring ones at that, so the pattern would be denser than that. Yet the South Georgia outliers would probably be members on their own right, drafted in situ - nobody would want to set up a colony that far from their main assets, except for the usual fanatical secessionists who'd not really add to the set of "UFP worlds".

That centre "core" has a circumference of about 3,000ly (1,500ly for the really central bit). A bit of a long trip for our Valiant cadets, but not impossible.

A circumnavigation of the Federation would most probably in practice mean visiting all the attractions, not doing a specific geometrical pattern around a specific volume. Although this might require zigzagging that would make the trip just as long as the really-going-around version...

...all they have to do is have allied members more or less encompassing a region!

Or numerous intrepid colonist parties claiming what amounts to a scattershot pattern of systems, and the UFP rubberstamping the claims, little noticing what gets cut off or hemmed in due to these claims. The colonial expansion of any given UFP member would be far from systematic. A single-culture empire might expand carefully - but Bolians will just think that Andorian and human expansion will fill in the holes left by their own colonization, and Starfleet will always be there because a colony of somebody Starfleet cares about is always nearby.

As for layers of membership types, ST:INS gives us the protectorate thing. Perhaps "it's complicated" is the very reason we never get a good, straight answer from our heroes to these issue of how big the UFP is, how many members there are etc.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Novak Senkovic]

If unexplored territory is beyond 4000LY it would mean the enterprise D would take a year to get home yet the episodes don't indicate that.

 

[Mytran]

Well, the episode "First Contact" puts the Ent-D 2,000ly from Earth in the space of half a season, and they certainly weren't flying a straight line at max speed for all that time.

In short, the "official" TNG speeds are way off! Kim's 6,000c and Paris' 21,000c are probably nearer the mark

 

[Novak Senkovic]

we havene't heard anything from our writer

 

[Novak Senkovic]

Well, the episode "First Contact" puts the Ent-D 2,000ly from Earth in the space of half a season, and they certainly weren't flying a straight line at max speed for all that time.

In short, the "official" TNG speeds are way off! Kim's 6,000c and Paris' 21,000c are probably nearer the mark

Remember, we can't make warp speed sfor TNG onwards too fast as according to the episode Q Who it would take the Enterprise D almost 3 years to cross 7000LY. I don't know how you got 2000LY is it mentioned in the episode? Have to check that.