How much of the Alpha Quadrant has been explored?

[Timo]

Indeed. And those named Quadrants come from TNG, so it's not something that would have been "outdated" by the "introduction" of Galactic Quadrants.

In ST2:TWoK, it's clear that a Quadrant is a subsection of a Sector: it's curious for the heroes to find the Reliant in the same Sector, but downright mysterious that she would happen to be in the same Quadrant. Also, in TOS, a Quadrant is an area where local conflict involving a star system or two exhaustively defines the "recent history" of the place ("Tribbles", "Armageddon") - the same way a conflict might define Somme or Gettysburg for us, but not Europe or the Western Hemisphere.

The big question then is, does there exist a subsection of some Sector that confusingly happens to be named the Alpha Quadrant?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

^ To be fair, Trek did seem to use the term for something smaller than the full Galactic quadrants, too. (Morgana Quadrant, Drema Quadrant, and a handful of numbered ones...)

Yeah, TOS played quite fast and loose with the term. "The Price" was the first attempt to define "quadrants" that were actually 1/4 portions of something. (Well, the first canonical attempt. The 1980 Star Trek Maps defined the treaty zone that the Federation was entitled to explore/occupy/claim as a sphere that was divided into four quadrants that were in turn subdivided into "North" and "South" halves, so that you'd have things like "Quadrant 3 North" and "Quadrant 4 South" -- although those would've actually been octants rather than quadrants.)

 

[Timo]

Yeah, TOS played quite fast and loose with the term.

TOS? All those examples come from TNG.

Of course, both shows remained perfectly consistent in treating "quadrant" as a small volume of space, until "The Price" needlessly confused the issue. As for the choice of terminology, it's not as if "sector" would be any better, the word having a rather definite meaning in geometry that's quite inconsistent with dividing a volume of space into those...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Idran]

TOS? All those examples come from TNG.

Of course, both shows remained perfectly consistent in treating "quadrant" as a small volume of space, until "The Price" needlessly confused the issue. As for the choice of terminology, it's not as if "sector" would be any better, the word having a rather definite meaning in geometry that's quite inconsistent with dividing a volume of space into those...

Timo Saloniemi

"Sector" has a geometric definition, sure, but it's also a well-established term for a generalized division of area in a way that "Quadrant" isn't. Controlled airspace subdivisions, for example. Or military sectors. The latter definitely predates TOS, it was used in military terminology in a general sense of "region" well-distinct from the geometrical definition as far back as the 1920s. Quadrant, though, has never been generalized in that manner in notable usage as far as I can tell, it's always referred specifically to one of four; likely because the implied "one-fourth" is baked right into the word.

 

[Christopher]

Like I said, it's problematical coming up with good geographical nomenclature for the Milky Way because it's just so darn huge and doesn't have a lot of definable subdivisions. I mean, there are a lot of geographical subdivisions between "my house" and "the planet Earth" -- a block, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a country, a continent, a hemisphere. But if the only terms you have for galactic cartography are "sector" and "quadrant," that's like having no subdivisions between "city block" and "hemisphere." It's really an inadequate system.

 

[Timo]

Then again, if a Sector is 20x20x20 ly, it's a pretty good subdivision for almost everything our Trek heroes ever do. Smaller than that and you can name individual star systems; larger than that and you can just start talking about national borders.

Adding the Morgana Quadrant to the lower end seems almost superfluous; adding the Grid is for the big boys who routinely span several and pay little attention to national borders. Something above the Grid probably exists in Borg nomenclature before they hit Galactic Quadrant or their equivalent, but that's way beyond our heroes. And their egghead sidekicks who may be studying the entire Milky Way with their subspace telescopes but, as noted in this thread, aren't making much progress there.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Leto_II]

Yeah, TOS played quite fast and loose with the term. "The Price" was the first attempt to define "quadrants" that were actually 1/4 portions of something. (Well, the first canonical attempt. The 1980 Star Trek Maps defined the treaty zone that the Federation was entitled to explore/occupy/claim as a sphere that was divided into four quadrants that were in turn subdivided into "North" and "South" halves, so that you'd have things like "Quadrant 3 North" and "Quadrant 4 South" -- although those would've actually been octants rather than quadrants.)

And also, I think we heard the TNG term used retroactively in a 23rd Century-era canon production for the very first time in The Undiscovered Country (where both the Alpha and Beta Quadrants are mentioned onscreen), and also retroactively again in VOY "Flashback" (although I think there it's Janeway who makes a couple of mentions, albeit during Tuvok's Excelsior-scenes).

Can't recall right off the top of my head if the two J.J. Abrams movies use the term onscreen, though.

 

[Idran]

Not according to the Chakoteya transcripts; only reference I see there to the word "Quadrant" was in STID, and it's using a generic sense:

HARRISON: ...For centuries we slept, hoping when we awoke things would be different. But as a result of the destruction of Vulcan, your Starfleet began to aggressively search distant quadrants of space.

"Flashback" is actually weird in two different ways for this conversation too. First there's this line -

JANEWAY: Praxis. Yes. Its destruction would have lasting repercussions throughout the quadrant, and it led to the first Federation-Klingon peace treaty.

- which seems to imply that the Federation and the Klingon Empire are both in the same quadrant (though I suppose you could read it as referring either just to Beta or just to Alpha), and then there's this line -

JANEWAY: It was a very different time, Mister Kim. Captain Sulu, Captain Kirk, Dr. McCoy. They all belonged to a different breed of Starfleet officer. Imagine the era they lived in. The Alpha Quadrant still largely unexplored.

- which all but states that in the 24th century the Alpha Quadrant is fairly heavily explored, something that doesn't really make any sense logistically for reasons previously described in this thread.

 

[Christopher]

And also, I think we heard the TNG term used retroactively in a 23rd Century-era canon production for the very first time in The Undiscovered Country (where both the Alpha and Beta Quadrants are mentioned onscreen), and also retroactively again in VOY "Flashback" (although I think there it's Janeway who makes a couple of mentions, albeit during Tuvok's Excelsior-scenes).

And Enterprise established its use in the 22nd century in "Regeneration."

Not according to the Chakoteya transcripts; only reference I see there to the word "Quadrant" was in STID, and it's using a generic sense:

But the Abramsverse tie-in comic did have a rather strange arc where the Enterprise was stranded in the Delta Quadrant for a few issues, and somehow managed to get back in a matter of weeks -- with Tholian space somehow being on the Delta/Alpha border, even though Delta actually borders Beta.

"Flashback" is actually weird in two different ways for this conversation too. First there's this line -

- which seems to imply that the Federation and the Klingon Empire are both in the same quadrant (though I suppose you could read it as referring either just to Beta or just to Alpha), and then there's this line -

- which all but states that in the 24th century the Alpha Quadrant is fairly heavily explored, something that doesn't really make any sense logistically for reasons previously described in this thread.

Like I said, it's the same kind of imprecision we use when referring to European countries as "Western" even though most of them are in the Eastern Hemisphere. Their historical, political, and economic ties connecting them as a whole are treated as more important than an arbitrary quirk of mapmaking, so they're referred to by a unified label. (It gets even weirder when you refer to America as "the West" and Japan and China as "the East," even though America is actually east of Japan. The terminology is Eurocentrically defined and doesn't really make sense when you're on the other side of the planet, but the usage has stuck anyway.)

In real life, though, the problem comes from DS9 generalizing its usage imprecisely. Originally DS9 (like "The Price" before it) referred to the Alpha and Gamma Quadrants just because those were where the two wormhole termini were located. The usage was really only meant to apply on the scale of a galaxy-crossing wormhole. So when the show -- and its successors -- began using "Alpha Quadrant" to refer more generally to the entire territory of the Federation and its neighbors, that was kind of a misappropriation of the term. But I assume it was done because it was a narrative convenience to use the established term rather than overcomplicating things with a geography lesson. Only a tiny minority of detail-obsessed fans like us would ever notice or care.

 

[Idran]

That's true for the first weirdness, yeah, fair. Doesn't really help the second, though; if anything, it makes it worse.

 

[Christopher]

That's true for the first weirdness, yeah, fair. Doesn't really help the second, though; if anything, it makes it worse.

Well, it's probably almost as hard for 24th-century humans to grasp the true, mindblowing scale of the galaxy as it is for us 21st-century landlubbers. A lot of people in the Federation, as well as a lot of Trek fans and writers, are probably prone to falling into the habit of thinking of "Alpha Quadrant" as synonymous with "known space," even though the latter is but a fraction of the former (and a fraction of the quadrant next door). I mean, it's not like there are that many better alternative labels to use.

 

[Idran]

Oh, also a good point. Basically a synecdoche; makes sense. Still a little circular in that specific line to apply that reading, but not horribly so.

 

[Christopher]

Oh, also a good point. Kind of like a reverse-synecdoche. It feels like the kind of linguistic shortcut there's probably a contemporary real-life example for too, though I'm blanking on one offhand.

How about using "America" for just the United States instead of the whole pair of continents? Or "the Pacific Coast" for the part of the US that abuts the Pacific Ocean? Not perfectly analogous, but similar.

 

[Idran]

Yeah, you caught my post before I edited it; forgot some obvious examples like those.

And also forgot that synecdoche already goes in either direction anyway.

 

[JD]

Is the map for Star Trek Online accurate to canon and the novelverse?

 

[Avro Arrow]

The big question then is, does there exist a subsection of some Sector that confusingly happens to be named the Alpha Quadrant?

If there is, it must be where Alpha III is located!

 

[Christopher]

Is the map for Star Trek Online accurate to canon and the novelverse?

I'd have to see it, but I doubt it. There is no real, official, uniform cartography for the Trek universe onscreen anyway -- just whatever suits the story, and whatever approximate graphics the art department has come up with to suggest it. There are some general broad-strokes guidelines the art staff came up with for how the quadrants were laid out and where the major powers were relative to one another, so that tends to be pretty consistent, but there's plenty of variation in the specifics from one source to another. And I'm sure the game people modified a bunch of stuff to fit the needs of their game.

 

[Idran]

Here's a picture of it I found on imgur: http://i.imgur.com/WmYDfZj.jpg

Edit after looking it over: It looks like in broad strokes of relative locations of powers it's pretty close to the Star Charts map. And a few of the major landmarks are in the same relative positions; the Rolor Nebula, the Briar Patch, the Betreka Nebula, the Azure Nebula, they're all in about the same spots.

If nothing else, it looks like it was based off of the Star Charts map, but modified for use in an MMO like Christopher said.

 

[Avro Arrow]

There is no real, official, uniform cartography for the Trek universe onscreen anyway -- just whatever suits the story, and whatever approximate graphics the art department has come up with to suggest it.

This brings up an interesting point. Do any of the maps depicted on-screen that show the division of the galaxy into quadrants actually show Sol on the border, or is that strictly from off-screen sources, like the Encyclopedia and Star Charts?

 

[Idran]

Not Sol specifically, but there was this production art for Season 7 of Voyager illustrating its course that shows the UFP in general being right on the border: http://www.stdimension.org/Cartography/Source/map_voyroute.jpg

I was sure I remembered a map seen on-screen in Voyager that showed it, but I can't seem to find it now.