Galaxy With Grid

[Kaziarl]

yes, but what he's referring to is your map shows the federation almost 10000 lightyears end to end, when thats probably not the case. Thats all. I'm not saying it still wouldn't take time to cross an area 8000 cubic lightyears, but what that map shows is almost 100 million square lightyears. Even only 50 lightyears "thick" would make an area of space unimaginably huge.

 

[Lorna]

yes, but what he's referring to is your map shows the federation almost 10000 lightyears end to end, when thats probably not the case.

OK, it's probably not the case, but it's still not the case regardless that the Klingons can get to Cardassian space in a couple of weeks. Federation space would need to be insanely small, far smaller than 8000ly cubed for that to happen.

 

[Pavonis]

You're still talking months of travelling, it takes months from DS9 to Earth.

Please, what is the source of this assertion?

In the third season opener "The Search", Ben Sisko ponders when he began to consider the station his home. Jake suggests that it was last week, when Ben brought some of their items to the station, out of storage on Earth.

That dialogue indicates the journey from Earth to DS9 takes less than a week.

 

[Lorna]

I'm working on a new map. The Star charts cannot be accurate.

In DS9 I remember Sisko mentioning that the Dominion was passing through Romulan space to launch attacks on the Federation. This must mean that Cardassian space borders Romulan space or is pretty close, If this is true then The Cardassians share a border with the Romulans, the Romulans with the Klingons and all 3 of them with the Federation.

I also remember Sisko mention that a transmission to Cassidy yates came from the other side of the Federation and took months to arrive. This leads me to believe that Earth and Bajor reside near the Earth end of the Federation and that the Earth end is where the borders are located with the Cards/Roms & Klings.

I'm working on this now: LINK

I've placed a preliminary location for Fed/Dom/Card/Rom & Kling space. How I think it actually is using on screen dialogue.

What I would love to do is eventually obtain flash player and create an animation where you can click on certain species and their territory will overlay on the map. Other stuff also like the Bajoran wormhole, click Bajoran wormhole and it's entry and exit points appear with a connected line.

 

[Finn]

Two gripes

I think the territories are too big. If the Klingons were able to reach Cardassian border in time at the start of DS9's Season Six, it wouldn't take more than a couple of weeks to across the galaxy when judging from the sizes shown.

We know that it takes several months to get from Earth to DS9, we know it takes a couple of days to reach Cardassian space from DS9, we know that Quo'nos is only 4 days away from Earth. We know Federation space is spread across 8000 lightyears.

The Klingon fleet was probably headed for Cardassian space months in advance and was probably deployed to a small deep space supply planet when the Dominion became a probable threat.

I was under the impression Worf had to travel to Klingon space to talk with Gorwon, and he was with the fleet at the end of the episode when they showed up....

And I'm pretty sure Bajor is very close to Cardassia, since Sisko was able to make it to the Cardassian ship in that solar ship at low warp early in the series in a short time.

 

[Lorna]

Two gripes

I think the territories are too big. If the Klingons were able to reach Cardassian border in time at the start of DS9's Season Six, it wouldn't take more than a couple of weeks to across the galaxy when judging from the sizes shown.

We know that it takes several months to get from Earth to DS9, we know it takes a couple of days to reach Cardassian space from DS9, we know that Quo'nos is only 4 days away from Earth. We know Federation space is spread across 8000 lightyears.

The Klingon fleet was probably headed for Cardassian space months in advance and was probably deployed to a small deep space supply planet when the Dominion became a probable threat.

I was under the impression Worf had to travel to Klingon space to talk with Gorwon, and he was with the fleet at the end of the episode when they showed up....

And I'm pretty sure Bajor is very close to Cardassia, since Sisko was able to make it to the Cardassian ship in that solar ship at low warp early in the series in a short time.

Yeh, I've adjusted my map. In fact, just read the post directly previous to your own.

 

[Timo]

Jake suggests that it was last week, when Ben brought some of their items to the station, out of storage on Earth. That dialogue indicates the journey from Earth to DS9 takes less than a week

To nitpick, Jake said it was "last Thursday". And that only means the journey takes less than two weeks. "Last Thursday" could be ten days ago, as opposed to "this Thursday", if it was Sunday today.

But other episodes refer to the ability to shuttle between the UFP core worlds and Bajor in about a week or less. In a runabout no less! (In "Defiant", Bashir wants to borrow a runabout for getting stuff from Vulcan within the week... Although we can perhaps argue he only needs this warp five craft for one short link in a multi-ship rendezvous delivery chain).

In DS9 I remember Sisko mentioning that the Dominion was passing through Romulan space to launch attacks on the Federation. This must mean that Cardassian space borders Romulan space or is pretty close

Not really. It only means that the space already conquered by Cardassia must extend close to Romulan space. Which the Star Charts show happening. And that part, incidentally, is "canonical" because the amber-colored Cardassian conquests are shown extending to the right and thus towards Romulan-marked space by the necessary number of lightyears in the DS9 War Room wall maps.

I also remember Sisko mention that a transmission to Cassidy yates came from the other side of the Federation and took months to arrive. This leads me to believe that Earth and Bajor reside near the Earth end of the Federation and that the Earth end is where the borders are located with the Cards/Roms & Klings.

That was two weeks for messages, eight weeks for a transport ship, between Cestus III and Bajor ("Family Business"). Which doesn't necessarily mean Cestus is really far away, because then mere eight weeks on a transport wouldn't make sense. It probably just means the nonpriority messages get stuck somewhere during their long trip from one backwater of a relatively narrow UFP to another.

I was under the impression Worf had to travel to Klingon space to talk with Gorwon, and he was with the fleet at the end of the episode when they showed up.

"Favor the Bold"/"Sacrifice of Angels"? Not necessarily - Klingons like to command from the front, so Gowron could well have been relatively close to DS9 at the time.

And I'm pretty sure Bajor is very close to Cardassia, since Sisko was able to make it to the Cardassian ship in that solar ship at low warp early in the series in a short time.

That, plus he got there in no time in "Tribunal", too.

The wall maps of DS9 indicate that Bajor and Cardassia are in fact neighboring systems, just five lightyears apart. A bit like Washington and Richmond during the Civil War...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RichMerk]

Part of the problem, and one of the issues I faced when I was making my own maps, was that the scale of things changed over the decades of Star Trek. Generally speaking, the size is getting smaller and smaller with each successive series, but even within the general trend there were countless inconsistencies and some truly epic extremes.

It's very hard to reconcile everything. You almost just have to pick a scale that rings most true to you personally and just go with it. Or else concoct some sort of non-canonical explanation for the inconsistencies, like the "Cochrane Variable" or subspace highways. Or both.

 

[Timo]

Generally speaking, the size is getting smaller and smaller with each successive series, but even within the general trend there were countless inconsistencies and some truly epic extremes.

...Indeed. Just remember how in "The Cage", Earth and Talos were supposed to be at the opposite ends of the galaxy (unless Pike cunningly lied about it, and the telepathic Talosians either missed the lie, or didn't comment on it). Or how in "All Our Yesterdays", Vulcan was supposed to be "millions" of lightyears away from Zarabeth's planet, even though the galaxy itself is way smaller than that! It would have been very difficult for the later shows and movies to quote longer distances...

You almost just have to pick a scale that rings most true to you personally and just go with it.

OTOH, there seldom are conflicting references on the distance between specific locations A and B. So what if Earth and Vulcan sit 16 ly apart but Earth and Talos are separated by half a galaxy? We never got a Talos/Vulcan distance reference that would create a contradiction.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RichMerk]

I always assumed that expressions like "half a galaxy away" or "millions of lightyears" were just hyperbole. But there are plenty of concrete examples in TOS of extreme distances being traveled in short time periods. The Enterprise visited the edge of the galaxy 3 times and the core twice. That's a lot of mileage. And the famous example in TNG is "The Chase".

 

[Timo]

All of the above examples can be contested, though. Since the galaxy doesn't have an edge in reality, we can place the fictional edge at any distance we wish, including just a thousand lightyears from Earth, which no longer amounts to a lot of mileage.

And both "Magicks of Megas-Tu" and ST5:TFF can be argued to feature travel towards the core, not all the way to the core. In the former, the ship would merely be seeking a vantage point to the core. Sulu says "Galaxy center, Captain", but we can choose whether he means "We're at the galaxy centerpoint, boss" or "See, that's the galaxy centerpoint, boss". Considering that the episode establishes that our heroes expect to find "forces and phenomena beyond [their] understanding", it doesn't really make sense for them to only start scanning after reaching the center. So Sulu's announcement probably comes at an earlier waypoint - quite possibly tens of thousands of lightyears earlier. There is no dialogue later on to suggest the heroes reached the core.

As for ST5, well, Sybok insists that paradise lies "at" the center of the galaxy. But he may be wrong, because our heroes appear to discover paradise right after penetrating the Great Barrier, which for all we know lies right next to Nimbus III and not all that far from Earth, either. Sybok's driving instructions may have been deliberately false, as God was luring him in with promises of paradise which Sybok believed lay at the core, even if (and IMHO when) God's prison was on a planet that was not at the core, merely en route there.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RichMerk]

Well, we're getting off the topic of a galaxy map just a little here, and I don't know how the OP feels about that, so I'll just say that while everything you said is technically plausible, it is not in the spirit of the episodes/movie, and is contrived purely for the purpose of "explaining" the unrealistically outrageous distances and travel times.

You'd definitely hate my own galaxy map.

 

[Enderw]

Ive been working on a map myself and would like to share, but Im stick in the under 50 posts black hole. So if you would like to see Ill gladly send it to any who contact me. Id love some input on it. I think it has a cleaner look to it. But like what Ive seen so far.

 

[Dac]

Can't you just upload the image to say photobucket or imageshack and link to it in a normal post?

 

[Enderw]

I never thought of that. Ill try.

 

[Enderw]

http://s1201.photobucket.com/albums/bb356/enderw1/

Lets see if this works.....

 

[Enderw]

My thinking was this. Not all territories butt up the the Fed. and there is unclaimed space the lies between. The only ones that I new of was Romulans and Klingons. And they had border problems as well, so I think they may not only butt to each other but maybe over lap in places.

The Cardassian territories I always thought of as a small but densely guarded militarized union. Not very big but solid.

Bajor I always thought of as VERY small, no real colonies to expand but for the system that controls the wormhole. I think of it as half the size that I made it.

The Ferangi most likely had as much territory as Cardassis just not the military. They had been in space a while. They should be close to the Breen, I think that where they got warp speed tec from. And in arms reach of the Fed.

Breen just far enough away to be a mystery but not to the Klingons that know better to go into the territory.

Gorn was a 3 system empire. Closer to the galaxy core.

Tholian Space was with in arms reach of the fed, close enough to get into trouble from time to time.

Dominion space. Not in control of the worm hole opening before the war. And not after. But controlling pretty much everything else in the area.

Borg. You got to love um! They would have the most densely filled part of whatever space they were in and expanding in all directions but mostly towards the Beta Q. Why? Because that would be the most direct way for raw materials and other civilizations. Going North would take them to a less dense part of the galaxy and eventually out of the galaxy. The black dots are fallen worlds or systems as the expand.

Anyway Id love to hear your thoughts and hope you all enjoy.

 

[Dac]

Technically its pretty good, but your layout tends to conflict with some knowns.

Firstly, from what I remember the Klingons were always referred to a a Beta Quadrant species.

Secondly, Voyager encountered the Krenim and the Hirogen after Kes whipped them waaaay out past Borg space toward the Alpha Quadrant.

Your placement of the Cardassians and Breen I like though.

 

[Enderw]

Voyager: Your right I completely forgot about that.

The Klingons : That I didnt know at all. I thought the Romulans bordered Alpha and Beta, with the Vulcans close to the same border.

I think the Vulcans were the first Feds to start exploring the Beta Q. and to make first contact with a species.

Ill do a little more research.

 

[Dac]

Memory Alpha lists Qo'nos as being in the Beta Quad.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Kronos