Location of Federation HQ post The Burn

[Timo]

Also, the Emerald Chain extends "north" of Andor. The constellation Orion is due "south" on that map - but apparently the planet Orion or the folks flocking under its banner are not.

Can we tell where Hima and The Colony are? And how Burnham could contact Terralysium from there, even if with some delay, when Vance is having real trouble managing a Federation that still/again seems to be limited to the vicinity of Sol?

...Cartography in S3 is up to a challenge: how come Sahil, with his thirty-sector vision in every direction, doesn't spot Vance's starships coming and going? Was the relay, and thus also Hima and The Colony, more than 600 ly from the HQ location after all? Yet Burnham and Booker visited Donatu, pretty close to Earth and the HQ and the rest...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[arch101]

Is anyone out there with the proper skills compiling a map of what we've seen so far? Like, where did Burnham ind Discovery first appear in the 32nd century, the location of fleet HQ, etc. Thank You to whomever can do this.

 

[Sci]

It's interesting that the charts in "Scavengers" show a klingon and a cardassian zone for example and not the Klingon Empire or the Cardassian Union. Perhaps it's a hint that they are Federation members.

Or maybe it means that the Klingon Empire and Cardassian Union both collapsed after the Burn as well, and those "zones" are areas where the surviving polities are predominantly Klingon and Cardassian.

 

[Odo]

I don't think it's the case, but it'd be funny if Bajor never joined the Federation but Cardassia did.

 

[DEWLine]

And maybe Bajor threw in with the Emerald Chain instead?

Scary thought.

 

[Tim Thomason]

Also, the Emerald Chain extends "north" of Andor. The constellation Orion is due "south" on that map - but apparently the planet Orion or the folks flocking under its banner are not.

Can we tell where Hima and The Colony are? And how Burnham could contact Terralysium from there, even if with some delay, when Vance is having real trouble managing a Federation that still/again seems to be limited to the vicinity of Sol?

...Cartography in S3 is up to a challenge: how come Sahil, with his thirty-sector vision in every direction, doesn't spot Vance's starships coming and going? Was the relay, and thus also Hima and The Colony, more than 600 ly from the HQ location after all? Yet Burnham and Booker visited Donatu, pretty close to Earth and the HQ and the rest...

Timo Saloniemi

Starfleet and the Federation are hidden in a top secret locale, which implies a certain level of need-to-know amongst Starfleet activity and probably some serious state actors, beyond a chain of pirates, to contend with. My guess is they just haven't bothered to let Sahil know what's going on.

 

[Sci]

Starfleet and the Federation are hidden in a top secret locale, which implies a certain level of need-to-know amongst Starfleet activity and probably some serious state actors, beyond a chain of pirates, to contend with. My guess is they just haven't bothered to let Sahil know what's going on.

It's also entirely possible that one of the reasons large states have mostly collapsed is that 32nd Century weapons technology in some parts of the galaxy are sufficiently devastating that small non-state actors are capable of doing the kind of damage it used to take state actors to employ. The collapse of the interstellar state system may well be a function of piracy growing beyond the ability of any state to control, at least post-Burn.

 

[Timo]

My point as regards Sahil is that he can see ships all right. If Vance is operating ships, Sahil should see the activity, unless it is mr than 600 ly away. Yet Sahil reports passivity, even though Vance seems to be sending ships out every week.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Markonian]

From TrekCore.com's twitter account:

"NOT A SPOILER: Thanks to a momentary glimpse of Starfleet's map of the Alpha Quadrant, we can see that the secret Starfleet HQ base is somewhere about halfway between the Terra Nova colony (ENT) and Subspace Relay Station AR-558 (DS9)."

https://twitter.com/TrekCore/status/1329437898630975489

Is there a version of this map without TrekCore's markers?
I've taken a photo of my screen when watching "Scavengers" but the image is riddled with visual artifacts.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

how come Sahil, with his thirty-sector vision in every direction, doesn't spot Vance's starships coming and going? Was the relay, and thus also Hima and The Colony, more than 600 ly from the HQ location after all? Yet Burnham and Booker visited Donatu, pretty close to Earth and the HQ and the rest...

It's implied that Hima is somewhere deep in the Beta Quadrant and it would stand to reason that Sahil's outpost was there as well. Sahil does detect two Federation starships in flight at the very edge of his sensor range. Given how close Sahil's location was to Emerald chain territory, it's entirely possible the Federation ships didn't travel out that far very often.

 

[Lakenheath 72]

This is supported by statements when Booker is brought over to Fed HQ, in that he had moved to a new quadrant. One of the places Booker and Michael Burnham visited was in the Donatu system, which has been canonically placed in the Beta Quadrant by a star chart.

 

[Timo]

Also, when Burnham fires up the Angel Suit for the last time, we don't learn that it would be programmed to travel to another place. It emerges in the 23rd century some 51k ly from Spock, so quite possibly right next to Terralysium. Which is where they aimed in the first place, of course.

Yet the reference to Donatu is actually a bad thing. Burnham and Booker should not be allowed a means to travel from Hima all the way to the familiar Donatu: their inability to travel across the galaxy is a big plot point, and if they could do it without the spore drive, Burnham would already have been to Earth during her initial year in the future.

That is, Donatu is right next to Earth, quite regardless of maps - Earth was able to pick up a fight there back in the mists of history already.

Oh, well, Burnham probably went to "a different Donatu".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Agony_Boothb]

Oh, well, Burnham probably went to "a different Donatu".

Personally, I think Donatu was just supposed to be a recognisable yet meaningless namedrop. In universe, there could be any number of reasons why Book and Burnham were able to visit Donatu but not Earth. They might have travelled to Donatu via the courier transwarp network for example but may not have been able to proceed to Earth because they ran out of dilithium, or the Klingons trashed subspace like the Gorn did, or perhaps the Klingons are hostile again.

 

[Dryson]

How was Federation HQ built in secret?

 

[Timo]

How not? The cloak is there as the sum total of the cloaks of the ships, it seems. So Starfleet one day just decided to depart for parts unknown; then gathered there, and became invisible; and had the freedom to build just about anything inside the bubble of invisibility, there being few passersby now that starflight was hideously expensive.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jackoverfull]

How was Federation HQ built in secret?

was it said they built in secret? The HQ is basically a giant ship floating in space, assuming it has FTL capabilities I can imagine it was built totally publicly (perhaps even before the burn) and then placed where it is now in secret.

 

[F. King Daniel]

How was Federation HQ built in secret?

Space is very, very big (almost as big as the inside of Discovery's turbolift network)

Of course, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale so sometimes it's very very small. But when the plot requires, it can be realistically big where you can build something in the middle of nowhere and unless someone knows exactly where to look, they'll never find it.

 

[Dryson]

Space is very, very big (almost as big as the inside of Discovery's turbolift network)

Of course, sci-fi writers have no sense of scale so sometimes it's very very small. But when the plot requires, it can be realistically big where you can build something in the middle of nowhere and unless someone knows exactly where to look, they'll never find it.

But the Egg Plant Queen found the HQ rather easily. Was that because of Discovery and Burnham's "child bull in a China shop mentality?"

 

[F. King Daniel]

But the Egg Plant Queen found the HQ rather easily

She took over Discovery. Pretty sure their flight plan was in their computer somewhere.

 

[jackoverfull]

It also had a trans warp tunnel suspiciously leading just there (with another suspiciously exiting just outside the nebula), so it wasn’t exactly in the unknown.