Gamma 7A system/Starbase 6

[fungun]

This is drivin me nuts.
Neither Gamma 7A nor Starbase 6 is anywhere on the Star Trek Star Charts. I have been to Memory-Alpha and Beta, Star Trek.com and TrekCore, read all the episode articles.

Where in the devil is Sector 39J, the Gamma 7A system, or Starbase 6?
Close to Sol? far away? near Klingon or Romulan???????

This one is a brain buster.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Tim

 

[fungun]

Went back to the Star Charts book, may or not be right, but if you follow the line south from Sol till you cross the name Kantare, then to the left alittle, you will find Gamma Ceti. I don't see anyother systems there or Starbases, except to the southeast of it is Starbase G-6 (??) .

Sounds like a good place (with a type-o LOL)

Tim

 

[Neopeius]

Where in the devil is Sector 39J, the Gamma 7A system, or Starbase 6?
Close to Sol? far away? near Klingon or Romulan???????

Wherever you want it to be

 

[Timo]

Well, check the Encyclopedia or Memory Alpha for "Gamma 7 sector" or "Gamma 7 outpost". Apparently, this place is close to the Cardassian DMZ and also to the Gagarin Research Station. By the Star Charts assumptions, this would probably indeed mean somewhere near Gamma Ceti, because that's where the DMZ is - and that's not a bad location for Gagarin, either.

Or for a low-numbered, TOS era starbase. Apparently, that route between Klingon and Cardassian territories is a popular one for UFP expansion and trade, since several other TOS era bases are around there. In Kirk's time, with the slower ships of that era, the bases would still be relatively far apart, though, allowing for the plots of the episodes in question.

And as you say, we have SB G-6 in that area, because it's near Betazed which by the Charts assumptions on Dominion War events must be around there. If that's the same place as SB 6 from TOS, why, there you go.

Except that in "Ultimate Computer", SB 6 was Kirk's port of call before he set out to explore the Alpha Carinae / Canopus system, which is a real one and lies in a completely different direction.

...Except that in the original episode, Kirk's port of call wasn't given a name at all. "SB 6" is the invention of the people responsible for the new effects that were created for the remastered version of the episode. So if you don't believe in the remastering, go for the "G-6 is 6" solution. It's not as if even the remastered episode explicitly gave us more than an ambiguous structure with perhaps a blurry "6" painted somewhere...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crewman47]

Depending on how Sectors are mapped, if there mapped out numerically from Earth,s 001, then given that each sector is 20LY in width then sector 39 could be some 780LY's away from Earth.

 

[Timo]

Only if one assumes that the sectors 1 through 39 go linearly out from Earth in a single direction. Which would be one of the oddest ways to do it.

a) It wouldn't reflect the practical reality of space exploration, where Earth's knowledge and influence of the surrounding space grows "shell by shell", perhaps best numbered in an outward 3D spiral of some sort.

b) It wouldn't explain how the sectors extending to the opposite direction from Earth would be numbered. Negative sectors?

The outward spiral model would place Sector 1 in the middle, Sectors 2 through 27 on the first shell outward (that is, roughly 20 to 50 ly out), and sectors 28 through 125 on the second shell outward (that is, roughly 40 to 110 ly out)...

(Incidentally, this model would place the first five-digit sectors at the tenth shell, or at least 200 ly from Earth... Which may not quite jibe with what we know of the Cardassian border.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crewman47]

I thought it was that. I was trying to remember from what Isaw in the Star Charts where it does show a map of Sectors out from 001. Not at home just now but iirc looking down on the Galaxy it looks like they have it go from:

001 ---> 002
|
\/
004 <--- 003

and then in a radial form from there. The confusing part is how the sectors would be numbered above and below the central (Y?) axis. Maybe it goes out like how you described it but it'd be nice to see it to understand it more.

 

[Timo]

Well, it could go like "fill the horizontal spiral around 001, then move to one step up from 001 and and fill the nine-sector plane above in a similar manner, then move to one step down from 001 and do the same; repeat and rinse until the galaxy is filled". But that's not the only way to do it - and if the UFP filled local space in such a spherical manner, then it couldn't fill out the entire galaxy which is not an Earth-centric sphere but a disk with its center far from Earth.

Geoff Mandel deliberately left parts of the system open in Star Charts, realizing there were exceptions to any rules he could come up with. Perhaps the system is filled out differently near Earth and farther out?

In any case, Sector 39 would probably still be easily within a hundred lightyears of Sector 1, even if there was no rhyme or reason to the progression of the numbers beyond coarse chronological order (small numbers first, even if in batches): Archer and NX-01 would already have covered several dozen sectors in their exploits, and the very next explorers would no doubt claim the 39th sector, without yet having loitered very far from Earth.

Difficult to say. So far, it seems best to assume that the action in the stories involving Gamma 7 took place within those 100 ly from Earth, and IMHO also that it was roughly in the direction of the Cardassian DMZ. It would get awfully confusing if Gamma 7A system wasn't in the Gamma 7 sector...

Timo Saloniemi