Science of "Worlds of the Federation"

[foravalon]

So this might be more of a tech question then a lit question but it's regarding Shane Johnson's 1989 book The Worlds of the Federation. For many of the worlds Shane has listed he has associated a real-world star to go along with it, not unlike the later Star Charts, based partially upon this book. Along with those named stars, whether they're real or fictional, he also has a set of 3 "Galactic Coordinates". Cross-referencing some of the real stars he names with a couple of coordinate systems with which I'm familiar I can't find any correlation to Shane's figures. So my question is this, are these numbers just bunk or is there any science behind them? Is this a coordinate system I'm not familiar with or just some kind of author created techno-babble? Am I just crunching my numbers incorrectly? I'm hoping someone may know because I've been scratching my head on this for a while.

 

[Therin of Andor]

^ I've never compared, but "Star Trek Maps", from Bantam in 1980, gave coordinates, too. I assumed Johnson made some use of STM, plus fanon and personal extrapolations from canon, when compiling WotF.

eg. In "Introduction to Navigation" by John Upton (contained in "Star Trek Maps"), the galactic coordinates of Andor (when it was Epsilon Indi VIII, per Franz Joseph & Eileen Palestine) were supposedly: 25.8, 60.1, -2.4. How does this compare with Johnson?

 

[Christopher]

The coordinates are copied (where applicable) from the "Introduction to Navigation" booklet accompanying the 1980 Star Trek Maps. It's based on a system of three axes that the maps defined in a rather odd way, based on the directions from the maps' arbitrary Federation center point to a couple of reference quasars. So it doesn't correspond to any standard set of rectangular galactic coordinates.

For the stars taken from the ST Maps, I would suspect that the coordinates are accurate within the system they're using, in terms of the relative positions of the real stars based on the parallax estimates available as of 1980. The folks who worked on the STM seemed to do a fairly good job of research. As for the stars added for Worlds of the Fed, I kind of doubt Johnson did anything more than make up some random numbers.

 

[foravalon]

eek, bunk as suspected, ah well.

thanks guys!