why does everone in the delta quandrant call it the delta quadrant

[Christopher]

I don't see why not-four is an easy number to work with and to plot on a astrocartographic map

But surely not the only number that's easy to work with, or we'd all be using base 4 instead of base 10. With millions of civilizations in the galaxy, what are the odds that absolutely every single one of them would choose identical cartographic conventions?

And as I said, the galaxy is so mind-bogglingly huge that breaking it merely into fourths is functionally useless in most contexts. So you've broken 400 billion stars into four sets of 100 billion stars -- big whoop. What have you actually accomplished there?

 

[stardream]

Which is an unlikely coincidence, especially since -- as I said -- it's a completely arbitrary and generally useless way of subdividing the galactic disk. And different cultures that did happen to divide it into quadrants would not pick the same quadrant dividing lines, certainly not ones based on Sol as the anchor point. Before the 1884 international agreement to accept the Greenwich Meridian as the global standard, there were a lot of different "prime meridians" used by different countries.

I think a more useful way of subdividing the galactic disk would be radially, as concentric rings -- the core, the inner disk, the middle disk, the outer disk, the halo. After all, there is a meaningful physical distinction between those regions -- the stars are packed closer together the closer in you get, the cosmic environment is more turbulent and radiation-rich closer in, and many scientists believe that the middle disk represents a "galactic habitable zone" where life is most likely to form (though I prefer to think of it more as a temperate zone, since perhaps life in the inner disk would simply evolve to be hardier and more radiation-resistant, and of course stars can drift from one region to another as they orbit). Of course, that means that two stars could be in the same ring yet on opposite sides of the galaxy, so maybe combining the ring divisions with a quadrant or octant system would help a bit, although that would still make each segment extremely huge and in need of finer subdivisions within it.

Sounds a bit like the Pentagon. The Outer Ring, etc.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Because the younger races, including the Federation can't map shit that far away. Janeway was looking at a 70 year trip home in the pilot, and Sisko thought he had a 90 year trip home in his pilot, which was later amended to 70 years.

These are imaginary distances, that have no relevance to an Alpha Quatritian's day to day life. Sure Earth straddled the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, but that just underlined how far away the galactic barrier was.

 

[Voth commando1]

100 Billion Stars is a lot less when you have warp travel though-not to mention some of the more exotic means of propulsion we see sometimes on Voyager.

I dunno maybe I'm more willing to let that stuff slide than most

 

[Locutus of Bored]

For whatever it's worth, in the Novel re-launch books, Voyager comes across a civilization that refers to the Delta Quadrant as the 'First Quadrant'.

Although it's still a coincidence for them to use the same "quadrant" designation at all, since it's purely arbitrary to divide the galactic disk up in that way. And there's no reason they'd define the quadrant boundaries the same way the Federation does, since the Alpha/Beta Quadrant border is defined as passing through Sol.

Just because the universal translator puts things into Federation terms for the Starfleet personnel doesn't mean the aliens are actually using that system. What we hear as First Quadrant could be an entirely different form of galactic demarcation to them (First Sphere, First Cube, First Ring, First Region, First Arm, etc., or something that has no equivalent translation besides "gigantic galactic segment"), and the UT is just conveniently using Starfleet terminology for the region they're located within, with an emphasis on the "First" part instead of "Delta" to show that they consider themselves and their territory older or more superior.

 

[Christopher]

100 Billion Stars is a lot less when you have warp travel though-not to mention some of the more exotic means of propulsion we see sometimes on Voyager.

Not really. Even if you could travel to a new star system every single day, visiting 100 billion stars would still take 274 million years.

 

[Lynx]

I guess it's the Universal Translator.
It translates other things the same way too, like hours,years, seconds, meters and so on.
Notice that most planets don't have 24 hours rotation or 365 days for a year.

 

[Sophie74656]

I guess it's the Universal Translator.
It translates other things the same way too, like hours,years, seconds, meters and so on.
Notice that most planets don't have 24 hours rotation or 365 days for a year.

I think this is exactly it. When an alien says "delta quadrant" they probably just said something like "this area" in their own language and it was translated into Delta Quadrant.

 

[Voth commando1]

Not really. Even if you could travel to a new star system every single day, visiting 100 billion stars would still take 274 million years.

There's more than one person doing the exploring though-say a civilization with 20 million people tops-say 1 million or 500,000 at the minimum are involved in space exploration-say a maximum of I dunno 2,500 ships(I'm making stuff up now) conceivably within a few centuries or less if need to be you could map out every star however not every star has life planets or planets with life-not every star is that interesting or worth devoting resources to-say out of that hundred billion only 1 billion actually have planets that can support life-and out of that 100 million with civilizations of note(warp travel)-see it wouldn't take near that long

 

[WebLurker]

I always assumed the UT was responsible.

(Incidentally, other episodes establish that "quadrant" can also refer to a smaller region of space.)

 

[Christopher]

There's more than one person doing the exploring though-say a civilization with 20 million people tops-say 1 million or 500,000 at the minimum are involved in space exploration-say a maximum of I dunno 2,500 ships(I'm making stuff up now) conceivably within a few centuries or less if need to be you could map out every star however not every star has life planets or planets with life-not every star is that interesting or worth devoting resources to-say out of that hundred billion only 1 billion actually have planets that can support life-and out of that 100 million with civilizations of note(warp travel)-see it wouldn't take near that long

But still, the best you can narrow it down to is a few centuries with a whole civilization doing it as a massive undertaking. That just proves my point -- that it's a huge amount of stuff. After all, we're not talking about a sweep of centuries, we're talking about stories dealing with a single group of characters on a single ship or station in the span of a 7-year TV series. On that scale, dividing the entire galaxy into merely four segments is too broad to be of much practical use. Sure, it's a convenient way of talking about travel through wormholes whose termini are really, really far apart, or about being abducted from one end of the galaxy to the other, but it's really only useful in a very limited range of contexts. When your GPS gives you driving directions, does it ever bother to specify what hemisphere you're in?

 

[Nebusj]

i understand the 4th wall answer but ignoring that its just a teleplay for a moment : you would think that someone would be like whats this chic talking about delta quadrant

Well, remember, in the Trek Universe the Ancient Greek gods are real, literal beings who travelled through space. Obviously they brought what we think of as Earth words such as ``delta'' to many planets, some of them on the far side of the galaxy.

 

[Voth commando1]

But still, the best you can narrow it down to is a few centuries with a whole civilization doing it as a massive undertaking. That just proves my point -- that it's a huge amount of stuff. After all, we're not talking about a sweep of centuries, we're talking about stories dealing with a single group of characters on a single ship or station in the span of a 7-year TV series. On that scale, dividing the entire galaxy into merely four segments is too broad to be of much practical use. Sure, it's a convenient way of talking about travel through wormholes whose termini are really, really far apart, or about being abducted from one end of the galaxy to the other, but it's really only useful in a very limited range of contexts. When your GPS gives you driving directions, does it ever bother to specify what hemisphere you're in?

For Voyager I'm more than certain there were civilizations they simply zipped by without ever meeting on screen-and when it comes to wormholes then quadrants make sense in terms of distance at least.

Oh and I forgot not all of those 100,000,000 civilizations will even have warp/FTL so a perspective civilization options and time are narrowed further.

 

[Christopher]

For Voyager I'm more than certain there were civilizations they simply zipped by without ever meeting on screen-and when it comes to wormholes then quadrants make sense in terms of distance at least.

Oh and I forgot not all of those 100,000,000 civilizations will even have warp/FTL so a perspective civilization options and time are narrowed further.

You're taking my illustration way too literally and missing the underlying point. The point is that there have got to be smaller subdivisions of the galaxy that are more useful in most contexts than merely splitting it into fourths. Just like we don't just divide the Earth into hemispheres, but into continents and countries and states and cities. In the vast majority of cases, the smaller subdivisions are going to be more useful than the largest ones.

 

[Voth commando1]

You're taking my illustration way too literally and missing the underlying point. The point is that there have got to be smaller subdivisions of the galaxy that are more useful in most contexts than merely splitting it into fourths. Just like we don't just divide the Earth into hemispheres, but into continents and countries and states and cities. In the vast majority of cases, the smaller subdivisions are going to be more useful than the largest ones.

And how precisely would you divide the galactic disk? Ten? Twenty? 100? Four

 

[Voth commando1]

Oh silly me-posted before post was complete

Four is a reasonable number to work with-two is to broad and more than five is excessive. 3 might work-but I don't what you'd call that? Trijuncts or something?

And if you absolutely can not stand the usage of quadrant then TNG and DS9 are just as guilty

 

[Christopher]

And how precisely would you divide the galactic disk? Ten? Twenty? 100? Four is a reasonable number to work with-two is to broad and more than five is excessive.

More than five is not even close to excessive when you're subdividing something large. The Earth is subdivided into hemispheres, yes, but it's also divided into 180 degrees of latitude and 360 degrees of longitude, each of which can be further subdivided into 60 minutes, which can be further subdivided into 60 seconds. And of course we have continents, countries, states/provinces, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, and individual house and apartment addresses. I'm not talking about replacing one large-scale subdivision with a slightly different large-scale subdivision; I'm saying there need to be additional, more granular levels of subdivisions below that. Trek does have sectors as a smaller subdivision, but it's kind of awkward to have no layers of division between quadrants 100,000 light-years in width and sectors 20 light-years in width.

This, of course, is an intrinsic problem with trying to define a galactic cartography, something I've thought about a lot in trying to work out my own SF universes. The galaxy is huger than we're able to comprehend, but there aren't really a lot of ways to delineate subdivisions within it. As I said in post #19, the most logical physical subdivision I can think of is by concentric rings based on the way the conditions of the disk change with distance from the center. But that's still a pretty large-scale way of breaking it down, so there'd need to be some additional way of subdividing it. I suppose you could base that on the spiral arms, like, say, maybe the Orion Arm sector of the Temperate Zone, but that might come out a little uneven. (The Orion Arm is sort of a mini-arm between two of the main ones.) And those would still be fairly large subdivisions compared to the scale of individual star systems or Trek-style sectors, so we'd need finer levels below that. That's when you'd probably have to start dividing up the space arbitarily rather than based on any physical features.

 

[Voth commando1]

More than five is not even close to excessive when you're subdividing something large. The Earth is subdivided into hemispheres, yes, but it's also divided into 180 degrees of latitude and 360 degrees of longitude, each of which can be further subdivided into 60 minutes, which can be further subdivided into 60 seconds. And of course we have continents, countries, states/provinces, cities, neighborhoods, blocks, and individual house and apartment addresses. I'm not talking about replacing one large-scale subdivision with a slightly different large-scale subdivision; I'm saying there need to be additional, more granular levels of subdivisions below that. Trek does have sectors as a smaller subdivision, but it's kind of awkward to have no layers of division between quadrants 100,000 light-years in width and sectors 20 light-years in width.

This, of course, is an intrinsic problem with trying to define a galactic cartography, something I've thought about a lot in trying to work out my own SF universes. The galaxy is huger than we're able to comprehend, but there aren't really a lot of ways to delineate subdivisions within it. As I said in post #19, the most logical physical subdivision I can think of is by concentric rings based on the way the conditions of the disk change with distance from the center. But that's still a pretty large-scale way of breaking it down, so there'd need to be some additional way of subdividing it. I suppose you could base that on the spiral arms, like, say, maybe the Orion Arm sector of the Temperate Zone, but that might come out a little uneven. (The Orion Arm is sort of a mini-arm between two of the main ones.) And those would still be fairly large subdivisions compared to the scale of individual star systems or Trek-style sectors, so we'd need finer levels below that. That's when you'd probably have to start dividing up the space arbitarily rather than based on any physical features.

In Star Wars-you have deep core, core, inner rim, mid rim, outer rim, wild space, and unknown regions-also you have sectors subsectors and so on. But you would have to be a legends fan though like me to know that.

Star Trek doesn't do well in terms of detail like that. Anyway I don't see why you have four quadrants-cover whole galaxy not counting say Magellanic Clouds or satellite galaxies-divide those quadrants say into a hundred sectors(at this point there is no practical value just lines on a computer screen or map) and then subdivide from there.

Seem fair?

 

[WebLurker]

I don't know. Space may be big, but dividing the Galaxy into fourths seems reasonable when talking about large regions of space. Besides, how often were quadrants used? VOY used them a lot, since the characters were on a journey to cross them. DS9 used them since the Wormhole connected two of them together. The other shows, not so much as I recall (we know next to nothing about the Beta Quadrant).

Besides, the show does need to be accessible to viewers and four quadrants helps with that. (We also see evidence of lots of smaller scale mapping systems, too, so its not like they're forgotten.)

 

[KelisThePoet]

The universal translator can translate any alien name for any (roughly) analogous area of space to "Delta Quadrant."

But it can't translate the word "Federation" into Talaxian.

"You federations are obviously an advanced culture."