History of licenced maps?

[Jarvisimo]

Hi all, a friend asked me about if there were many Star Trek maps. I just wanted to ask about the history of licenced maps and canonical maps, and if anyone has ever collected this information (and pictures) in one place? Memory Beta wasn't so helpful here (the information possibly is too fragmented to easily find).

 

[Therin of Andor]

Hi all, a friend asked me about if there were many Star Trek maps. I just wanted to ask about the history of licenced maps and canonical maps, and if anyone has ever collected this information (and pictures) in one place? Memory Beta wasn't so helpful here (the information possibly is too fragmented to easily find).

I thought there had been only four:

* "Star Trek Maps" (Bantam Books 1980; dumped onto remaindered shelves almost immediately after the licensing rights passed from Bantam to Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster)

* "Star Trek Star Charts" (Pocket Books, 2002)

* "Star Trek: Stellar Cartography" (Pocket Books, 2013)

* "Star Trek: Stellar Cartography", second edition (Pocket Books, 2018).

Each one corrected and expanded the one before.

Lots of RPG materials would also have some maps., but not necessarily compatible with canon.

 

[Jarvisimo]

Thanks for that @Therin of Andor That's ok if the rpg ones aren't canon compatible Therein - i guess in that sense they are still licenced maps - and we were curious about them. There isn't really a history of trek cartography (including canonical and non canonical entries).

I wondered if @Christopher had thoughts - I remember you discussing maps and cartography before and wondered if you knew of various (less well known) maps in the franchise's history.

 

[drt]

The first licensed maps would have been the ones in Franz Joseph's Technical Manual. Those maps are largely ignored now, but were popular throughout the 70s.

Star Trek Maps was next, but like @Therin of Andor mentioned, was actually hard to come by, I only ever saw it once in a book store and never again. The Star Trek Role Playing Game of the early/mid 80s had the next licensed map, it was largely based on Maps. That game was pretty popular at the time and a lot of the world building was incorporated into other licensed products and fanon stuff.

The first "canonical" map was introduced in "Conspiracy", I think it was used a couple of more times but isn't compatible with later episodes so it was dropped. The TNG art department drew up a new map which started to be used more frequently, presumably it's reproduced in some of the licensed products from the 90s, but I don't have them handy at the moment to dig through. This map's most prominent appearance was probably in "The Chase". It was a "galactic scale" map and didn't show much fine detail.

The later Star Charts/Cartography maps provided the fine scale details, and while not entirely canonized, portions have been used for Into Darkness and in the Kurtzman shows.

 

[Christopher]

I wondered if @Christopher had thoughts - I remember you discussing maps and cartography before and wondered if you knew of various (less well known) maps in the franchise's history.

No, the others have pretty much covered it. Aside from the galaxy-scale map that was in the original writers' technical reference and reprinted in the Starlog-published TNG Technical Journal magazine. It predates the quadrant divisions introduced in "The Price" and shows the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans taking up a much, much huger part of the galaxy than Star Charts later depicted, although their general galactic position and relation to each other was much the same as in STSC. Our own King Daniel did a modified version of that map a while back: https://imgur.com/7YDS1kw

 

[Tuskin38]

Star Trek Online also uses Star Charts/Stellar Cartgrophy for the basis of their galaxy map, though some systems are nudged around for gameplay reasons. or because the in game map doesn't actually reach far enough.

 

[Jarvisimo]

Thank you everyone, this is really interesting.

I also wondered about the mini map in Balance of Terror and the map/cartographic image Colonel West shows in TUC; did the latter relate to other publications and how did the former become incorporated in future publications?

The same with stellar cartography in Generations - did the art created for that film relate to or become incorporated in future map publications?

Thank you again!


Also I saw a bit on Google about the FASA "triangle" too, which was quite intriguing.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Star Trek Maps is fantastic for having a barely painted AMT Enterprise model slapped on the cover instead of literally anything else.

It's also my favourite for the sheer volume of Easter Eggs dotted around the edges of Federation space.

Star Trek Star Charts is the current one, used as the basis for in-universe maps since Discovery started in 2017. Here's a close up of the war map in Discovery season one, which is such a copy paste from the Star Charts it features stuff that won't happen for decades in-universe.

 

[Christopher]

I also wondered about the mini map in Balance of Terror and the map/cartographic image Colonel West shows in TUC; did the latter relate to other publications and how did the former become incorporated in future publications?

The same with stellar cartography in Generations - did the art created for that film relate to or become incorporated in future map publications?

The TUC map wasn't based on anything else or referenced in anything else, as far as I know. It wasn't until the Kelvin films that the canon started drawing on published map books, and I think that's largely because Geoffrey Mandel was in the art department for ST '09.

The BoT map of the Neutral Zone inspired how Star Trek Maps and Star Charts both depicted the region, naturally enough.

I don't think the GEN maps were incorporated into anything, and it wouldn't really have worked anyway, since the intent there was to show a 3-dimensional view of space of the sort you'd get using the Celestia space simulator, while the published map books take a 2-D top-down approach. Basically the GEN map was the "Google Street View" version.

 

[drt]

I don't think the GEN maps were incorporated into anything, and it wouldn't really have worked anyway, since the intent there was to show a 3-dimensional view of space of the sort you'd get using the Celestia space simulator, while the published map books take a 2-D top-down approach. Basically the GEN map was the "Google Street View" version.

Yeah, it was also a relatively local area of space, with no anchor points to anything of interest, so really no reason to depict it it any detail afterwards - although Veridian, Amargosa and the Nexus' path are shown in Star Charts.

 

[Tuskin38]

There was a map from star charts used for set dec in ENT, but it's not legible.