SIze of The Federation in the new series

Deneb is over 3000 LY from Earth. At the speeds Dimensions site uses it would take years for Enterprise to reach Earth, even if they wouldn't stop to explore and do other missions. Yet, they visit Earth on season one. This just doesn't add up.

 

Further to that:

According to the Star Trek: Star Charts (p. 36) and the Stellar Cartography: The Starfleet Reference Library ("Federation Historical Highlights, 2161-2385"), the Star Trek universe had two Rigels. The first – Rigel (Beta Orionis) – was the "true" Rigel. This was a bright blue binary star 773 light years from Sol. The second – Beta Rigel – was a system known for its high percentage of inhabited planets. Four of its planets were M-class. Both Rigels were located in the Beta Quadrant.

According to Star Trek: Star Charts (pp. 33-34 & 41) and Stellar Cartography: The Starfleet Reference Library ("Federation Historical Highlights, 2161-2385"), there were two stars that were known as Deneb - Beta Ceti (Deneb Kaitos) and Alpha Cygni. Beta Ceti was a G9.5 star with an apparent magnitude of 0.8. The sixth planet, a failed protostar classified as a T-class planet, was viewed by some as a binary companion of Beta Ceti. The "true" Deneb – Alpha Cygni – was a bright blue giant located 3,230 light years from Sol. Both stars were located in the Alpha Quadrant.
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Here is a magnified version of the Star Charts 1500 light-year "Known Space":



Clearly even the Charts, informed by Mike Okuda and Rick Sternbach's interpretations, favor a small Federation - Deneb Kaitos is only 96 light years from Earth, and was regarded as the furthest outpost in Encounter at Farpoint. The only difference is that Star Trek Dimension reconciles a large Federation of 8000 light years with this view.

Also worth noting is the idea that some areas of the galaxy allow faster warp travel, to account for differences in speed - i.e. Archer's trip to Qo'noS.

 

The number of stars within a hundred LY radius of us is about 14,600 (based on the density of stars immediately around us).

Problem with the majority of the different maps is they place all the places of interest on the same 2 dimensional plane, plus the idea that the Federation occupies a sizable chunk of two quarters of the galaxy is silly.

Picard said the Federation was spread over 8,000 LY's. That doesn't necessarily mean a sphere 8,000 LY's in diameter. Disregarding various maps, the Federation could be a strung out chain of member star systems. The Federation could still be 8,000 LY's long, while being only in places 500 LY's wide. this would explain how Bajor could be so close to Earth and at the same time be on "the frontier." If the Klingons border and the Romulan border are relatively close to the "core" of the young Federation, in order to grow it was forced to do so up and down the Orion arm of the galaxy.

The Orion arm (or spur) of the galaxy is about 1,000 LY thick and 3,000 LY wide, possibly the Federation and all the various Empires and independent are bound (trapped?) within those confines.

A map of the Federation might look more like this ...

Spoiler: MAP

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I think the 8000 lightyears line should be ignored, from what we have seen on screen the Enterprise, the Defiant etc. were hopping all around the federation as if it was no big deal, they're at the cardassian border one week and then investigate the romulan neutral zone the next.
They're on missions charting unknown sectors but can still warp back to the federation core to do stuff on earth, vulcan etc. without any indication that they've been twiddling their thumbs for weeks (or months!) on the way, they often make the trip in a span of a commercial break.

Of course the federation could look like a 8000 lightyears long sausage to make the borders close to each other and still fit in Picard's estimate but I don't remember much evidence for that. In Remember Me Beverly wanted to go to Tau Alpha C and the trip would have taken something 130 days iirc and from her reaction that seemed to be REALLY far away, so I can't see the sausage ends of the federation being years apart at warp.

 

Undefined.

 

Here is a quick map I made that shows roughly the same thing as the Star Trek: Star Charts, but also incorporating some of the scales of Star Trek Dimension (such as a larger Romulan Empire; although most people assume the Klingons have the larger of the two empires, because they seemed to be the leading partners in their TOS-era alliance, there is nothing to prove this - Romulus may be a veritable Rome) - I've noted the positions of Deneb, Rigel and Antares (the "real" ones), but chosen not to include Star Trek Dimensions multiple 'cores' - and I've tried to include several local nebula, and the Pleiades Cluster.



My own feeling is that some things are more spread out than this - for example, out of personal preference, I think that the Breen, Sheliak and Ferengi are spread deeper into the western Alpha Quadrant - which would explain why they were relatively unknown in the 24th century. If the Enterprise D was out on the fringes of the western or northern Alpha Quadrant, it would explain why they only then made first contact with the Ferengi, who may have a distant and scattered mercantile empire - with only Ferenginar itself being close to Federation space - it would explain hearing about the Breen for the first time as some mysterious race in TNG - it would explain the relative isolation that seems to be associated with the Sheliak.



Contrary to how the Star Charts depict the Ferengi Alliance as a relatively small territory, I feel that they were probably a more expansive empire. Their ships, owing to their economic might, were a match for the Federation's finest - probably through corporate power and spending. They probably had some kind of mercantile trade empire, complete with client states, puppets, protectorates - spread out due to their trading nature.



The Sheliak being some distant and mysterious power which only has limited contact with Earth fits with their theme of being an incomprehensible and strange civilization. This obviously doesn't prove anything - they could be in some tiny enclave in the Federation - but the sense you get from how the Federation treats them, suggests to me they are larger and distant. Perhaps they are even more remote than the Breen.



So, if we were still going with the multiple-core theory, I would depict things more like this above - which sorta explains the seemingly relative isolation of the Breen, Sheliak and Ferengi - whilst also allowing for how the Klingons knew about the Breen centuries ago - in the vastness of space, two stellar empires could be relatively close, and not make first contact, like this.

 

True, but USS Einstein was talking about diameter of 100 LY, so radius of only 50. That's under 2000 stars, way too little. 200 LY diameter you mention would be far more reasonable, but I think still too small, unless we assume that habitable planets are far more common in Star Trek than they're in reality.

Anyway, really interesting discussion, and whatever they decide, I really hope the producers of the new series at least think about these things. Decide the size and warp speed scale and stick to it!

 

Life seems to be really common in Star Trek - I think Archer commented in some episode about the proportion of inhabited planets - but I can't remember exactly what the figures were - when I multiplied his estimate, based on the stellar population of the Milky Way, I think the number of life-bearing planets came out at some high number, like a hundred thousand, or a million (bearing in mind 400,000,000,000 stars, with a potential average of more than one planet per star - it would still seem empty) - also the "original humanoids" seem to have seeded the galaxy with some kind of genetic predisposition to the evolution of the bipedal form, according to "The Chase".

I would like to try to find that episode.

So, without being like Star Wars, where it seems literally everywhere has some alien settlement or homeworld, Star Trek would be among those franchises where the Drake Equation turns out a high number of civilizations - as opposed to something hard and bleak like Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space, where there is probably almost no other sentient life in the cosmos.

Hence, even in a 2000-star area, we might still be able to have many core members like Earth, Alpha Centauri, Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, Betazed, Benzar, Bolius, Bynaus, etc. Not to mention all the crazy alien diversity from the TOS movies:





When we reach the logical limit of the number of sentient species in a 2000-star grid, then maybe further alien members are located outside this main core in an expanded periphery.

 

A while back Christopher posted some stuff in the Bryan Fuller thread that I noticed, on the size of the Federation - I hope he wouldn't mind me quoting it here - since he is a Trek author, this at least gives some insight into how one of the Pocket Books crew sees it:

The problem -- and those maps illustrate this quite well -- is that human beings have no ability to grasp just how immense the Milky Way is. We have no reference for it. We may have some idea of the difference in size between a city and a continent, or a city and the whole Earth (although most people's estimate of either of those is probably way off), but the difference in scale between a single star system and the entire galaxy is immensely greater.​

One way to look at it is in terms of numbers. The galaxy has something like 4-500 billion stars. Even if the Federation could visit a new one every single day, it would take more than a billion years to visit every star in the galaxy. In three centuries at that rate, the most they could cover would be 0.002% of the galaxy. Even in that 4-5% covered in Star Charts, the vast majority of star systems would probably have never been visited by anything but unmanned probes at best.

Even if we conservatively assume that only, say, one star in a million has sentient life, that's still nearly half a million intelligent species, so if you could visit one per day, it would still take over 1,300 years to contact them all. And in Trek, sentient life seems to be far more common than that.
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Referring to the map in Star Trek: Star Charts (which shows the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Tholians, Gorn Carbassians. Ferengi and Breen all withing 1500 light years):

That tiny dot contains the entire Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian, Tholian, Breen, and Ferengi territories with plenty of extra room besides. You can also see how tiny the space is between the Idran system and the Founder homeworld (and frankly I think the book greatly overestimates the scale of things in the Gamma Quadrant), and you can see the very narrow line representing Voyager's journey (and keep in mind that the ship actually skipped over most of that line thanks to various transwarp jumps and wormholes and the like, so it's really just a few short, scattered dashes along that line). All the exploration we've seen in all the Trek shows has covered only a few tiny specks of the galaxy. Even if you throw in the "Approximate Limit of Explored Space" outline around the UFP and its neighbors, I'd say the total explored volume adds up to less than 5% of the entire Milky Way. And that map is based on an old assumption about the galaxy's radius -- we now think the galactic disk might actually be 60% wider, meaning it would have over 2.5 times the total area. Which would mean the explored total would be less than 2% of the whole.
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I agree with this interpretation, and don't really like the 8000 light year wide view.

 

@USS Einstein, yes that is a good description of how mind bogglingly huge the galaxy is. This is great, there's a lot for our heroes to explore (sometimes I hear people saying that they should visit other galaxies in the new series, these people fail to comprehend how much unexplored there's in the Milky Way.)

But let's crunch some numbers:

- So about one in 25 stars are not hostile to life and have planets in the habitable zone (this is the current estimate, and it makes these planets way more common than was previously suspected.)

- Lets be generous, and say half of these planets can actually support life.

-Lets again be extremely generous, and assume half of them will produce intelligent life.

-And then we generously assume that half of these civilizations have developed the warp drive.

So one in 200 stars harbours a potential Federation member. If we chance all those 'halfs' to (IMHO) more plausible one in five, we end up with one in 3000 stars having such a civilization.

So even with the really generous estimates, we end up with less than ten warp capable civs in that 100 LY bubble suggested as the core. With more cautious numbers we end up with less than one...

 

You totally lost me there.

 

If Wikipedia says otherwise it needs editing because that is not only what it said last time I checked there (it mentioned that A Light Year in distance is measured by the distance of the sun to the edge of our solar system), take for example that our Solar System is one light year in perimeter to our sun, light takes practically a year for it to travel in a vacuum to traverse to the edges of our solar system, hence how it became measurable. This is basic physics...

I just watched the movie last night, he did not mention Federation in any of his sentences; if he did then it is continuity error since The Federation is not the military, Starfleet is.

 

One astronomical unit (AU) is the distance from the Sun to the Earth. Light years (LY) have nothing to do with any notable pre-existing distance or physical boundary line. The article may just have mentioned that the solar system extends to a significant proportion of a light year, as a matter of interest. For comparison, Earth is about 8 light-minutes (LM) from the sun.





Most people would say the solar system ends at either the Oort Cloud, or the Termination Shock or Heliopause - none of which are exactly one light year away. The nearest star is about 4 light years away. The Oort Cloud is thought to begin about 0.8 light years out, and end about 2 or 3 light years out. Other stars have actually passed through it as recently as 70,000 years ago.

 

To rephrase - just because the needs of the story determine the size of the Federation, doesn't mean we cant have fun speculating about it - especially when there is a theory that explains those differences AND makes sense from an in-universe perspective.

 

Preaching to the choir there (being doing that for decades). I actually proposed a theory earlier--to regard warp factors as being extremely variable, which would allow ships to move at the speed of plot like they do onscreen and also serve as an in-universe rationale.

 

It would be big.

 

Wikipedia says "As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in vacuum in one Julian year"

The distance between the sun and the outermost planet is a varible, depending on where Neptune is in it's elliptical orbit.

The distance between the sun and the outer boundary of the Oort Cloud is unknown, but is estimated between 0.79 LY and 3 LY's.

If the radius of the solar system was 1 LY, then the perimeter would be 6.28 LY's.

No, the speed of light is 299,792,458 metres per second, that is 1 light second. If you multiply that by the number of seconds in a year you get the distance of a light year.

The quote I posted is correct, and Pike does mention the Federation. It's in the scene shortly after nuKirk gets beat up in a bar.

There's no "if" about it.

†

 

I am wondering where the USS Discovery will be going in the new show

 

Well, let's just go to the tape



Looks like T'Girl is correct. I can understand the confusion, though, because Pike says Starfleet in every instance prior to the quote. Seems odd to call the Federation an armada or a fleet, but there it is.

 

There's a line in the episode where Worf is on trial where they actually go so far to say that there's Cardassian colonies on the Klingon border, so either they border each other, or are at least very close.

Anyway, for warp speed to have any sort of consistency, you pretty much have to accept that there's certain areas or routes that allow a ship to accelerate significantly relative to their output speed, and for whatever reason Voyager couldn't find these in the Delta Quadrant.