Will some Trek historians help me out here? I’m confused by Earth’s Alpha/Beta Quadrant positioning.

Lifelong fan, but I’ve never had a mind for the minutiae. Sometimes, that leaves me a touch bewildered.

It is my vague understanding that the Sol System straddles the borders of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants because the delineation is a humanity-centric concept. (Stop me here if I’m already mistaken.)

Now, while I do recognize that space is far from two-dimensional and the z-axis is of significant importance, am I correct in my analysis that the vast majority of Federation space is thus “to the left/west” (I know, I know) of Earth, because it’s in the Alpha Quadrant? It’s strange to me that Starfleet’s expansion would tilt so thoroughly in one direction. But I get it — Star Trek is a fantasy universe and there are plenty of historic examples of countries following similar suit, besides.

Please rip my comprehension of this to shreds if necessary. :P

 

You pretty much are spot on. The only thing to add is that Klingons and Romulans are from the Beta Quadrant, which is understandable to overlook given they are always referenced among the Alpha Quadrant's top dogs.

Indeed, I suppose this could account for why most of the Federation's expansion has been into the Alpha Quadrant, since the two major powers in the Beta Quadrant they ran into in the early days were antagonistic military powers who they ended up fighting wars with within a century of encountering, Alpha Quadrant expansion was probably deemed lower risk.

 

The reason why the line was drawn where it is was to account for all the times the Enterprise was the only ship in the quadrant. If everyone, including Klingons and Romulans are in the Alpha Quadrant, then claiming the Enterprise is the only ship in the quadrant is ludicrous.

Of course, that rationale is also ludicrous.

 

I'm pretty sure when they said "quadrant" in TOS they were referring to a smaller area than the later shows established the quadrant sizes to be.

And really, the Enterprise being the only ship in the area is itself a whole other issue entirely.

 

Earth being between the quadrants is non-canon and IMO kind of silly when you think about how often the term “Alpha Quadrant” is used. To be fair Discovery and Picard at least use the Beta Quadrant a little more than older shows.

 

There's canon maps showing the Sol system sitting on the border.

 

Earth is switching quadrants twice a year

 

It's the 23rd century version of Daylight Savings.

 

I like Star Charts, but it isn’t canon.

Where? Maybe the Discovery war map since that was heavily influenced by SC, but from the shots I saw it never showed Earth on the line.

EDIT: Memory Alpha says that it’s shown on the border in Picard, but specifically shown to be in the AQ in Discovery, so we’re basically back at square one.

 

jeez

 

Thanks, everybody! Much obliged.

 

This has never been stated in any dialogue, so those who don't put much weight on background art can already call it a day here and say that the A/B border is at an undisclosed location.

The old Chronology/Encyclopedia books reveal that the authors felt the reference to "only ship in the quadrant" in The Motion Picture would best be covered by saying that there are two quadrants to choose from (the four big ones having already been established at that point) with the heroes being on one while all the rest of Starfleet supposedly was on the other. This never made an ounce of sense to me - especially considering that both TOS and early TNG made constant reference to "quadrants" that apparently were smaller sub-units of "sectors" and thus really intimate volumes of space, easily allowing for one starship per quadrant.

OTOH, the offscreen map books mentioned above all had the A/B line going through Earth, much like the Greenwich line goes through London. And those maps were used for background art in various Trek episodes and movies, sometimes in sharp focus. It's just that no map ever had the holy trinity of a) A/B line marked, b) camera pointing at that part of the map, c) focus...

Now enter Discovery, and its war maps of the first season. Those are the very first to include a clearly marked A/B quadrant line, and it does not go through Earth. No, that map does not actually show Earth - but it shows all the other Star Charts highlights in the neighborhood, the real and fictional stars, and establishes that the A/B line is "actually" to the right, or widdershins, of Earth. Absent any other evidence, this is what we might just as well believe in, from now on and retroactively. It's not as if it would be in contradiction of any pseudo-fact we've heard or seen.

WRT this, it might be relevant to mention that Earth sits basically at the centerplane of the galactic disk as far as we can tell. That is, conventional wisdom has it at mere 50 lightyears above the plane that goes through the galactic core and best matches the spin of the whole. Milky Way isn't quite flat, but it is surprisingly flat out here: there are stars "above" and "below" Earth, but only for a couple of thousand lightyears till they thin out to nothing. So maps drawn in 2D, looking "down" on Earth and its surroundings, are really surprisingly useful for scifi purposes.

No onscreen map has showed the entire Federation in any easily discernible fashion yet, so we can argue either way. Certainly there's stuff in Alpha, and then stuff in Beta (such as Vulcan, if we accept it orbits the real star 40 Eri A which is there for real).

The idea in making Star Charts and its derivatives was that the UFP has not expanded in any direction particularly much. It's a small star empire, only a couple of hundred lightyears across, and has encountered enemies in every direction, thus failing to expand much.

However, unlike other star empires out there, the Federation isn't shy to invite in folks who are poorly situated strategically. The Romulan Star Empire is portrayed as a nice, tight eggshell because any extending pseudopod would be a vulnerability, difficult to defend against enemy invasion. But the Federation reaches out this way and that, through the cracks between its opponents - so it is much like the European Great Powers that might find it difficult to win two acres of land from each other in four years of fighting that costs millions of lives, but can still easily give and take whole subcontinents on the other side of the planet. Thus Picard's boast that the UFP is actually 8,000 ly across: it has isolated holdings at its extremes (not shown in most maps, and not discernible in detail in maps of sufficient scale), seldom involved in any adventures.

I'd rather point out the very few limitations there are on you using your own judgement. The Star Charts model of a small UFP that just explores a lot in every direction is the reason the onscreen maps look like they do. However, the rationale is never spelled out in any dialogue, and the areas not yet shown in maps can by definition look exactly like you want them to look like!

Timo Saloniemi

 

You didn’t like my posts
Still though, glad we could help

 

And plus Voyager stated that Alpha Quadrant powers agreed no to expand into other quadrants.

 

The quadrant dividing line was drawn through Sol by analogy with the Greenwich Meridian being drawn through London. It's the axis used as a reference point for navigation, so it's defined relative to the center of the far-traveling civilization, London for the British Empire and Earth for the Federation. (It's also just an outgrowth of the early maps the TNG art staff used from the beginning, which always positioned the Sun directly "below" the center of the galaxy, on the 180-degree line. When they later divided the map into four quadrants, the Y axis therefore went through Sol.)

But there's a difference between formal geographic usage and informal speech. The vast majority of Europe is east of Greenwich and thus in the Eastern Hemisphere, but we talk about it as part of "the West." So referring to the Beta Quadrant parts of the Federation as "the Alpha Quadrant" is the same kind of shorthand and shouldn't be taken too literally.

The problem is that DS9 used "Alpha Quadrant" to contrast with the Gamma Quadrant, defined by the two ends of the wormhole, and it was simpler to refer to all of the powers on this side of the wormhole as "Alpha Quadrant" powers rather than complicating the matter by breaking it down into Alpha and Beta. But that gets confusing when applied more locally.

 

Haha, I'm sorry! I'll like them now. :P

I really appreciate this, Christopher. We're all fans here, but few among us have spent nearly as much time handling these matters firsthand. I think DS9 is the #1 reason I grew up feeling so confounded by all this!

 

This is from my perspective.

I feel that the maps, especially based on the Star Charts and the Stellar Cartography, have made a mess of things. Though it was never easy to figure out where things are in the Star Trek universe, these maps have made the situation more difficult. For example, I was bemused when, in "Birthright, Part I", it was said that the Carraya system was not far from DS9. Going by the Picard map, the distance from DS9 to Carraya is over 180 light years. Perhaps my definition is not the same as the characters, but, to me, 180 light years is quite a long distance to travel from DS9, especially in a small shuttle.

A real world map of the galaxy. Note the degrees.



The first map we have of the galaxy is from "Conspiracy". Degrees are seen on this map. The degrees on this map would place the Sol system in what would become the Delta Quadrant (real world map) or in the Gamma Quadrant ("The Emissary" map, see below)



The map shown in "The Emissary" (TNG), and other TNG shows like "The Chase", amends this by placing the explored areas of the galaxy where, it was later established, in the Alpha and Beta Quadrant. The Alpha Quadrant goes from 180 to 270 degrees, the Beta Quadrant goes from 180 to 90 degrees, and the Gamma Quadrant, which would have contained the portion of the galaxy shown in "Conspiracy", goes from 270 to 0 degrees. The position of Sol, or the assumed position of Sol, is not shown on this map.

Many years later, there is another map of the galaxy, this one showing the flight path of the Voyager, from Star Trek: Voyager. I am going to assume that Sol lies in the position of the map labeled "UFP". I am thinking the grids shown in the different quadrants are explored space.



In the film Star Trek: Into Darkness, we have a star chart. This one shows Sector 001 (Sol sector) not at the border, but at some distance from the border. The map is a classic example of too much noise and not enough clarity.

“Star Trek Into Darkness” - User Interface VFX on Vimeo

Years later, in Discovery, we have the map from "The War Without, The War Within". This map places the Sol system not at the border, but at some distance from the border. (See Federation star charts at Memory Alpha, go to chart showing the places claimed by the Klingons. Place names match those in the Star Charts.) The trend of using Star Charts/Stellar Cartography begins here.

Finally, in Picard, we have the map wherein Sol is back at the border. This map, unlike the one from Voyager, makes it appear that the area of explored space is considerably smaller and that the Federation, as a result, covers less ground.

Star Trek: Picard — andrewjarvis.art

We have a large holographic galactic star chart and smaller star charts, on monitors, seen at Federation Headquarters. These maps have not been released to the public, so at the moment it is not known where Sol is positioned.

 

Actually, "the trend of using" should be given a bit of consideration here. According to the backstage books, "Birthright" already was made in an era where the writers had a galactic map sketched on a whiteboard, so that they would know that Cardassia would be "to the left" and Romulus "to the right". There also was a map of Bajor with the couple of locations from the first season dropped in place to "fix" things for convenience.

That Bajor and a Romulan star system should be "close" is something that underlies the mapping conventions: everything that gets regularly visited in the adventures is by definition "close", and Bajor and Romulus both certainly count there. So the UFP is not drawn as a huge swath of blue space separating the villain cultures that surround it, but as a small blob squeezed in between and easily traversed by, say, the cloaked Klingon fleet in "Way of the Warrior" or Shrek's shuttle in "Birthright". Both trips apparently take several days, meaning the Klingons go stir-crazy and need to vent steam at DS9, and Worf gets to grow annoyed at Shrek.

Basically, all the map art we get to see in DS9 is part and parcel of the Star Charts deal, in the sense that maps in the book were traced from that wall art. The occasional scale-suggesting grid is retained, too. Although no effort is made to explain why Ferenginar wanders all across the neighborhood!

Yup. They're off by 180 degrees from the Trek reality, sorta.

But the tick marks in the "Conspiracy" wall map are unlikely to be degrees. The scale won't work that way. Rather, they work best as arbitrary running numbers for humble sectors, much smaller than a full degree would be at that distance from the core. But we can read them as fractions of degrees, too, if we wish, with the initial digits omitted for clarity - and can then choose the omitted digits to our liking.

What "border"? The map area has some sort of a sector grid, and the whole wall graphic is further divided into windows by thick lines, but there's no A/B dividing line marked. The area of the graphic that is the map has the words ALPHA QUADRANT at one corner, but obviously the map doesn't depict the whole quadrant and need not be limited to depicting just the quadrant, either; the words aren't associated with any particular line or border.

The DSC map is the first with a discernible A/B line, and has it to the right of where Sol would be. One fun interpretation would be that it's a close analogy to the Treaty of Tordesillas meridian, marking the leftmost tip of Romulan holdings back when the whole galaxy was divided between them and Earth...

Timo Saloniemi

 

By definition quadrant means 1/4 of a circle.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/quadrant

 

lol no worries, I thought it was worth saying but that emoji overdramatized it