The Galactic Barrier!

[Timo]

I don't think any thinning of the starscape was evident in the adventure. Our heroes never indicated any goal for their mission other than penetrating that barrier, so there's no telling when they would have been satisfied with their achievement and turned back - but it didn't seem as if there had been any mission highlights before the barrier.

Over or under? I rather like to think that the barrier appears as a horizontal ribbon due to some sort of a polarization effect, and would appear that way no matter where the heroes went. Unfortunately, while the original episode matches the orientation of the ribbon with the orientation of the ship, the redone effects have the ship appear tilted wrt the ribbon on occasion... (Doesn't mean the polarization model would be invalidated - we just have to assume that we're watching the adventure through a "camera ship", that is, through our own eyes which remain horizontal and in synch with the image of the ribbon!)

Anyway, I'm convinced this thing isn't located at the sharp edge of the galactic disk, because no such sharp edge exists in reality. It's just a random outer region of the galaxy, perhaps a nice disk shape, perhaps a sphere shape, perhaps a fancy octopus-like shape that cradles the galactic arms individually - but most probably a shape that conforms to something else altogether. Probably to something with "subspace" in its name, too.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

Always wondered why they did not just fly above or below that barrier,or just go 'up' from the center of Federation space and away from the disk instead of traveling through the disk to its horizontal edge...

That's what they pretty much had to be doing anyway. The nearest outer rim of the galactic disk is very far away, almost as far from Earth as the center of the galaxy is. It's prohibitively far away, using the warp-speed assumptions of modern Trek. Therefore, the "edge" of the galaxy that they visited must've been one of the faces of the disk. The thin disk, where about 85% of disk stars are located, is only about 1000 to 3000 light-years thick, meaning the nearest face of it is maybe 500 to 1500 ly away. That's the only "edge of the galaxy" they could realistically have reached.

The visual-effects portrayal of the barrier as a flat strip is just a design error, a fault of the FX artists thinking 2-dimensionally. After all, as I said, even the thinnest part of the disk is at least a thousand light-years thick. It's very far from "flat" on any scale that a human could perceive.

 

[Timo]

A face of the disk, or an edge perpendicular to that, or something else altogether... We have already ruled out the Barrier being associated with any conventionally perceived edge of the galaxy, now haven't we (the conventional wisdom on such edges even existing being wrong)?

For all we know, dark matter has fine structure around and inside Milky Way, a complex snowflake shape for its density variations, creating lots and lots of sharp edges - one of those proximal to the Federation. Although Trek should offer dozens of other alternatives for the pseudophysical phenomenon that creates the fine structure.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BK613]

We do know that there is a falloff (a truncation) in the stellar density as one approaches the "limits" of the disk, and there is ongoing research as to its severity. Perhaps the connotation of edge as in "edge of a cliff" should give way to "edge of a forest."