Maps "canon" thoughts
- Thread starter fungun
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Colonel West's "Operation: Retrive" map in ST: TUC is pretty interesting. Although it can be barely seen in the film, Memory Alpha has some info on it as someone took hi-res shot of it on display (at the Experience?). Whoever made it went through a lot of trouble naming all the stars and other stellar phenomena around UFP/Klingon boarder and Rura Penthe. I don't think Geoff Mandel had or remembered this map for his Star Charts book. If he had used it his detail of that area of space would have held up a little better as Enterprise rolled on.
BTW, IMO, The original Klingon homeworld was much closer to Federation space until the Praxis incident in which they relocated to another planet deeper into the Empire. Besides the Fed. President indicating this in TUC, lots of other evidence supports this, right down to the "look" of the "homeworld" in ENT compared to TNG.
Also somewhat along the same lines, I think the Delphic Expanse was largely located in territory claimed by the Empire by the 24th century. It was only after the collapse of the Expanse that the Klingons could really spread out without bumping into The Federation or the Romulans.
BTW, IMO, The original Klingon homeworld was much closer to Federation space until the Praxis incident in which they relocated to another planet deeper into the Empire. Besides the Fed. President indicating this in TUC, lots of other evidence supports this, right down to the "look" of the "homeworld" in ENT compared to TNG.
Also somewhat along the same lines, I think the Delphic Expanse was largely located in territory claimed by the Empire by the 24th century. It was only after the collapse of the Expanse that the Klingons could really spread out without bumping into The Federation or the Romulans.
This. +1
Nah, that's just overcompensating for a simple FX change. And it's not as if a single planet can't have different 'looks', especially if you take into account the effect of the Praxis explosion. Yeah, there's also that ENT line '4 days there, 4 days back' but that line makes no sense anyway.
This always kind of bugged me. Why did the Klingons care so much about defending the Alpha Quadrant when they are in the Beta Quadrant?
Though they are in the Beta Quadrant, they are presumably close enough to the Alpha Quadrant that affairs in the Alpha would have an impact on them.
I wish you'd have linked to a scanned copy of the chart! Though I think I've seen it already... honestly, I liked FJ's concept the best to start off with.
I think with these maps it would probably be a good idea to move some of the "real name" stars that Trek visited into more plot appropriate spaces. Like Timo had pointed out, the stars we have named and seem to know the best (the brightest ones), may not be particulalry good candidates for having planets with life. And to me it makes sense, when you're actually GOING to the stars, that you may actually rename some of them or change their designations to familiar ones to give familiar names to these lonely, faroff places...even if they weren't technically correct. Just throwing that out there. The Talos IV that Trek knows of shouldn't be way the hell off like it is in real life, by the time of TNG, it would likely be surrounded by other places.
I think with these maps it would probably be a good idea to move some of the "real name" stars that Trek visited into more plot appropriate spaces. Like Timo had pointed out, the stars we have named and seem to know the best (the brightest ones), may not be particulalry good candidates for having planets with life. And to me it makes sense, when you're actually GOING to the stars, that you may actually rename some of them or change their designations to familiar ones to give familiar names to these lonely, faroff places...even if they weren't technically correct. Just throwing that out there. The Talos IV that Trek knows of shouldn't be way the hell off like it is in real life, by the time of TNG, it would likely be surrounded by other places.
The look is only one reason I believe this. It seems the Klingons were beginning to make serious inroads to our "local" space because they were blocked by the Romulans on one side and an ever growing Delphic Expanse on the other.
If the calculator on that site is correct, in TMP Klingon space is about 5.388 ly from Earth.
Let's remember they are speaking through the Universal Translator there, though. As already suggested a couple of times, the Klingons probably do not even recognize the concepts of Alpha and Beta Quadrants - for all we know, they divide the galactic disk into six parts or something.
I bet that when they say "we will respect our alliance with the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant", the literal translation would be more like "the real warriors will make use of the real warriors' exploitation pact with the Spinward Weakling Fools and the Contested Hinterlands"...
Then again, if we got Earth maps of equal resolution today, we'd decide that the Zero Meridian runs straight through Paris and is probably centered on the Eiffel Tower.
That's the problem with fictional stars, alas...
The Briar Patch has now been revealed to be the same as the Klach D'kel Brakt, and the latter identity is related to the Klingon/Romulan conflict, so I'd pick the Star Charts location over the stdimension.org one.
(Moreover, Briar Patch is said to be Sector 441, and Sector 401 from DS9 "Paradise" is related to both Bajor and the Romulans; Sisko gets there easily by runabout, and said runabout is later spotted by a Romulan vessel. Again perhaps evidence in support that 400-range sectors ought to be situated conveniently between Romulan, Klingon and Bajoran space...)
The location of Talos is completely speculative; it's apparently between Rigel and Earth so that Pike could catch the Talosian message, but not directly between because nobody else on that supposedly busy route seems to have gotten the message or been abducted by the Talosians. If we choose to think that Pike's Rigel was Beta Orionis, then the stdimension.org location is closer to that beeline.
Betazed's location is open to speculation. Neither of those maps seems to match the general area of space where Sisko was waving his hand when describing Dominion war maneuvers against Betazed in "Rapture". However, at least the Star Charts Betazed falls within the borders of Cardassian-Dominion expansion suggested by the maps seen on the walls of the DS9 war room... Also, it sits in the middle of a narrow "neck" of said spatial expansion, and thus could be argued to be a crucial capture in terms of war logistics, like the plot dictates.
That would present the mild problem that the UFP has been said to have direct access to several "southern" real stars such as Mira or Rigel. Star Charts assumes that the Klingons are closer than, say, Rigel - so if they were to the "south", they'd sit inconveniently between Rigel and Earth.
The Feds also enjoy access to Canopus, though, and that is pretty far towards "east". That's why Star Charts tries to keep the wall of hostile "eastern" empires as thin as possible in the Canopus direction (that is, the two empires meet there, and only thinly interact with each other). That, plus Probert's old wall map which suggested there was "detached" UFP space beyond Romulus in the "eastern" direction.
Umm, all of those stars listed on that map are fictional, so that doesn't help much with fixing the map's position or even its orientation.
Wasn't that map also used in "Yesterday's Enterprise" for depicting the UFP-Klingon war in the alternate timeline? Except that there, half of it was copy-pasted onto itself to expand the width of the map...
That sounds good to me, too.
What we know of the Expanse is that it was big, something like 2,000 ly across at least - but close, just about 50 ly or so from Earth. We also know it went away eventually, which is fortunate, because otherwise squeezing something so big onto these maps would present major problems!
Perhaps the Expanse would have lain mostly "above" or "below" the planes of those maps - but would have penetrated to the map plane in the rough location of the Briar Patch? That would explain why the areas next to it would be known as the Borderlands. It would also tie in with the Briar Patch still being something of a mess. AND it would be an excellent place for a "Klingon-blocking obstacle", the removal of which would intensify the conflicts between Klingons, Romulans and Feds.
If so, one might also speculate the Xindi space was (is?) located in the general region of the later Briar Patch...
Timo Saloniemi
The idea in Star Charts was that the Romulan Star Empire would be the only neatly ovoid (rather than complexly shaped) political entity there, because that shape was dictated on it by the Neutral Zone treaty. Arching towards Cardassia would be unlikely, then.
That neat ovoid was also neatly positioned relative to Gamma Hydra so that it could be equated with the Neutral Zone ovoid we saw in ST2:TWoK...
However, later canon info has cast doubt on that - in ST:NEM, we saw a floor mosaic that seemed to describe a border between the RSE and the UFP that wasn't a simple curve, but a gently curving S... So there could easily be some complexity to the shape of the RSE that takes it close to Cardassia if need be.
Timo Saloniemi
That neat ovoid was also neatly positioned relative to Gamma Hydra so that it could be equated with the Neutral Zone ovoid we saw in ST2:TWoK...
However, later canon info has cast doubt on that - in ST:NEM, we saw a floor mosaic that seemed to describe a border between the RSE and the UFP that wasn't a simple curve, but a gently curving S... So there could easily be some complexity to the shape of the RSE that takes it close to Cardassia if need be.
Timo Saloniemi
Nice grammar: neither . . . reflects. So many people make the verb agree with the object of the prep.
And yes, I have an English major.
Oops.
Not an error. The episode of ENT that established the Briar Patch to be the same area of space as Klaq D'Kell Bracht (or whatever) didn't air until two years after Star Charts was published.
How is that an inconsistency?
Nice grammar: neither . . . reflects. So many people make the verb agree with the object of the prep.
I just had a really, really anal English teacher in middle school.
It's funny, though...I missed a LOT of grammar education in school due to moving around frequently (always managed to skip that year in each school's curriculum), except for 2 years: 4th grade (which was actually frighteningly detailed for the age in question) and 8th grade. My English lit professor in college was really surprised when I told him that. I think I just picked up the rest from reading, and from writing fanfic.
NOT that I always have perfect grammar. Sometimes in an environment like this I bend things around on purpose.
I completely disagree. I think that we need an explanation for why the Federation never seemed to bump into the Cardassians or Ferengi all that much, even though they seem to be about the same distance from the Federation core worlds as the Klingons and Romulans, and I think the Delphic Expanse offers us a potential explanation. I hypothesize that the Delphic Expanse was located in the area of space containing Cardassia, Ferenginar, Bajor, Tzenketh, Breen, Talar, etc., and that the Federation mostly kept away from that area of space until the mid-to-late 23rd Century as a result of their prior experiences with the Expanse.
There's actually a lot of detail in how it works. Here you go...
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/sv_agr.htm
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