My map of the Federation, post-Nemesis
- Thread starter Belz...
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The bit about Picard using significantly more high warp than usual for Starfleet is mentioned a couple of times, but "Phantasms" is a good example: it's the reason they need this rare core overhaul that goes awry.
It doesn't follow that Picard would travel great distances. But that bit comes from the show itself: we win nothing by arranging his adventures in a straight row, because he deals in high politics with major enemies and there'd be no point in arranging those enemies in a row. He sorts out Romulan, Klingon and Cardassian business alike, sometimes because he's sent to, sometimes because events catch up with him.
I don't think this should be a problem, actually. Picard isn't really credited with exploring anyway ("Remember when we used to be explorers?" "Well, Sir, there was that one mission in Season Three, I think, with the Tin Man thing and..."). And the dimensions of the UFP aren't particularly relevant there: exploration takes place outside those confines, not within them. It's just a job for... Somebody else.
Then again, his enemies are many. Perhaps a dozen Picards are fully employed shuttling between all the players, there being advantages to rotating the negotiators so that things don't get stuck?
But as far as we know, there is only one flagship. And she does go from capital to capital all the time - just like lesser players do, there being means for, say, Vash to span the known space reasonably fast.
Three dimensions, is all. The RNZ is a smallish eggshell, easily circumnavigated; that an ugly Klingon pseudopod splashes against it in conflict doesn't mean the UFP would be cut off from the back yards of either of those two players.
Actually, there's nothing in the walla about "border"; it cuts rather sharply before anything of the sort could be made out, and apparently quite deliberately so.
In the originally scripted (and supposedly shot but then cut) version of the teaser, Klingon ships were lurking nearby, and decloaked and captured the Narada right after George Kirk had rendered her immobile and helped his crew escape the scene. The dialogue may have been written with that in mind: "Negative, the Klingons are still at point blank range and we can see everything they are doing - they aren't the guilty party here". That'd be right out of the Cold War books: two enemies shadowing each other, mirroring each and every move the other party makes, no matter how innocuous. In this case, going to check out a weird space storm...
Now, figuring out where the heck the teaser takes place is the fun part. Is that the star that destroyed Romulus? Weird holes through time need not travel through space at all, and in Trek they generally don't. Is that in fact the homestar of the Romulans? After all, both Spock and Nero must have launched into the 23rd century from there, because they fell into the timehole Spock created, and Spock created the timehole right next to the kaboom, and the kaboom was right next to Romulus... We are still debating whether "Balance of Terror" took place at high warp or low sublight, so Starfleet moving at the outer edges of the Romulan home system itself might be quite possible in the 2230s.
Timo Saloniemi
Then you're saying that the whole premise of the show is a lie. I can't accept that. Call it an argument from incredulity, but exploration is the very core of Star Trek. Yes, they do diplomacy and other things at the same time, but from an administration standpoint, flagship or no, you send the ship where it can reach in time for the mission, not to places it'll take months to reach. It's just not logical. In any case, it's irrelevant, since I've arranged the map to avoid these sorts of issues (save 3 or 4 times where the distance between two episodes is pretty large) while still having a functional presentation of the Star Trek universe.
To be clear, you're correct that they don't do quite as much exploring as you'd expect, and they sure stay closer to home than dedicated explorers. Still, I wanted to convey the size of the Federation and the missions of the Enterprise in a way that didn't betray the core idea of the show, and most maps I've seen fail in some way or another. Hopefully I've done good with that.
Then the whole idea of the neutral zone is pointless, since the Romulans could circumvent it as well unless they are completely surrounded and isolated, in which case they wouldn't be a threat.
Regardless of what they meant, it's still spitting distance, so you can't discount the Klingons. It's a nonsensical answer any way you slice it.
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Easy to explain for TOS era: Even if shuttles have low warp capability, they have limited fuel (The Menagerie, The Galileo Seven, Metamorphosis, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield), so, nothing good ever comes of leaving a solar system they are near. In TM and LTBYLB, both left Starbase and ran out of gas. TG7, dropped at edge of solar system, caught in storm, crashed on planet (ran ashore), punctured gas tank. This case could be pure dumb luck or maybe Spock had limited control and guided it to the only inhabitable planet. Metamorphosis, left planet to rendezvous with ship outside solar system to save a little time, grabbed by space (sea) monster, taken to home planet (in the belly of the beast and spit out on shore). At low warp, the next solar system is months to years away. At low warp, any place in a solar system can be reached in minutes to hours. Its like a small motor boat off the coast on the ocean. It's unwise to loose sight of land.
Got nothing for TNG/DS9 era: Now shuttle/runabouts are high warp small ships with unlimited fuel, able to go back and forth to Earth for shore leave. They seem to trip over star systems with M-Class planets.
TNG is a bird's nest.
Archer and Kirk should have more "linear" paths at least making this part of the map easier to create. 
DS9 should be the easiest; they didn't go any place (unless you start mapping out the Gamma quadrant). 
Good Luck, again.
Yah, instead of 1000 lys, maybe 10 lys or something vague like "far" would have been better. I agree that the warp charts are baloney. I have two overlapping technobabble theories on how warp factors result in variable and much higher speeds using the Cochrane Variable theory (my own warp chart), and an additional theory that results in reverse time dilation at very high warp factors (coming to Trek Tech soon). BLSSDWLF came up with an excellent warp diagram based on empirical TOS episode data that showed incredible speeds (>500,000 c) at high warp factors in interstellar space.
As to the TOS Enterprise safety maintaining warp 8, the warp engines have been updated between Season 1 "Arena" where warp 8 was achieved with some danger, and the start of Season 3 where the Enterprise was routinely hitting warp 9. On the return trip, Spock had the Enterprise at warp 8.4 for hours (the return trip was to take 11.37 hours at warp 8.4). Additionally, due to Losira's sabotage, the Enterprise was accelerating out of control for ~15 minutes and hit warp 14.1 before it was brought under control. They made up a lot of distance during that short time.
Thanks. I'm starting to look into it.
Also interesting is that while they are in the solar system at high warp speeds they are actually going very slow. So it would seem that regions of higher gravity actually produce slower actual speeds. This would also match what we see in First Contact, where the Phoenix barely makes any distance even traveling at warp 1. My theory is that warp factor(speed) isn't necessarily directly related to speed but is more related to power put into the system. For example the Phoenix only broke light speed in terms of generating a 1 Cochrane warp field and would have been traveling at 1c if it was in open space. But since it was right next to earth the Actual Speed was less than 1c.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that sometimes the script says you can't use warp drive safely within a star system, and sometimes it's not a problem.
The two put together sort of complement each other, now don't they?
Add Bajor's infamous time-dependent "subspace weather", as mentioned in a couple of episodes, and then note that Bajor is the only system quoted with "warp problems", apart from Sol. Perhaps Sol also burps out foul weather more often than other stars, then? A fun detail to add to the astrography of the Trek playing ground.
Then why are there no adventures involving exploration in TNG? Premises are irrelevant if they have no effect on that which is.
TOS has plenty of exploration. It does not happen inside the UFP, though. But even TOS shows that zipping between the far frontier and Earth is easy, and the ship visits Earth twice during her "deep space" adventures. The TNG ship does so in "Conspiracy" easily enough as well - at which point Picard outright states that this is unusual for a starship by choice, not due to technical shortcomings.
From which it simply follows that speeds in Trek are high and/or distances are short. What's the problem with that? Your map or Star Charts' does away with internal contradictions; going against an unrealized premise is not something we should worry about on top of that.
Absolutely. I just wanted to gripe about premise fixations from that other angle - that the premise of exploring your own back yard, the Federation, is not something I want to believe in unless forced to.
But that has always been the point: the Romulans are a threat and for that reason completely surrounded and isolated. Which doesn't help, as their very first adventure already involves them defying the isolation in a frightening fashion. Nothing wrong with that.
Oh, no disagreement there. I just wanted to point out how that snippet of a line came to be: it apparently refers to specific Klingon ships that are lurking nearby, not to the general proximity of potential Klingon activity. "It can't be Bob - he's right next to me" is not nonsense. The movie as cut for release just fails to solidly establish the line would be about that thing.
Timo Saloniemi
Add Bajor's infamous time-dependent "subspace weather", as mentioned in a couple of episodes, and then note that Bajor is the only system quoted with "warp problems", apart from Sol. Perhaps Sol also burps out foul weather more often than other stars, then? A fun detail to add to the astrography of the Trek playing ground.
Then why are there no adventures involving exploration in TNG? Premises are irrelevant if they have no effect on that which is.
TOS has plenty of exploration. It does not happen inside the UFP, though. But even TOS shows that zipping between the far frontier and Earth is easy, and the ship visits Earth twice during her "deep space" adventures. The TNG ship does so in "Conspiracy" easily enough as well - at which point Picard outright states that this is unusual for a starship by choice, not due to technical shortcomings.
From which it simply follows that speeds in Trek are high and/or distances are short. What's the problem with that? Your map or Star Charts' does away with internal contradictions; going against an unrealized premise is not something we should worry about on top of that.
Absolutely. I just wanted to gripe about premise fixations from that other angle - that the premise of exploring your own back yard, the Federation, is not something I want to believe in unless forced to.
But that has always been the point: the Romulans are a threat and for that reason completely surrounded and isolated. Which doesn't help, as their very first adventure already involves them defying the isolation in a frightening fashion. Nothing wrong with that.
Oh, no disagreement there. I just wanted to point out how that snippet of a line came to be: it apparently refers to specific Klingon ships that are lurking nearby, not to the general proximity of potential Klingon activity. "It can't be Bob - he's right next to me" is not nonsense. The movie as cut for release just fails to solidly establish the line would be about that thing.
Timo Saloniemi
Aren't there? I thought there were plenty. Not the majority, but plenty.
It's still saying that the premise is a lie.
"Space, the former frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It's ad-hoc missions: to enforce strange, old treaties, to seek out old enemies and old trade negociations. To blandly go where we've already gone before." Doesn't sound very exciting.
I don't know where you get this idea that they're not inside the UFP any more than in TNG. Is this from a line of dialogue?
As I already said, it gives the impression that space is small and familiar rather than vast and unexplored. That's not how I view the premise of the show.
I don't follow, sorry
This is at least the third time in your post that you state what sounds like your interpretation as fact. That is, unless you can show in canon that the Romulans are indeed contained. I've never had this impression, but I'm willing to be shown wrong. That sure would give a lot of weight to the Star Charts map.
Missions explicitly involving the E-D going by choice to where no one (from the UFP at least) has gone before? I don't think Picard ever conducted a single one. Aboard the E-D, that is; I can't vouch for his Stargazer days.
We could argue that adventures with certain impressive heavenly phenomena he observed (such as the collision of worlds in "Ship in a Bottle") additionally involved him being the first at that location, but that isn't quite stated.
And indeed it is. Moreover, it isn't even part of the Trek universe - it's part of the credits, which reveal the entire Trek universe to be a lie, the characters to be impostors, etc. Why worry about such a thing?
Turned out to be in the end, though. So what's a little lie between friends? In-universe, the empty boast of the voiceover is supposed to be some sort of a quote - but it's not original with Picard. Or even Kirk. It's credited to Zephram Cochrane.
In terms of geometry, you mean? The heroes are often in places that are not part of the UFP, and have to introduce the concept to the locals (the relevant quote being "I am Captain James T. Kirk and I represent the Federation" in all its variants). I guess it would be impossible to rule out the idea that these alien places are within UFP territory. It's just that Kirk needs to do a lot of this type of introducing, and Picard needs to do less.
What would be the alternative, though? If everywhere is within the UFP, and the UFP is everywhere, are our heroes delusional megalomaniacs who have declared the entire universe their property even without visiting it? Often enough, when Kirk has to do the introduction bit, he's fighting over possession of the place quite concretely, rather than delusionally (although there's some of the latter, too) - with Klingons on three or four occasions, say. This by definition cannot take place within the UFP, where those foreign devils ought to have no hold.
The UFP is small and familiar. It's the home base. The heroes defend it, and some of them just do that from the inside. When they defend from the inside, though, they don't go toe to toe with Klingons or Romulans. That interaction defines the borders or the free-for-all vastness beyond them. And if you feel the stories need breathing room, then that vastness ought to provide it, no matter how small the UFP itself is.
I don't quite understand the confusion. Surely it's clear from "Balance of Terror" already that the Romulans are utterly contained? It features, and I do quote, "the neutral zone between planets Romulus and Remus and the rest of the galaxy". Not between them and Earth, or between them and anything else - but between them and everything else. And all the early plots about Romulans are about the failure to contain them, against expectations. They are the caged tigers, and the excitement is over whether the bars and locks will hold.
It is only in "Tin Man" that we first hear of Romulans outside the RNZ and don't have the heroes accusing them of an act of war outright. Chiefly because said Romulans are firing at them anyway... In DS9, having Romulans outside the RNZ is more or less accepted, though, although the ships encountered may be on diplomatic or commercial business under special permit.
(In practice, the RNZ does leak, and among the things leaking from there is the famed ale. But that's the way of borders.)
I hope this doesn't create the impression that I disapprove of your work, BTW. My comments are prompted by my conviction that you are needlessly worried: the issues you see are not crucial to Trek mapmaking. But they certainly don't invalidate your approach, either.
Timo Saloniemi
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I don't think "explore" means "by choice". You can very well be sent to explore a nebula that no one's ever been to. That's what I'm refering to.
You must be joking. It's not ridiculous to immerse yourself into a fictional setting and assume that it's a real thing for the purposes of enjoying it.
Post hoc. It took decades for that to be made up.
That's always been my interpretation, yes. The Federation's expanded and has engulfed several inhabited star systems that are non-members.
According to some semi-official sources it's supposed to be 10,000 ly wide, which would take 6.67 years at non-stop warp 9 to cover. That's obviously way too big, but the idea's there.
That's one way of looking at it, and the Star Charts map sure seems to be built upon this assumption.
Taken literally, yes. But it's superseded by the following encounters, and it's clear by TNG that their empire has expanded, not least of which since they can fight toe-to-toe with the other powers.
Again, your interpretation.
No, no. The two discussions are entirely separate.
You are correct. I'm not worried, by the way. I just disagree with the way other maps have been made, and decided to make my own. To clarify, the first version of this map was made back in the early 2000s, and its structure is very similar to the current one.
It all depends on the assumptions you make. I wanted a map that showed a clear expansion of the UFP between eras, one that would be as accurate as possible compared to the content of the show (even if that meant contradicting its charts) and one in which you could follow the path of the Enterprise(s) through the series. But if your assumption is that the Federation hasn't expanded much for various reasons, but that the radius of explored space has, then the Star Charts map is pretty damn good. However, it would mean that the Tzenkethi, the Cardassians and even the Ferengi should've been known to Kirk. They're much loser to Earth than Cestus III or the Mutara nebula, and about equidistant with the First Federation or Gamma Hydra.
I guess my main issue with it is that it seems to take Star Trek as a single moment in time rather than a 200 year history of Earth. Hell, why is Regula I so damned far? You'd think Starfleet would want their god-like experiment close to home where they can safeguard it.
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A couple of random points:
True. But what was that tirade "supposed" to be before that? It sounds as if Kirk is dictating the foreword, or rather the blurb, to his memoirs there. It has no place in the fictional context of the mission itself - there's no context in which Kirk would be prompted to say "These are the voyages", yadda yadda.
That two captains, Kirk and Picard, would feel obligated to read the same lines suggests a tradition, and tradition may trump reason. But specific to the Enterprise? Started by Kirk? (Thankfully, we don't need to think Archer started anything there.) Or generic insert-ship-here? Regardless of actual mission? It makes so little sense no matter which way one looks at it...
I guess I have a problem with that engulfing. So now exploration means telling the natives that they have been conquered? On the other hand, that certainly has a comfortingly familiar ring to it.
Yet in early TNG it is still casus belli if Romulans are to be found on the wrong side of the RNZ. By simple topological argumentation, there can be no wrong side unless the RNZ is a complete shell...
What would be the advantage of assuming the shell leaks de jure? I mean, it obviously leaks de facto, and the Star Charts sorta refused to make the RNZ graphically truly continuous on the far side and instead postulated spillage. But the heroes seem to condemn leakage, till "Paradise" where a report from a random Romulan ship in the wrong place is taken on the stride (all the other Romulan presences on the wrong side could have been considered illegal or part of diplomatic arrangements).
And so would the gods of Pollux, if distance is our only yardstick. But the Ferengi would be secretive, the Tzenkethi perhaps isolationist, and for all we know the Cardassians were known (they are obliquely referenced in those parallel 2250s at least).
That's what ties together a great deal of Star Charts in fact! "Space Seed" finds our heroes at a location abandoned by modern Earthlings after a previous presence; Khan supposedly gets marooned in the neighborhood, and the action of ST2:TWoK then supposedly involves the neighborhood as well. An uninteresting backyard like that would be a prime location for a secret experiment when many of its major threats would come from within the UFP itself (critics, thieves, saboteurs, spies, terrorists).
It still counts as "close to home", as Kirk's birthday joyride reaches the location easily enough. We may also debate whether Kirk really ended up close to the place at random, or whether it just was a short hop from the location where Khan lured him in to the location where Khan awaited him at Regula despite this not being close. I.e. the hypothesis that all of the UFP is traversed relatively quickly by a starship in a hurry, including those places nobody cares to go to any more.
The absolute numbers would come from assumptions on the speed of the Botany Bay. Around 150 ly from Earth would have been my best estimate (as this sort of speeding would relativistically shorten Khan's sleep sufficiently for the "two centuries" reference), but Mandel had slightly different ideas.
Timo Saloniemi
True. But what was that tirade "supposed" to be before that? It sounds as if Kirk is dictating the foreword, or rather the blurb, to his memoirs there. It has no place in the fictional context of the mission itself - there's no context in which Kirk would be prompted to say "These are the voyages", yadda yadda.
That two captains, Kirk and Picard, would feel obligated to read the same lines suggests a tradition, and tradition may trump reason. But specific to the Enterprise? Started by Kirk? (Thankfully, we don't need to think Archer started anything there.) Or generic insert-ship-here? Regardless of actual mission? It makes so little sense no matter which way one looks at it...
I guess I have a problem with that engulfing. So now exploration means telling the natives that they have been conquered? On the other hand, that certainly has a comfortingly familiar ring to it.
Yet in early TNG it is still casus belli if Romulans are to be found on the wrong side of the RNZ. By simple topological argumentation, there can be no wrong side unless the RNZ is a complete shell...
What would be the advantage of assuming the shell leaks de jure? I mean, it obviously leaks de facto, and the Star Charts sorta refused to make the RNZ graphically truly continuous on the far side and instead postulated spillage. But the heroes seem to condemn leakage, till "Paradise" where a report from a random Romulan ship in the wrong place is taken on the stride (all the other Romulan presences on the wrong side could have been considered illegal or part of diplomatic arrangements).
And so would the gods of Pollux, if distance is our only yardstick. But the Ferengi would be secretive, the Tzenkethi perhaps isolationist, and for all we know the Cardassians were known (they are obliquely referenced in those parallel 2250s at least).
That's what ties together a great deal of Star Charts in fact! "Space Seed" finds our heroes at a location abandoned by modern Earthlings after a previous presence; Khan supposedly gets marooned in the neighborhood, and the action of ST2:TWoK then supposedly involves the neighborhood as well. An uninteresting backyard like that would be a prime location for a secret experiment when many of its major threats would come from within the UFP itself (critics, thieves, saboteurs, spies, terrorists).
It still counts as "close to home", as Kirk's birthday joyride reaches the location easily enough. We may also debate whether Kirk really ended up close to the place at random, or whether it just was a short hop from the location where Khan lured him in to the location where Khan awaited him at Regula despite this not being close. I.e. the hypothesis that all of the UFP is traversed relatively quickly by a starship in a hurry, including those places nobody cares to go to any more.
The absolute numbers would come from assumptions on the speed of the Botany Bay. Around 150 ly from Earth would have been my best estimate (as this sort of speeding would relativistically shorten Khan's sleep sufficiently for the "two centuries" reference), but Mandel had slightly different ideas.
Timo Saloniemi
I think you're over-thinking this (gosh that's a bad way to write this!). The narration doesn't need to be in-universe, only to represent what the show is about.
Contrary to what they claim, the Federation's often a bit of a dick.
That's like saying that the DMZ in real life prevents South Koreans from going to Japan. They could expand on the far side, instead.
Isolationist is one thing, but it's hard to miss those fleets and colonies if the Federation's expanding and exploring.
I have some sympathy for that argument.
Correction: they reach the Regula I outpost easily enough, which makes its location on the Star Charts suspect. Again, it's like everything's in Earth's backyard, which makes the isolationist argument even weaker. I guess that's my main objection to almost all of the fan maps made about Star Trek: they completely miss the grandeur I expect from a world where exploration's the main (audience) draw.
Which of course makes Star Trek more like Star Wars, and the whole premise pointless. I have more respect than that for its core idea.
The Botany Bay is a 20th century ship. It couldn't even get outside the solar system in that time, were the writers to put any thought into it.
It is supposed to be. The Klingons call it Klach K'Del Brakt, a name first used in DS9. However they weren't mentioned as different names for the same phenomena until Enterprise's season 4.
Some of the olders star charts thus show them as two different locations, but after the Enterprise episode the latest Stellar Carthography book lists them as the same.
Some of the olders star charts thus show them as two different locations, but after the Enterprise episode the latest Stellar Carthography book lists them as the same.
I remember something I read about how the "briar patch" we saw on Enterprise wasn't the same one we saw in Insurrection, around the time that episode came out.
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