What about the Betreka Nebula Incident? It supposedly happened before the Fed-Klingon alliance, yet the Klingons and the Cardassians are on opposite sides of Federation space.
Where is the Betreka Nebula?
SIze of The Federation in the new series
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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What about the Betreka Nebula Incident? It supposedly happened before the Fed-Klingon alliance, yet the Klingons and the Cardassians are on opposite sides of Federation space.
Where is the Betreka Nebula?
I just saw an article today about the possibility of an earth-like planet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centari. This got me thinking back to earlier in this thread where people were talking about the likelihood of habitable and inhabited planets. Recently having started a rewatch of Enterprise, I know that T'Pol says that only 1 in 43,000 planets are M-class. To me this seemed like a ridiculously small fraction (given the frequency of finding m-class planets in Star Trek...I think a couple of times someone has had engine failure and "found" an m-class planet within several hundred thousand KILOMETERS, like "oh, i just found this planet here"...). Anyway, I wanted to ask what people think would be a reasonable fraction given what we have seen in Star Trek. Maybe 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 planets are m-class?
Just doing some back of the envelope calculations: using T'Pol's number and 150 member worlds (and our latest estimates of about 2 planets per star in the Milky Way), the size of the Federation could range from a cube of 800 lightyears on a side (minimum), to 1800 lightyears on a side (more likely, but still using conservative numbers).
Just doing some back of the envelope calculations: using T'Pol's number and 150 member worlds (and our latest estimates of about 2 planets per star in the Milky Way), the size of the Federation could range from a cube of 800 lightyears on a side (minimum), to 1800 lightyears on a side (more likely, but still using conservative numbers).
If we take into account that there are more planets in the galaxy than stars (that is what NASA was saying, that statistically every star has 1.5 planets most probably) than let's take the pessimist way around: 100 billion stars in the Milky way so let's take just one planet per star, 100 billion / 43000 = 2.325.581 M Class planet. So .... we have a pretty huge amount of M class planets. Even if the federation is working only in 1% of our galaxy, that still equals to 23255 M class planets 
PS: 100 billion planets, I know I saw something with 100 billion
This is the quote:
The Milky Way contains between 200 and 400 billion stars and at least 100 billion planets. The exact figure depends on the number of very-low-mass stars, which are hard to detect, especially at distances of more than 300 ly (90 pc) from the Sun.
PS: 100 billion planets, I know I saw something with 100 billion
This is the quote:The Milky Way contains between 200 and 400 billion stars and at least 100 billion planets. The exact figure depends on the number of very-low-mass stars, which are hard to detect, especially at distances of more than 300 ly (90 pc) from the Sun.
Random sniping again:
1) Pike's drunken speech to the even more drunken Kirk segues briefly into "Do you know what the Federation is?", but that part is either concluded by the answer "It's important" or left unanswered. Then Pike returns to the subject matter of Starfleet with "It's a peacekeeping armada-" before being cut off by the other drunkard. No need to assume the men were being more coherent than they really were...
2) Trust me, the "small Federation" Star Charts indeed assume that the "real" Rigel is part of the Federation, some 700 ly away from Earth. It's just part of the diffuse outer regions, not a core world or an important member or anything like that. The "other" Rigel is a core world at the proximal ENT location; which onscreen Rigel adventures get attributed to which location is a matter of personal preference for the audience. Whether the "real" Deneb is a UFP member remains debatable, and in any case conventional wisdom back at the time of drawing those maps said it was just 1,600 ly from Earth.
3) The "small Federation" there is intended to span 8,000 ly between endpoints, but only when the speaker is bragging (Picard usually is). There's no doubt a way to draw a 8,000 ly line between points formally annexed by the UFP if the Federation indeed has explored 11% of the galaxy; surely they would have stopped to drop a few flags here and there.
4) Romulans aren't depicted as small for being weak. They are depicted as small for being isolationist (although more importantly because that's how they're portrayed in Okuda and Sternbach's own art). Also, their empire is a regular eggshell because that's what we see onscreen; no "naturally" growing Trek empire is of that shape, but the Treaty of Algeron produces this artifact.
5) How many habitable planets? Well, all of them. There has been intelligent life roaming the galaxy for at least four billion years - why would they have left even a single rock planet un-terraformed? It's just that the warranty has expired on quite a few already.
6) Klingons on their way to invade Cardassia would travel at freighter speeds to maintain their cloaks. It takes a freighter about that time to get from DS9 to Regulus III (wherever that is - Jake's "300 ly" remark probably was an exaggeration, so even the real Regulus might be a candidate).
7) Betreka was contested between the Cardassian Union and the Klingons. Whether one of them got it, or neither did, this did not result in a border between the two, because in "Way of the Warrior" there is none! The only way the Klingons can access Cardassia is by crossing the UFP. Or at least they choose that way despite the obvious drawbacks. So Star Charts puts Betreka between the two empires, in a region where the UFP will eventually have the most influence and a purported history of driving the other contestants out (not because of Betreka but because of things like access to the Rim).
Timo Saloniemi
1) Pike's drunken speech to the even more drunken Kirk segues briefly into "Do you know what the Federation is?", but that part is either concluded by the answer "It's important" or left unanswered. Then Pike returns to the subject matter of Starfleet with "It's a peacekeeping armada-" before being cut off by the other drunkard. No need to assume the men were being more coherent than they really were...
2) Trust me, the "small Federation" Star Charts indeed assume that the "real" Rigel is part of the Federation, some 700 ly away from Earth. It's just part of the diffuse outer regions, not a core world or an important member or anything like that. The "other" Rigel is a core world at the proximal ENT location; which onscreen Rigel adventures get attributed to which location is a matter of personal preference for the audience. Whether the "real" Deneb is a UFP member remains debatable, and in any case conventional wisdom back at the time of drawing those maps said it was just 1,600 ly from Earth.
3) The "small Federation" there is intended to span 8,000 ly between endpoints, but only when the speaker is bragging (Picard usually is). There's no doubt a way to draw a 8,000 ly line between points formally annexed by the UFP if the Federation indeed has explored 11% of the galaxy; surely they would have stopped to drop a few flags here and there.
4) Romulans aren't depicted as small for being weak. They are depicted as small for being isolationist (although more importantly because that's how they're portrayed in Okuda and Sternbach's own art). Also, their empire is a regular eggshell because that's what we see onscreen; no "naturally" growing Trek empire is of that shape, but the Treaty of Algeron produces this artifact.
5) How many habitable planets? Well, all of them. There has been intelligent life roaming the galaxy for at least four billion years - why would they have left even a single rock planet un-terraformed? It's just that the warranty has expired on quite a few already.
6) Klingons on their way to invade Cardassia would travel at freighter speeds to maintain their cloaks. It takes a freighter about that time to get from DS9 to Regulus III (wherever that is - Jake's "300 ly" remark probably was an exaggeration, so even the real Regulus might be a candidate).
7) Betreka was contested between the Cardassian Union and the Klingons. Whether one of them got it, or neither did, this did not result in a border between the two, because in "Way of the Warrior" there is none! The only way the Klingons can access Cardassia is by crossing the UFP. Or at least they choose that way despite the obvious drawbacks. So Star Charts puts Betreka between the two empires, in a region where the UFP will eventually have the most influence and a purported history of driving the other contestants out (not because of Betreka but because of things like access to the Rim).
Timo Saloniemi
I prefer a small federation.
Colonize a planet would require centuries: bring there enough settlers, bulld cities, defences, until you have a strong society able to launch a second wave of settlers.
There is no way for an Earth who discovered warp drive just 200 years before to colonize more than very few worlds, and probably with just one or to being fully indipendent
Colonize a planet would require centuries: bring there enough settlers, bulld cities, defences, until you have a strong society able to launch a second wave of settlers.
There is no way for an Earth who discovered warp drive just 200 years before to colonize more than very few worlds, and probably with just one or to being fully indipendent
I think T'Pol said that 1 in 143,000 planets were inhabited by an intelligent race. That's a big difference from an M-Class planet, as there's probably hundreds (or thousands) of M-Class planets for every intelligent species. Though it's not clear if she meant a homeworld or a planet currently used as a colony.
EDIT: After checking, we were both half-right. The number was 43,000; but she did indeed say intelligent life.
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