The Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook for Star Trek Adventures
- Thread starter JRoss
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They didn't. I just compared the star positions, and the "top view" map in ST Maps appears to be mirrored relative to the view in Star Charts, as if they're looking at the galactic disk from opposite sides. Also, STM's overview of the Milky Way shows the spiral arms spiraling outward clockwise while SC shows them spiraling outward counterclockwise. So one is looking at the disk from galactic north, the other from galactic south. There's no up or down in space, of course, so it's arbitrary. Thus, in the STM maps, the Alpha Quadrant would be on the right and Beta on the left. (Although the relative positions of the Klingons and Romulans are therefore inverted between the two.)
The TNG tech people had a galaxy map showing Klingon and Romulan territories counterclockwise from the Federation (using the Star Charts orientation) even before the quadrant system was introduced. That's been consistent all along, although the earlier maps showed the territories on a much larger scale. They got shrunk down when DS9 started treating Earth and the Federation border as just a few days' travel from each other, and ditto for all the major capitals like Qo'noS and Cardassia.
I don't think it's totally accurate, but the map used fro Star Trek Online, should at least be able to give you a basic idea of what's in which part of the galaxy in the 24th century series.
I'm a lifelong Trekkie who's watched TNG, DS9, and Voyager numerous times, and I've still never been real clear on what's in the Alpha Quadrant and what's in the Beta.
The Delta and Gamma are easy to remember since the Gamma is on the other side of the Bajoran wormhole and the Gamma is where Voyager ended up.
I'm a lifelong Trekkie who's watched TNG, DS9, and Voyager numerous times, and I've still never been real clear on what's in the Alpha Quadrant and what's in the Beta.
The Delta and Gamma are easy to remember since the Gamma is on the other side of the Bajoran wormhole and the Gamma is where Voyager ended up.
I know you meant to say Voyager ended up in the Delta quandrant...? I would have been really confused if you had said Delta-Q is on the other side of the Bajoran wormhole and Gamma is where Voyager ended up!
A fun thing I noticed, while flipping through the Alpha Quadrant book, this one looks like a good source for material from the Animated Star Trek, so that was pretty exciting to see certain races appear. I've always thought that The Jihad episode could have an expanded story behind it, which would be great for roleplaying scenarios.
JRoss posted that he detected some intriguing connections that are common with races from the Gamma Quadrant on the last page of the Mophidius Star Trek Adventures thread. That post was so intriguing that it was frankly a selling point for me. I've been sold on it since roughly the middle of 2018, and now it's great to see that it's out now.
Flipping through it, it almost looks like it could be called The Dominion War Sourcebook as much as it is The Gamma Quadrant Sourcebook.
@thribs Yup. And by extension, we can consider where the various Enterprises were when they encountered people. Kirk and crew were probably in the Beta Quadrant in most adventures, seeing as that's where the Romulans and Klingons are. So maybe assume that the Gorn, Tholians and Orions are all based there.
DS9 was specifically set in the Alpha Quadrant, which means Bajor and Cardassia are there. Since Picard had all sorts of adventures there, let's just say that TNG was Alpha Quadrant. Easy peasy.
As I type, a thought occurs to me. In Enterprise we learn that Kronos is less than 90 light years from Earth. Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani A, which is only 16 light years away. Maybe the dividing line runs through Earth, Vulca, Kronos and others. It's unlikely that the Klingons exist only in the Beta Quadrant.
DS9 was specifically set in the Alpha Quadrant, which means Bajor and Cardassia are there. Since Picard had all sorts of adventures there, let's just say that TNG was Alpha Quadrant. Easy peasy.
As I type, a thought occurs to me. In Enterprise we learn that Kronos is less than 90 light years from Earth. Vulcan orbits 40 Eridani A, which is only 16 light years away. Maybe the dividing line runs through Earth, Vulca, Kronos and others. It's unlikely that the Klingons exist only in the Beta Quadrant.
No, Star Charts and the onscreen/STO maps based on it put Tholian space in the Alpha Quadrant, beyond the "peninsula" of Federation space that extends rimward (downward on the map) between Klingon and Cardassian territories. It does put the Gorn in Beta, nestled in just rimward of Klingon space and counterclockwise from said UFP peninsula. And the Orions are from Pi3 Orionis, in Beta but close to the "prime meridian" dividing it from Alpha. But a number of worlds encountered in TOS are on the Alpha side.
Again, the idea is that the meridian between Alpha and Beta is the line (or rather, plane) connecting Sol to the center of the galaxy. So Sol/Earth is right on the border between the two quadrants, and the Federation is roughly bisected by it. So it's like being in England or France, or any other country the Greenwich Meridian passes through (a bit of Spain, Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Togo, Ghana). You can cross between the Eastern and Western hemispheres quite casually without even noticing, with no meaningful divide or difference between the two. It's an arbitrary geographical distinction that really only matters on a much larger scale.
Again, Star Charts puts a lot of TNG locations in both Alpha and Beta. The Enterprise traveled widely, unlike DS9 which was mostly in one place.
Star Charts puts the actual Klingon Empire proper entirely in Beta, but of course starships belonging to a given power would often be found traveling far beyond their own territory, just as you can find US Navy ships all over the world rather than just in US waters. I mean, that's kind of a whole point of a navy, right? To go beyond your own borders. To spread your nation's influence through force or diplomacy or trade, or to expand its knowledge of new realms through exploration.
So you can see what a headache it was to put maps and supplement outlines together for the game. 
We made the best guesses we could and sent it all to CBS for their approval. None of it's canon anyway, so take the maps with a grain of salt and adapt for your own personal use.
We made the best guesses we could and sent it all to CBS for their approval. None of it's canon anyway, so take the maps with a grain of salt and adapt for your own personal use.
I’ll try to replicate your experiment, but, by “north” and “south,” are you referring to the Z-axis or the Y-axis? Thanks.
The axis perpendicular to the plane of the galactic disk, which I guess is what you mean by Z. Galactic north is the side of the disk to which the Earth's north pole points (though the Earth's north/south axis is at a large angle relative to the galaxy's).
So if you define the Star Charts maps as looking straight "down" on the galactic disk from "above," then the ST Maps version is looking straight "up from below."
Nobody would've cared about "decanonizing" the '80s publications, because they were never canonical to begin with. They never had any binding status, but were just conjectural works, exercises in creativity and imagination. All of this is just make-believe for fun, so there is no objective "right" or "wrong."
And there's no "right" way to look at the galaxy either, because there's no up or down in space. One orientation is as valid as any other. It simply happens that when Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda drew up the galaxy map for TNG, they chose the opposite angle for viewing the galaxy from the one Mandel chose in STM, so that had become the standard orientation by the time Mandel made Star Charts, and thus he went with it (as he was actually a member of the show's art staff by that point). It's common for creators to adjust their ideas when they revisit them later in life, especially if they're working with collaborators who have different ideas.
Okay, man. This is just “for fun” for me, too. I’ve been spending a lot of time with stuff like the Star Fleet Technical Manual, the Spaceflight Chronology, the Star Trek Maps, the early Pocket Books novels, the FASA RPG, and other materials from the 70s and 80s, and it has been very interesting to me to see the “continuity” that formed between them. I don’t mean to imply that they were ever “canon,” but, I enjoy tracing the development or evolution of ideas from one to the next to the next. It’s a deep well and a complex web, as it also involves fanzines, and episode novelizations and scripts, and multiple different film and TV production teams. Pretty much nobody felt obligated to or restricted by any other source, but it’s still interesting to me that some ideas were created from whole cloth, vs. other ideas which were borrowed from other sources, vs. other ideas which look like they were borrowed but are actually just parallel (logical?) development, vs. other ideas which seem designed to “refute” other ideas.
It’s kind of like how the Modiphius RPG follows the Star Charts, yet neither of those are canon, either. There’s still a link.
Sure! Just for me it is fun to dig into this sort of publication/development history. I know it is probably not for everybody.
That’s true, except that this isn’t a completely fictional geography. Or is it? Isn’t it actually possible to chart the relative positions of Rigel, Antares, Deneb, and Sol?
It is. And those stars should be in relatively the same positions in both Star Trek Maps and Star Charts. Just turn the map until they line up (more or less).
One of the other major assumptions that changed between the TOS era of production and the "fanon interregnum," and the TNG production era (as it developed) was the size of the Federation, the distances involved and the speeds at which ships traveled. Earlier materials show the Federation and the neighboring powers, and the volume of explored space, to be much bigger than those produced after TNG.
Well, they sort of are now, since the onscreen maps in Discovery were based on Star Charts.
Yes, of course, and their positions in both map books are as accurate as they could be given astronomical knowledge at the time. It's just that they're looking at the galactic disk from opposite directions, so one view is the mirror image of the other.
No -- again, one is the reflection of the other. I tried rotation and it didn't work; I realized that the STM and STSC versions were mirrored (which was further confirmed when I realized their full-galaxy images had the arms spiralling in opposite directions). Or rather, they are rotated, but through the third dimension, as if you flipped over a transparent map and were viewing it from the other side.
The early TNG behind-the-scenes map, which I have in the third-season Writers' Technical Manual and which was reproduced in Starlog's TNG Technical Journal, also portrayed the territories on a much larger scale. I presume that Star Charts' much smaller Federation was in response to later DS9 having all these quick, easy commutes from DS9 to Earth, Cardassia to Qo'noS, etc. DS9 was originally meant to be a remote frontier outpost, hence the "Deep Space" part, but once the show became about interstellar war and politics, it went with short travel times between major powers' capitals for story convenience, and that required changing the cartographic assumptions.
Although the small model is more plausible in a lot of ways, since "small" is a relative thing. The Milky Way is so enormous that the scale of the early maps was kind of ridiculous; a civilization that had only been expanding into space for 2-300 years would have barely been able to chart a fraction of that volume.
Yeah. A lot of the older maps have the Klingons, Romulans, and other empires out beyond the edges of “Federation Space,” which is not the same as the Federation Proper, but is the area within which Enterprise 1701 would have confined itself. I hesitate to incorporate DS9 assumptions into my TOS game, but, I *think* it does make more sense to me to have those empires border the Federation Proper, and for the Enterprise to have spent a lot of time out beyond anything claimed by the Federation or its rivals. I’ll have to consider the specific ramifications of this vis-a-vis things like Rigel’s frequent appearances in TOS.
The Rigel, Deneb, Antares issues are dealt with in two ways by Star Charts. Multiple systems with those names - the "true" Rigel is home to Rigel VII and Rigel XII, while the "Rigel colonies" of "The Doomsday Machine" and Rigel X from "Broken Bow" are found in the Beta Rigel system much closer to Earth. As for the distances involved in reaching Antares, Deneb, the Galactic Rim, etc, there's the concept of "warp highways." You can ignore all that, of course, and do whatever you want in your game. These are just things to consider.
That's what we're talking about.
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