Check this map out fellow Niners

[Photon]

http://forum.tribalwars.net/showthread.php?t=167419

(Click "Done" at the top)

The UFP on the far side of the Klingon Empire?

 

[JonBaas]

Interesting map. Nice job to whomever put it together.

-Jon

 

[toughlittleship]

I like looking at "maps" of Star Trek locations (the Star Trek: Star Charts are excellent) but I take them with a pinch of salt. Surely the Cardassians and the Romulans have to be near each other, as per "Improbable Cause", "In the Pale Moonlight" etc.

 

[Timo]

Why? Klingons interacted with Cardassians easily enough without sharing a meter of common border. Surely Romulans could likewise send a fleet across vast distances to hover near the Cardassian border in "Improbable Cause", or a diplomatic envoy across similar distances in "In the Pale Moonlight" - or offer the Dominion a chance to loop around to stab the Feds in the back via the RNZ in that latter episode.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Jono]

Interesting map. Nice job to whomever put it together.

-Jon

It is from a guy named Chris Adamek who I assume put it together himself for his fan fiction he wrote several years ago. They've cut off his list of planets and their grid coordinates that use to be on that map.

As for the Fed area on the other side of the Klingons. This map was originally meant to portray around 2400, so between then and when that area was made into Fed space it could have been cut off. Or because we're looking at a 2D map, so we're not getting the full picture, Federation space might go over or under (or through) Klingon or Romulan space and connect up the two areas.

 

[Timo]

The Star Charts also feature that blue blot of UFP space to the "east" of the area where Klingon and Romulan empires touch. It's intended to be a 3D feature all right - and it meets a continuity requirement of sorts, because without it, the Federation couldn't access the real star Canopus which nevertheless is UFP territory (or at least a Starfleet wargames playground) in TOS already.

It also tries to steer the viewer out of the sort of thinking where this large number of hostile empires around the UFP core worlds would somehow be preventing the UFP from expanding. There are foes in every direction, yes - but the UFP can sneak past them and keep on expanding. Only a trusting "good guy" empire would do that sort of thing, creating vulnerable tendrils of space that the enemy can cut off with little warning. The "bad guy" empires tend to be tight spheroids instead...

In dramatic terms, Star Trek needs areas of space that are farther away than the usual regions of conflict with the usual foes. That can only be achieved by going past the territory of those usual foes, so maps really ought to reflect this somehow. But the easygoing and expansive UFP may also have truly isolated "islands" of territory far away from the core worlds, comprising star systems and smaller empires that have joined the UFP on their own free will instead of having been absorbed by an expanding "conquest front".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Cyke101]

I find it odd that the Mutara Nebula is so far away from Earth. Then again, we don't really get an idea of the passage of time in TWOK, do we? Likewise, Khitomer seems pretty deep into the Beta Quadrant, and I'm not sure how it reconciles with Sulu's line of Excelsior being in Beta Quadrant, making it difficult to reach Khitomer in time for the conference.

 

[Timo]

Sulu actually says he's in the Alpha Quadrant when trying to reach Khitomer...

As for Mutara, it's apparently close to Ceti Alpha. There's no real star of that name, but there are plenty of stars with the word "Ceti" in them - stars from the expansive constellation Cetus. A binary star with A and B components might well be called X Ceti Alpha / X Ceti Beta, and our heroes might simply drop the X from the name because they know which star they are talking about (no others anywhere nearby), even if they have to distinguish between the binary halves Alpha and Beta.

Since Cetus is so expansive, we can pick just about any real Cetus star at any distance and still claim that Ceti Alpha is where it should be in the real world. Incidentally, a distance of 150 lightyears would be far enough from Earth to be seldom visited, close enough to have been formerly visited, and also where a ship moving at 0.45 times lightspeed would end up in the late 2260s if it started in 1996. And a speed of 0.45 c would in turn mean that this travel time of 270 years would be relativistically shortened to less than 250 years, thus allowing Kirk and Khan both to round it down to just two centuries of cold sleep rather than three...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Photon]

The Star Charts also feature that blue blot of UFP space to the "east" of the area where Klingon and Romulan empires touch. It's intended to be a 3D feature all right - and it meets a continuity requirement of sorts, because without it, the Federation couldn't access the real star Canopus which nevertheless is UFP territory (or at least a Starfleet wargames playground) in TOS already.

It also tries to steer the viewer out of the sort of thinking where this large number of hostile empires around the UFP core worlds would somehow be preventing the UFP from expanding. There are foes in every direction, yes - but the UFP can sneak past them and keep on expanding. Only a trusting "good guy" empire would do that sort of thing, creating vulnerable tendrils of space that the enemy can cut off with little warning. The "bad guy" empires tend to be tight spheroids instead...

In dramatic terms, Star Trek needs areas of space that are farther away than the usual regions of conflict with the usual foes. That can only be achieved by going past the territory of those usual foes, so maps really ought to reflect this somehow. But the easygoing and expansive UFP may also have truly isolated "islands" of territory far away from the core worlds, comprising star systems and smaller empires that have joined the UFP on their own free will instead of having been absorbed by an expanding "conquest front".

Timo Saloniemi

How tough would it be to be in the Cardy Union.
Talarians, Tzenkethi, UFP, Tholians, and a prong on the Klingons encroaching fairly close

 

[Timo]

The thing is, you won't even notice "fairly close" most of the time. Even though Starfleet was having its way with Bajor for most of the series, people in the neighboring Cardassian home system probably didn't even notice much. The gulf between stars is deep and dark enough that you could basically imagine you're all alone there. Earthlings did, until very recently... And in the real world, still do.

Out of all its neighbors, the Cardassians only seem to have minded the Breen. The others stayed in their own star systems and shipping lanes, presumably.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Photon]

The thing is, you won't even notice "fairly close" most of the time. Even though Starfleet was having its way with Bajor for most of the series, people in the neighboring Cardassian home system probably didn't even notice much. The gulf between stars is deep and dark enough that you could basically imagine you're all alone there. Earthlings did, until very recently... And in the real world, still do.

Out of all its neighbors, the Cardassians only seem to have minded the Breen. The others stayed in their own star systems and shipping lanes, presumably.

Timo Saloniemi

Those Killer T's could have united for a formidable force against the Union had the Cardies had expansionist ideas.

I just wished DS9 had fleshed out those Tzenkathi more

 

[Kai Winn]

the romulan empire's border a mere 10ly from earth, that's seems a little too close. i wish there were more real places on the map, but i recognize only alpha centauri, wolf 359, vega, capella and castor (where's pollux?) in the neighbourhood of sol, the distances about right. rigel is 800 ly away, but that's a 2d map and it could be in the depth. orion? that's a constellation, not a star.

 

[Timo]

To be sure, that map doesn't have a scale bar. If it's following the same scale as the Star Charts map that's used as its basis, one of those squares would be 20 ly per side. That's the size of a "sector" as first defined in the TNG Tech Manual...

The Rigel in that map ain't the Beta Orionis Rigel, because that would be "south" on the map, not "down" or "up". But the sky is full of real Rigels - in fact, Alpha Centauri is one of them (Rigel Centauri or Rigil Kentaurus, literally "Leg of the Centaur").

As for "star named Orion", that's a Trek thing... In TOS and TAS, there's mention of an ancient culture of Orion, and the TAS episode "Yesteryear" makes it sound as if the place is called Orion, too, not just the culture. In DS9 "Little Green Men", there's definitively a place called Orion: Quark's going to make a side trip there.

The question is, what sort of a place is it? A constellation doesn't make sense as a waypoint for Quark, because one can't make a "side trip" to a dozen stars scattered all across the sky. A star or a planet are better alternatives.

Whether the star/planet Orion is related to the Earth constellation Orion in any way is debatable. Might be it's named after the Orion civilization instead, and the name of the Orion civilization in turn doesn't come from the Earth constellation but is instead just coincidentally the same word... Much like Klingons aren't named because they resemble cling-ons (at least as far as we know).

Of course, some fans of old saw the contradiction even back when TOS and TAS was all we had. Instead of yielding to the idea of an ancient civilization named after an Earth constellation, they decided our heroes were in fact speaking of "O'Ryan's planet"... The good old Star Maps refers to this one, in addition to featuring stars of the "real" constellation (which incidentally include one of the Rigels).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I find it odd that the Mutara Nebula is so far away from Earth.

Yes, why should it to be so much further away from Earth compared with DS9, which was supposedly the ass-end of the galaxy a century later?

Maybe it's that pesky third dimension that we're not seeing. Where's the holographic version of this map?

 

[Timo]

That's the funny thing... Bajor was never really the ass end of the Federation - everything else was!

That is, it was always trivially easy to shuttle between Bajor and Earth in a couple of days, but other locations such as Kasidy's "homeworld" Cestus or Mardah's studying place Regulus were stated to be impracticably far away from Bajor. It seems that when Julian Bashir wanted to practice frontier medicine, he chose the closest frontier he could find...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[PKTrekGirl]

Very interesting map. It's always interesting to see how others perceive the Trek Universe.