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How big is the Federation really?

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indolover

Fleet Captain
Picard in First Contact said 8,000 light years, but is this in length or cubic area?

If it's length, then I don't get the statement Picard made. To travel from one end of the Federation to another would take 8 years lol., if it takes a ship at warp 9 to travel 1,000 light years (well I gathered this from Voyager and the Intrepid class is supposedly one of the fastest Starfleet ship designs).

This would make Starfleet untenable, since it would take a long while to bring in reinforcements to any sector of space.

Doesn't a cubic measurement make more sense? 8,000 cubed is about 650-700 light years, which seems more logical.
 
Reminds me of a fandom parody I saw of the FJ UFP map in the TM...

Circle showing "Federation Treaty Zone",
Circle showing "Space Claimed by the Federation"
Circle showing "Actual Federation Space".

In any case, it's gotta be crazy three dimensional all over the place.

If you head out and claim a planet/star that's, oh, 3000 lightyears away,
does that instantly extend the radius of the UFP up to that particular location,
and everything inclusive behind it? That's crazy. Right?
 
indolover said:
Doesn't a cubic measurement make more sense? 8,000 cubed is about 650-700 light years, which seems more logical.
Click to expand...
If the Federation was 8,000 cubic light-years, that's a cube only 20 light-years on a side.

That seem a little small.

I figured once that if the Federation was a sphere 8,000 light-years in diameter, it would contain about 329 million stars and 268 billion cubic light-years.

That seems a little huge.

click image (you have to double click the resulting image for enlargement)

I've trimmed this image of a portion of the milky way galaxy to show just the orion arm, the portion shown is about 8,000 LY long, if the Federation were only in the orion arm, then it makes sense that it's a drawn out string of stars. Also in the orion arm would be the Klingons, Romulans, Orions, Cardassians, etc..

They at each other throats because they're all packed into a long tube together.

Here's a larger view of the orion arm.

click image


:):):):):):)
 
indolover said:
Picard in First Contact said 8,000 light years, but is this in length or cubic area?

If it's length, then I don't get the statement Picard made. To travel from one end of the Federation to another would take 8 years lol., if it takes a ship at warp 9 to travel 1,000 light years (well I gathered this from Voyager and the Intrepid class is supposedly one of the fastest Starfleet ship designs).
Click to expand...

Voyager stated about 70 years to cover about 70,000 light-years. That works out to 1000 light-years per year, but it's unlikely they meant at warp 9 the whole time. To run the engines at warp 9 for 70 years straight sounds... optimistic.

I think the 1000 light-years per year is supposed to be an average, assuming a somewhat slower cruising speed and many stops along the way. Which means that a ship that really was going all-out, at warp 9+ continuously, should be able to cover 8000 light-years in a much shorter time.
 
Another thing to consider is that the Federation may not be a perfect sphere, but rather an irregular shape--like an ink blot--with Earth as its center in a political sense rather than a geographical one. Some of the Federation's borders may lie hundreds or thousands of light-years from Earth, while others may be less than fifty light-years away because they might bump against the borders of another galactic government (like the Klingons or the Romulans).

The core sectors of Federation space may only occupy a region a hundred or so light-years across, IMO. The more distant regions may be so far away, however, that travel to and from Earth may not be feasible for most, with some Federation representatives only able to attend conferences via subspace radio.
 
How big is the Federation really?
Click to expand...

(With apologies to Douglas Adams...)

It's big. Really, really big. You might think the distance between Ceti Alpha V and Ceti Alpha is a big, but that's just peanuts to the Federation.
 
The most distant real stars mentioned in Star Trek are about 1,000 to 2,000 ly from Earth, and those aren't necessarily UFP members. OTOH, our heroes already tread in the final frontier when they say they are 400 or 900 ly from Earth. Even some locations under 200 ly from here remain unvisited by man in TOS.

When Picard says "Over one hundred and fifty [planets in the UFP] ... Spread across eight thousand light years", then, it sounds as if he's describing the interstellar equivalent of the British Empire. They have "overseas" holdings they are proud of, but many of those are ridiculously distant from motherland and cannot be plausibly defended or otherwise controlled by the central government. Picard emphasizes "spreading", further suggesting that the member planets are relatively isolated from each other in spatial terms.

How difficult would it be to reach a member world that sits 8,000 ly from Earth? On shorter trips, starships can probably go faster (better opportunities for pit stops, less risk of engine overheat translating into certain death). In "Q Who?", a trip was said to take three years if the ship used maximum warp and went from point A, a planet 7,000 ly from Earth, to point B, the closest starbase at unknown distance from Earth. That translates to 1,000 ly/y only if the UFP really is a sphere 8,000 ly in diameter and centered on Earth... Otherwise, travel is faster on the average at such distances than at the distance USS Voyager had to span.

Still, a three-year reaction time in defending the outermost holdings means that the UFP isn't exactly prepared to ward off invasions against its outermost members. At least not by direct military means.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Here's my take....

The Federation does, in fact, strech over 8,000 light-years (if viewed on a 2D map) and the writers didn't care to follow a strict scale when it came to speed.

After all, most times, the speed of warp depends on the "speed of plot."

Sometimes it takes eight weeks at maximum warp to reach the "other side" of the Federation. Other times, that distance can be transversed relatively quickly.

So, I just wink my eye and accept that the Federation is unbelieveably large and that Starfleet can in fact travel anywhere within it they want whenever they want. ;)
 
I always presumed it was an irregular 3D shape which had a 8k ly diameter at its greatest, but not as big as that all the way round.
 
indolover said:
Picard in First Contact said 8,000 light years, but is this in length or cubic area?

If it's length, then I don't get the statement Picard made. To travel from one end of the Federation to another would take 8 years lol., if it takes a ship at warp 9 to travel 1,000 light years (well I gathered this from Voyager and the Intrepid class is supposedly one of the fastest Starfleet ship designs).

This would make Starfleet untenable, since it would take a long while to bring in reinforcements to any sector of space.

Doesn't a cubic measurement make more sense? 8,000 cubed is about 650-700 light years, which seems more logical.
Click to expand...

This is probably perimeter.
 
But such a border has never been mentioned in any episode. All we have evidence of is the presence of Romulan forces next to the Cardassian border in "Improbable Cause" - but no evidence that those forces were in Romulan space.

Quite to the contrary, if Enabran Tain's fleet had been residing in Romulan space, the runabout with Odo and Garak aboard would never have reached them. Not only would paranoid Romulan border patrols have shot them on sight (they didn't have a cloak, after all), but Odo would have flat out refused to go.

In practice, Cardassia, like any other interstellar player of appreciable size, must have some borders against empty, unclaimed, neutral space. The one from "Improbable Cause" could be one of these.

Timo Saloniemi
 
It might be worth noting that the Valiant, a Defiant Class ship which cannot go above warp 9 was going to circumnavigate the entire Federation as a cadet training excercise.

I don't think they mentioned how long that would take, but it surely wouldn't have been years.
 
Of course, the definition of "the entire Federation" may depend on practical considerations. A Royal Navy frigate might sail to "every corner of the British Empire" even when ignoring a couple of islands in the Pacific, a visit to which would lengthen the trip by 300%.

The model of the UFP as a solid spheroid of given radius is not supported by the basic nature of the TV shows. There are always ways for UFP enemies to approach close to UFP key worlds, ways for them to challenge our heroes even when they travel from UFP world A to UFP world B. There are so many contested borders that a simple sphere would quickly run out of suitable "corners" for them all. And there are stubborn enemies in some directions, enemies that have dug their trenches a century before the relevant episode and prevented UFP expansion in that direction - whilst space in other directions is open for our heroes to expand UFP reach. An initial spheroid shape would pretty soon be disrupted. And the hypothetical initial spheroid would date back to the days when human warp drive was primitive and mankind's reach limited, so its radius would probably be tiny, its shape unobservable in the outlines of the later UFP.

...Not to mention that the initial sphere would probably be more like a cluster of initial spheres, from UFP founding cultures. And that cluster need not be particularly symmetrical or continuous.

Timo Saloniemi
 
Timo said:
Of course, the definition of "the entire Federation" may depend on practical considerations. A Royal Navy frigate might sail to "every corner of the British Empire" even when ignoring a couple of islands in the Pacific, a visit to which would lengthen the trip by 300%.

The model of the UFP as a solid spheroid of given radius is not supported by the basic nature of the TV shows. There are always ways for UFP enemies to approach close to UFP key worlds, ways for them to challenge our heroes even when they travel from UFP world A to UFP world B. There are so many contested borders that a simple sphere would quickly run out of suitable "corners" for them all. And there are stubborn enemies in some directions, enemies that have dug their trenches a century before the relevant episode and prevented UFP expansion in that direction - whilst space in other directions is open for our heroes to expand UFP reach. An initial spheroid shape would pretty soon be disrupted. And the hypothetical initial spheroid would date back to the days when human warp drive was primitive and mankind's reach limited, so its radius would probably be tiny, its shape unobservable in the outlines of the later UFP.

...Not to mention that the initial sphere would probably be more like a cluster of initial spheres, from UFP founding cultures. And that cluster need not be particularly symmetrical or continuous.

Timo Saloniemi
Click to expand...

As I basically see it, the Federation is a kind of irregular splotch, totalling about 900 light years at the widest point, and in some volumetric sense akin to 'square area' is CLOSE to 8000 light years. But that may be a very loose measurement.

Or one might prefer to handle it in terms of sectors (each one, 8000 CUBIC light years in volume, in itself) of which, there may be a total of 2250 fully populated ones? Perhaps averaging 3 to 3.25 populated worlds, each? (consistent with the Star Charts book's picture of Federation occupancy)
 
CaptChris42 said:
As I basically see it, the Federation is a kind of irregular splotch, totalling about 900 light years at the widest point, and in some volumetric sense akin to 'square area' is CLOSE to 8000 light years. But that may be a very loose measurement.

Or one might prefer to handle it in terms of sectors (each one, 8000 CUBIC light years in volume, in itself) of which, there may be a total of 2250 fully populated ones? Perhaps averaging 3 to 3.25 populated worlds, each? (consistent with the Star Charts book's picture of Federation occupancy)
Click to expand...

First, welcome to the board.

Second, please take some time to review the rules for posting here, pinned at the top of this forum.

Specifically, the rule regarding resurrection of dead threads.

This one has been dead for 13 years. Let’s let it rest in peace, shall we?

Thanks
 
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