Lit-verse Star Charts

[ryan123450]

I remember a thread in the forum some time ago that talked about where some Litverse related planets and territories would be located in the Star Trek Star Charts, and it got me thinking that something the TrekLit community is lacking is stellar cartography info.

We have TrekLit ship designs and stats, timeline data, Memory-Beta for encyclopedic information, but not much on the maps front. It would be great to see a map with the location of the Taurus Reach, the New Thallonian Protectorate, the Holy Order of the Kinshaya, the voyage of the USS Titan, the Confederacy of the Worlds of the First Quadrant, etc.

Does anyone have something like this as one of their personal projects? Perhaps it could be something we work on as a community? I would certainly be willing to put something like this up at the Litverse Reading Guide if it existed, but I doubt I'll ever have time to do the project justice on my own.

I assume simply copying images out of the Star Trek Star Charts, making additions to them, and posting them online would violate some copyright law, but I'm sure there is a way to accomplish something amazing.

I look forward to seeing what people think or can contribute!

 

[Masiral]

This is something I was just thinking of while re-reading Vanguard. It would be great to see the Taurus Reach on a map.

 

[Paul Weaver]

All maps I've ever seen have the Khan problem - 2 dimensional thinking.

An ideal map would be four dimensional, as the map of the galaxy post Destiny is rather different to that of the galaxy in 2151.

The problem with maps of Trek of any sort is that they rarely match up with travel times and distance quoted.

 

[Relayer1]

It's about time some techie reader put together an interactive 3D map...

Anyone ?

 

[Christopher]

^Well, there was www.whitten.org/starmap, which I think was created by a TrekBBS member, but that seems to have disappeared.

 

[chris_masters5]

the link seems to work if you take starmap of the end: http://www.whitten.org/

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I have one of these. Not a particularly good-looking set of maps, but something I scribbled down and contribute to periodically.

The locations of the Taurus Reach, Thallonian space and the Holy Order of the Kinshaya are pretty easy to place given what we know.

 

[DEWLine]

Actually, Jed Whitten's been working on a new take on the idea.

http://starmap.whitten.org/

 

[Christopher]

^All I see at that link is a white screen with a menu bar on top. Maybe it's a browser issue.

 

[ryan123450]

It worked in Firefox but it was very slow to load or function. Looks like a work in progress.

 

[DEWLine]

Definitely a work in progress.

And as far as it goes, it works in Firefox for Mac. Safari...not so well.

 

[jimcat]

Dear ryan123450,
I was going to post about this yesterday, but got caught up in Jed Whitten’s new version of his map (I usually use Firefox, so it showed up fine for me).

One of the maps in Larry Nemecek’s “Stellar Cartography” pack of maps is what he calls the “National Geographic” map, done by Geoffrey Mandel. It is done in the style of one of the National Geographic magazine’s historical map supplements, and it’s a revision and expansion of the “Star Charts” book’s maps (also Geoffrey Mandel’s work, as were the long-ago original “Star Trek Maps”). I was hoping that someone who has the map and has the time and money to keep up with the novels too might post, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.

My own occasional dipping into the TOS novels means that “Vanguard” is the only thing I really recognised. I don’t think there’s much coverage of the novels, and I didn’t immediately spot any of the political groupings you mentioned. The cut-off date for the map is 2385, so I’m guessing it really doesn’t cover much after the TNG movies.

Vanguard is marked on (it’s in the Alpha Quadrant, about level with where the Delta Triangle is in the Beta Quadrant, and a similar distance from the Alpha-Beta Quadrant boundary), but it’s in the middle of a rather empty area of the map, so I’m none the wiser about where the various stars in the Taurus Reach might be.

As Paul Weaver pointed out, the two-dimensional maps may look good, but it’s very difficult to work out where the stars are in relation to each other in three dimensions. It’s a particular problem with stars that are marked on the map, but don’t seem to correspond to stars that exist in reality. Or stars not marked at all. Is Vanguard and the Taurus Reach about level with the Sun, or a few hundred light-years “above” or “below” it in the plane of the Galaxy?

To get to the point, if you’re interested in an update to the “Star Charts” maps to use as the base for a map of the “Star Trek” novels universe, the one in “Stellar Cartography” would probably be the best to start with. Unless you can find it at a huge discount, it’s very expensive, though. I spent ages waiting for Amazon UK to discount it by 40-50% before I took the plunge, and I’m really not convinced it’s worth paying the full price for, especially if star maps aren’t that big a deal for you.

As for my own interest in “Star Trek” maps, I did post this first pass at a map of the Romulan Neutral Zone after the Treaty of Algeron (something that came out of nowhere in “Star Trek: Nemesis” and the “Star Trek: Enterprise” final episode “These Are the Voyages…”):
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=235444
I’m still hoping to go back and have another go at it when time permits, but if this version’s any use to you in the meantime, please feel free to use or adapt it any way you like.

Best wishes,
Timon

 

[ryan123450]

Dear ryan123450,
I was going to post about this yesterday, but got caught up in Jed Whitten’s new version of his map (I usually use Firefox, so it showed up fine for me).

One of the maps in Larry Nemecek’s “Stellar Cartography” pack of maps is what he calls the “National Geographic” map, done by Geoffrey Mandel. It is done in the style of one of the National Geographic magazine’s historical map supplements, and it’s a revision and expansion of the “Star Charts” book’s maps (also Geoffrey Mandel’s work, as were the long-ago original “Star Trek Maps”). I was hoping that someone who has the map and has the time and money to keep up with the novels too might post, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.

My own occasional dipping into the TOS novels means that “Vanguard” is the only thing I really recognised. I don’t think there’s much coverage of the novels, and I didn’t immediately spot any of the political groupings you mentioned. The cut-off date for the map is 2385, so I’m guessing it really doesn’t cover much after the TNG movies.

Vanguard is marked on (it’s in the Alpha Quadrant, about level with where the Delta Triangle is in the Beta Quadrant, and a similar distance from the Alpha-Beta Quadrant boundary), but it’s in the middle of a rather empty area of the map, so I’m none the wiser about where the various stars in the Taurus Reach might be.

As Paul Weaver pointed out, the two-dimensional maps may look good, but it’s very difficult to work out where the stars are in relation to each other in three dimensions. It’s a particular problem with stars that are marked on the map, but don’t seem to correspond to stars that exist in reality. Or stars not marked at all. Is Vanguard and the Taurus Reach about level with the Sun, or a few hundred light-years “above” or “below” it in the plane of the Galaxy?

To get to the point, if you’re interested in an update to the “Star Charts” maps to use as the base for a map of the “Star Trek” novels universe, the one in “Stellar Cartography” would probably be the best to start with. Unless you can find it at a huge discount, it’s very expensive, though. I spent ages waiting for Amazon UK to discount it by 40-50% before I took the plunge, and I’m really not convinced it’s worth paying the full price for, especially if star maps aren’t that big a deal for you.

As for my own interest in “Star Trek” maps, I did post this first pass at a map of the Romulan Neutral Zone after the Treaty of Algeron (something that came out of nowhere in “Star Trek: Nemesis” and the “Star Trek: Enterprise” final episode “These Are the Voyages…”):
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=235444
I’m still hoping to go back and have another go at it when time permits, but if this version’s any use to you in the meantime, please feel free to use or adapt it any way you like.

Best wishes,
Timon

Thanks for your comments! I have thought about getting Stellar Cartography, but like you mentioned it seems too expensive for the small amount of material included. Maybe someday it will be cheaper and I'll get to check it out. Thanks for posting your map. I hope more people can post things they have come up with.

I know 2-D maps aren't extremely useful, but they are so beautiful. The artistry of the political divisions in a map the style of the Star Trek Star Charts maps has been a love of mine since being a young teen in the 90s. While I don't know when I'll ever get time to do it, I would love to take another pass at my old hobby of Star Trek map making again.

I was very intested in your stardate website also. I love when people come up with hetrodox opinions on Star Trek concepts, and your stardate system is one of the most unique I've seen. Very interesting indeed.

 

[publiusr]

I think it is useful to have a dedicated map to each adventure, novel, etc--instead of putting everything on one map--it can be a bit overwhelming.

 

[ryan123450]

Wow, wouldn't it be cool if Pocket published a one page map in the back of each book showing the planets/ nations in the story! Good idea publiusr!

 

[Paris]

^I would love this. Somebody get on the horn with Pocket books!

 

[Masiral]

Wow, wouldn't it be cool if Pocket published a one page map in the back of each book showing the planets/ nations in the story! Good idea publiusr!

The Star Wars: The New Jedi Order novels did something similar, though with a full-galaxy map:

Every so often the smaller inset map would be changed. It'd be great to have something like this in Star Trek books.

 

[Markonian]

Wow, wouldn't it be cool if Pocket published a one page map in the back of each book showing the planets/ nations in the story! Good idea publiusr!

The Star Wars: The New Jedi Order novels did something similar, though with a full-galaxy map:

Every so often the smaller inset map would be changed. It'd be great to have something like this in Star Trek books.

They did the same for the old Battletech novels.

 

[Timo]

There's the problem of the different writers wanting to use different levels of "resolution" in their stories...

Say, in The Sundered, a connection was made for the first time AFAIK between Cait and the Tholians - apparently solely because the only thing on the Star Charts that is anywhere near the indicated Tholian holdings is Cait. A map highlighting this would have been worse than useless, as a "zoom-in" from the source material would have revealed nothing of interest or worth: Star Charts simply isn't detailed around that region. The nod to the charts book is cute, and further writers may add detail upon this, but how should the zoom-in thing have worked in such a case? Should the author have drawn in some "filler" stuff so that his zoom-in looked as cool as the one that would have accompanied Serpents Among the Ruins, another book from the era making vigorous nods in the direction of Star Charts but in a more "densely populated" part of the chart area?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I'm sure something like this would be possible.