That Name's Taken! You can be "Emirates"...

[Enterprise1701]

I hope a Star Trek author picks one and uses it in a soon to be published novel.

After all, someone's got to give an update on whether all those joined morons actually learned from the 2376 crisis.

 

[Sci]

The answer to the Trill question must lie in there somewhere.

I propose: The People's Most Serene Great United Socialist Democratic Co-Operative Federative Sovereign State Union of Trill.

Every time a new president is elected, he or she is permitted to add another word, just as a new host adds something to the existing Joined lineage. There's terrible unrest over whether Durghan gets to add a word, rather than Maz having already covered it.

Durghan is considering adding a "Really", reportedly. Quite where she'll place it and what she's implying there, is up for debate.

but it's an anomalous usage.

Anomalous usage is not an uncommon thing in Star Trek.

Dominion is not a dominion,

Well -- not a self-governing region of the British Empire, no. But it's quite possible that the term might have an analogous meaning. We usually think of the Founders as being the heads of the Dominion, but maybe they were to the Dominion as the British Crown was to the dominions of the British Empire. Maybe under their own law, the Dominion does not regard itself as having sovereignty, but as a polity that is self-governing, but is under the sovereignty of the Great Link itself? Maybe the Dominion thinks of the Link as being sovereign and itself as being merely one of the Link's.... dominions?

United Federation of Planets is technically more of a confederacy,

This idea gets thrown around a lot, but I never see anyone really back it up.

Breen are by everything seen and written much more likely to be a unitary state than a confederacy,

I don't think we've seen enough about how the constituent worlds of the Breen Confederacy interact with each-other to make that determination.

and none of the major empires have an actual emperor...

1. The term empire encompasses polities that have conquered or dominated other polities for their own enrichment without having their own imperial monarchies. The United States, for instance, is often referred to as an American Empire.

2. Kahless II has reigned as Klingon Emperor since 2369, and Shiarkeik reigned as Romulan Emperor until he was assassinated in 2374 (though it is true that the Senate has not placed anyone on the throne since then). And the Gorn Hegemony remains under the leadership of Imperator Sozzerozs.

Only some of the Federation member states are on record. A great mystery is what the Trill call theirs.

I swore I remembered a reference to the Republic of Trill somewhere, but I couldn't find anything about it on Memory Beta, and nobody here has mentioned it, so I might be mistaken.

Star Trek: Star Charts established it to be the Trill Symbiosis, but I think most everyone agrees this is an awful name. I always think of it either as the Trill Union, or as simply Trill, but that's just my speculation.

 

[dahj]

United Federation of Planets is technically more of a confederacy,

This idea gets thrown around a lot, but I never see anyone really back it up.

Member worlds hold sovereignty and can leave at any time.
Other than defence and arguably foreign affairs the central goverment's influence on those worlds is by all accounts virtually nonexistent. We've seen different Federation worlds have various legal, political and economic systems... hence confederacy.

 

[Markonian]

There're also Taurus and Typhon Pact. That's a name lending itself to be copied over and over, (Nebula) + 'Pact'.

 

[Christopher]

Except neither of those is a nebula. Taurus is a constellation, and Typhon is an "expanse," whatever that is.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I assume Markonian was thinking of the Taurus Dark Cloud. And the Star Charts uses the same coloured blob effect for the Typhon Expanse as it does for nebulae, whatever that means for the definition of 'expanse'.

Of course, the Taurus Pact was named for the Taurus Reach, not for any particular location or phenomenon in Taurus.

 

[Christopher]

And "Taurus Reach" is a very Earth-centric name for the region of space in the direction of the imaginary constellation that the ancient Greeks thought looked like a bull.

 

[flandry84]

Not forgetting the K'vin hegemony,a onetime member of the UFP(Doomsday world).

 

[Deranged Nasat]

And "Taurus Reach" is a very Earth-centric name for the region of space in the direction of the imaginary constellation that the ancient Greeks thought looked like a bull.

Well, yes, obviously, but the proposed name for the Tholian-Breen-Gorn alliance came from the region, because as with the Typhon Pact it was the location of their final talks, so I imagine it's Whatever-Agreed-Term-They-Use-For-The-Area Pact (Shedai Sector Pact?), assuming they didn't just take the name Taurus itself as a reminder of the Terrans' actions there (the Tholians like keeping grudges alive, after all). But whether it's actually the Taurus Pact or not, that's what it translates to because they were deliberately naming it after what Terrans call the Taurus Reach.

What the Typhon Pact is called in their own legalese I don't know. Whatever-Agreed-Term-For-That-Region Pact, presumably. Does it have six different official names?

I guess, building on Star Charts, the fact that they recognise the same area as distinct shows that the expanse has definable boundaries that aren't just arbitrary Federation line-drawing. There's something there. The Delphic Expanse had its cloud border, so maybe it's something like that.

 

[Enterprise1701]

Do you guys think that names like Delta Triangle and Badlands are Earth-centric? They are named after features on Earth, but a triangle is a universally known polygon and "badlands" is cobbled from basic translatable English words.

 

[Christopher]

Well, "Delta Triangle" is something of a tautology, though I assume that humans coined the term as an analogy for the mythical Bermuda Triangle. As for "badlands," that's a generic term for a type of dry, heavily eroded terrain with lots of canyons, ravines, and gullies. But presumably the feature in the DMZ was named that by human settlers by analogy with the badlands of the American West and their reputation as a place where outlaws could find many places to hide out or elude pursuit.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

As for "badlands," that's a generic term for a type of dry, heavily eroded terrain with lots of canyons, ravines, and gullies.

And Deinonychus!

I was one of the dinosaur-obsessed children, and my first exposure to the term "badlands" was the knowledge that Deinonychus was unearthed in the Badlands of Montana. So I came to associate the word with the dinosaur. Even more than plasma storms, that's still what comes to mind for me.

There's even a star called Deinonychus in Trek. Sadly, it isn't in the Badlands.

 

[Markonian]

Except neither of those is a nebula. Taurus is a constellation, and Typhon is an "expanse," whatever that is.

Correct. Let me rephrase that - naming themselves after (star) clusters. In this case, that's the Typhon Expanse and the Taurus Reach.

Maybe STO's 2410 storyline should've gone for the Azure Pact instead of the Jenolan Accords for the alliance of UFP, Klingon Empire and Romulan Republic.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

Maybe STO's 2410 storyline should've gone for the Azure Pact instead of the Jenolan Accords for the alliance of UFP, Klingon Empire and Romulan Republic.

Ah, so they're all at peace again now, are they?

Jenolan Accords sounds very elegant. Rolls nicely off the tongue.

In other news, the Pa'haquel's hunting alliance is now the Gum Pact. A Pact of Gum.

 

[Captrek]

I'll just post to gripe about the name "Klingon Imperial Empire."

 

[Christopher]

Correct. Let me rephrase that - naming themselves after (star) clustes. In this case, that's the Typhon Expanse and the Taurus Reach.

Sorry, those aren't star clusters either. They're just regions.

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I'll just post to gripe about the name "Klingon Imperial Empire."

It was a shame that the Stellar Cartography book referenced that on one of the maps. Sins of the Father - such a great episode but it has that one oddity. Such painful lines belong not in Patrick Stewart's mouth (or anywhere, but especially not there).

We must assume that the Department of Redundancy Department temporarily wrested control of the Klingon state from the High Council? Hopefully they were soon put to ignoble death, and sanity (or as close as the Klingon Empire gets, anyway) was restored. Or perhaps the Klingons are just really enthusiastic about their empire? They're the most imperial empire that ever did...imperare? Imperiate?

 

[Markonian]

Maybe STO's 2410 storyline should've gone for the Azure Pact instead of the Jenolan Accords for the alliance of UFP, Klingon Empire and Romulan Republic.

Ah, so they're all at peace again now, are they?

Jenolan Accords sounds very elegant. Rolls nicely off the tongue.

In other news, the Pa'haquel's hunting alliance is now the Gum Pact. A Pact of Gum.

Yes, peace has been reestablished (About time!). The name is derived from the site of an international conference in the Jenolan Dyson sphere. The Khitomer Accords have not yet been reinstated.

Correct. Let me rephrase that - naming themselves after (star) clustes. In this case, that's the Typhon Expanse and the Taurus Reach.

Sorry, those aren't star clusters either. They're just regions.

STO treats almost anything called nebula, cluster and expanse as a star cluster with multiple worlds inside (size permitting). That's where I got the idea from.

By the way, are the Taurus Dark Cloud and the Taurus Reach the same region?

 

[Christopher]

Sorry, those aren't star clusters either. They're just regions.

STO treats almost anything called nebula, cluster and expanse as a star cluster with multiple worlds inside (size permitting). That's where I got the idea from.

Well, that's a gross misuse of the term "star cluster" and a reminder of why you shouldn't expect a computer game to be informative about anything resembling reality. A star cluster is a group of closely associated stars, either a globular cluster of tens of thousands to millions of stars gravitationally bound into a spherical clump (usually found in the halo around the galaxy) or an open cluster of young stars formed in the same stellar nursery and not yet dissipated through the galaxy.

By the way, are the Taurus Dark Cloud and the Taurus Reach the same region?

Absolutely not. The Taurus Dark Cloud is a real thing, more properly called the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a star-formation nebula located near (but not physically associated with) the Pleiades in the constellation Taurus (the Bull in the Zodiac). "Taurus Reach" is a name made up for Vanguard to refer to the much nearer region in which the series took place, and is called that because it's also in the direction of the constellation Taurus. See, because of how the ancients treated the sky as a sphere and divided it up into constellations, every part of the sky that we think of as a constellation is actually a 3-dimensional wedge beginning at Earth and expanding outward indefinitely, getting wider the farther you get from Earth. So "Taurus" -- or any other constellation name -- doesn't refer to a single place, but to an entire wedge-shaped sector of the sky that expands outward from Earth and has no defined outer limit. In Trek Lit usage, a "[Constellation] Reach" is essentially the name for one of those sectors, or at least the part of it extending beyond the Federation's borders. At least, that's how I've expanded the usage in a few of my works following the precedent of the Taurus Reach (e.g. Cygnus Reach, Scorpius Reach, and Sagittarius Reach).

In Star Charts terms, the Taurus Reach, or the portion of it featured in Vanguard, is basically the part of 24th-century Federation space that lies between Cardassian and Tholian territory on the one side and Klingon territory on the other. It's much closer to Earth than the Taurus Dark Cloud.

 

[Markonian]

Thanks for the explanation. That makes sense. When I started reading VGD in 2008 I just assumed the Taurus Reach and Dark Cloud were the same. I knew the letter from maps in various astronomy books and enjoyed pinpointing Trek locations on these.

Going wedge-shaped is a neat way to designate territories in space.