ST Stellar maps

[GulGoneCrazy]

Since i started to watch Star Trek i always wondered whats the look of the galaxy political map.I managed to find a lot of them but many of them were obviously incorrect or there was too much difference between those few who may be realistic.

Is there any official ST galaxy or quadrant maps?
(If there is than i wont be doing this project)

I am planning to draw one or more maps with planets,anomalies,battle sites,borders,etc... by using detailed info from Series and tested sources.My first plan is to made a Alpha and Beta quadrant map before dominion war.It will take a lot of time, drawing is not a problem but i need to re watch a lot of episodes and find big quantity of info before starting.Any help(ideas,facts,etc..) would be great and appreciated!

Maps would be made only for fun i have no intention of commercial deeds or copyright violation.

 

[Christopher]

There's nothing "official" in the sense that the makers of the shows declared it definitive, but there is the book Star Trek Star Charts by Geoffrey Mandel, who was on the art staff of several Trek shows and films. It has some significant inaccuracies here and there -- it gets the scale wrong on its Dominion map, it gets some details and episode placements wrong on its Delta Quadrant maps, and it mistakenly assumes that NX-01 returned to Earth after the pilot rather than continuing outward -- but overall it's the most comprehensive Trek atlas we have, and it's been a key reference used by the tie-in novels since it came out. It's based on real maps of the positions of stars in local space, so there's some decent science in it here and there, although there are also some significant scientific errors, particularly in the listing of planet classes.

Mandel was also involved in the earlier Star Trek Maps in 1980, which are based solely on TOS/TMP information and are thus very, very different from the Trek universe depicted in Star Charts.

 

[Pauln6]

I think some people have tried to produce maps inspired by the Star Trek Online game. Quite detailed and evolving.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The earliest Star Trek space map I can think of is the overview of Federation space in the 1975 Star Fleet Technical Manual. Variations of it appeared in FASA's gaming RPG booklets. Star Trek Maps came along in 1980. The maker of 2002's Star Trek Star Charts was instructed not to depict Federation space as a sphere as the previous versions had.

We've seen a few space maps on-screen during Trek episodes too (most notably in Next Gen's "Conspiracy" and some Voyager episodes), some of which have appeared online since.

The TV/film writers never paid much attention to any maps, and all locations were distance-of-plot away. See the neutral zone being far distant in "The Neutral Zone" but a 5-minute warp hop away in the movie First Contact.

Oh, and uberfan James Dixon once made a map of the Trek galaxy entirely in ASCII.

 

[Christopher]

There's also the extensive Cartography section at the now-defunct ST Dimension site, which is archived here. I think it was an influence on ST Star Charts, but it differs in some respects.

 

[Timo]

It was definitely an influence, and indeed a direct source for the Cartesian coordinates of real stars in the Alpha/Beta maps (as per the HIPPARCOS survey). The two takes differ chiefly in how the nature of the Romulan Neutral Zone is interpreted.

ENT created a wealth of new datapoints, but those don't necessarily contradict either the Geoff Mandel or Christian Rühl takes as such - they just call for a partial update. The respective charts would not be all that significantly altered if the VOY route goofs were corrected or the ENT sandbox rearranged to be Qo'nos-centric rather than Earth-centric. On the other hand, both would have to resort to major trickery to accommodate the Delphic Expanse - but that vast region messes up all other cartography projects as well, and perhaps worse than these two. The Mandel and Rühl charts can at least benefit from their basically two-dimensional approach by shunting the (former) Expanse mostly to the third dimension.

What I have seen of the ST Online map seems to derive in part from these above two sources, too. Which probably isn't a major surprise, as both sources tried to guess what the legendary yet apparently very real Paramount "writers' aid" map might have looked like. There aren't too many ways to put that one together, if one takes note of the hints given in the DS9 Companion.

I guess now would be a good time to slap together a "definite" map, since there's no further televised Trek in sight and the new line of movies is free to rearrange its astrography (or at least naming practices - see Delta Vega) as it pleases. But it would probably have to be a web project, as a book might not sell sufficiently well.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

It was definitely an influence, and indeed a direct source for the Cartesian coordinates of real stars in the Alpha/Beta maps (as per the HIPPARCOS survey). The two takes differ chiefly in how the nature of the Romulan Neutral Zone is interpreted.

ENT created a wealth of new datapoints, but those don't necessarily contradict either the Geoff Mandel or Christian Rühl takes as such - they just call for a partial update. The respective charts would not be all that significantly altered if the VOY route goofs were corrected or the ENT sandbox rearranged to be Qo'nos-centric rather than Earth-centric. On the other hand, both would have to resort to major trickery to accommodate the Delphic Expanse - but that vast region messes up all other cartography projects as well, and perhaps worse than these two. The Mandel and Rühl charts can at least benefit from their basically two-dimensional approach by shunting the (former) Expanse mostly to the third dimension.

What I have seen of the ST Online map seems to derive in part from these above two sources, too. Which probably isn't a major surprise, as both sources tried to guess what the legendary yet apparently very real Paramount "writers' aid" map might have looked like. There aren't too many ways to put that one together, if one takes note of the hints given in the DS9 Companion.

I guess now would be a good time to slap together a "definite" map, since there's no further televised Trek in sight and the new line of movies is free to rearrange its astrography (or at least naming practices - see Delta Vega) as it pleases. But it would probably have to be a web project, as a book might not sell sufficiently well.

Timo Saloniemi

I'm thinking a 3d modelling program.

And don't look at me.

 

[GulGoneCrazy]

I believe i run onto one more problem in my project, after some thinking i decided map should be in 3D ,after all galaxy is not flat 2D picture.But i am not skilled in 3D drawing in fact i know very little about it (shame for ex computer technician in engineering). So before drawing i must remember myself how to use 3Ddrawing programs.This whole thing will take me a lot of time...