I think Voyager could have been better with a map showing where they were and the places they were going. The map would have been primarily for the writers. It's good for the writers to know more about the situation than they show or tell, to give a realistic feeling. The show could sparingly show parts of it in Astrometrics or in the Magic Meeting Room. They would learn about each civilization from their neighbors as they approached. Each civilization would take between one episode and one season to traverse because it's hard to imagine a cohesive civilization that takes a year to traverse. The civilizations could be modeled after civilizations of human history and the stories would be similar to a group of pre-Columbus Scandenavian explorers riding horses from Newfoundland across the Amercicas to Tierra del Fuego. The map would be the backdrop. We would see them weighing decisions like travelling closer to the galactic center, perhaps with navigational hazards, to travel through an empire rumored to have subjugated neighboring civilizations before the won independence at great cost, or to travel a longer path through an empire rumored to have collapsed into mostly feudal planets loosely allied under a common religion. They always have the option of leaving the spiral arm or travelling along its edge where they'll encounter fewer allies and adversaries. They wouldn't always have reliable information on the civilizations, who is likely to help them or harm them, and the internal power struggles going on in the place they pass through. But the map would anchor it all. They know where the stars are. They know where they are. They know something about the civilizations behind them. They know at what point they'll start reaching the boundaries of explored space and encounter known allies and adversaries. We didn't get that anchor. Instead it felt like each episode we learned "we're not travelling through a region with characteristics XYZ," but it didn't feel real. TOS is random and episodic, but I still got a feeling of place: The UFP was a great power, and Kirk was exploring the Wild West and protecting frontier settlements. Roddenberry said he fibbed when he sold it as a Western, but to me that's exactly what it was, and it worked. With Voyager, I obviously knew the story of where they were, but it felt like something they just mentioned when convenient, not the backdrop for everything that happened. tl;dr Voyager would have felt more realistic underpinned by a map of where were and possible paths ahead.
The Voyager crew were thrown into the Delta Quadrant. Starfleet had never explored that part of space before. They had no idea what was ahead of them. Neelix tried to help guide them but even after a while he had no idea either. The "lost in space" premise made the show more interesting.
They weren't exactly lost though, they knew exactly they where they where. True they didn't know anything about the races in the area.
^right. In theory, they (in-universe) would have a sufficient anchor point in a set of pulsars for triangulation, especially if that set of pulsars would also be measurable from Federation space to chart their absolute progress. That technology would be feasible, even with today's technology (in fact, a (rudimentary) form of this technology has been used in the (real-life) Pioneer plaque for indication of Earth's position). A more complete map would only confer the additional advantage of knowing which parts of space were more or less desirable, for whichever reason(s). However, the writers could have profited from such a map immensely, in keeping their universe internally consistent and believable for us.
I have always wondered if it might've been more efficient to make a beeline for the Bajoran Wormhole. Imagine if they got there at the beginning of DS9 season 6?
1. Berman screams at the comicon audiences "it's the same ####ing distance! It's not shorter or quicker, your map is a ####ing liar, #### your map you ####ers!" 2. If the wormhole was 20 to 40 years closer to Caretakers Array than federation Space, and Voyager did fly there, what if the wormhole wasn't there any more when Voyager got there, 30 years later? 3. There is some argument about whether Voyager knew about the Dominion. Voyager's lost in space Timeline doesn't exactly overlap with the DS9 season finale Jem'Hadar, but when they were teaching Kes how to fly a shuttle... Jem'Hadar fighters were fighting her.
Can't help but notice their start point and trajectory differ between the first two and the bottom one.
Okuda had the flu that day? The last one, from the episode "Renaissance Man," was on a p.a.d.d. and hard to see in the episode. The other 3 are from Astrometrics, or at least 2 of them are.
Do you mean when they combined all of their tricorders and made a map of their twisted ship? They lost it?
No, the entity that was twisting the ship dumped some 20 million gigaquads of data about the region of space in to their computer. So, they either traveled past that know space or that information was unintelligible.
The data dump by the twisted entity was explored in the novel protectors and acts of contrition. It's explained that Kim was pretty obsessed with it off screen and worked for a while to try and decipher the data but couldn't or only could manage to decipher part of it. It's been a while since I read it. It would have been interesting if they had explored the data dump within the show. Once the astrometrics lab was introduced, I liked the fact that we could actually see voyagers course. In endgame we see how close they are to finally reaching the Beta Quadrant.
Seven said that she knocked 3 years off the trip by plotting a smarter route. Who charted the original journey home? Harold S. L. Kim.