posted
A little nit I have (something I noticed whilst watching "The Price" TNG the other day). When LafOrge and Data realize they're in the Delta Quadrant, and not the Gamma Quadrant, they say something like: "We're not in the Gamma Quadrant. We're 200 lightyears from where we should be...in the Delta Quadrant."
Which means, if the Ferengi pod didn't have warp drive (which it might have), the planet they crashed on would have to be about 200 lightyears from the Gamma Quadrant and so would part of Voyager's course to the AQ.
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posted
That's true... if I wanted to acknowledge one of the most horrifying examples of sheer idiocy represented by the Voyager crew -- rivaled only the unmentionable "Spirit Folk."
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
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posted
Indeed. Then again, perhaps Data was saying "We are not only no longer in Kansas, we are 200 ly away from where MY calculations (which put us in the Delta quadrant) indicated we would end up being." To which LaForge is too daft to answer "Hey, waitaminit, what calculations? You *knew* we were going to end up in the middle of the *wrong* nowhere?"
Seriously, I guess Data could have analyzed the original Barzan data and determined that their probe in fact ended up in the Delta quadrant after all. And the shuttlepods also ended up in Delta, but 200 ly away from the probe's destination. Which was enough to prove to Data that his analysis was the correct one, and the wormhole wasn't stable.
Two further potential mistakes I spotted: the locations of "For the Cause" (the Holor nebula and the Bajoran colony) don't correspond to the wall map seen in the episode. That map placed the colony planet to the right of DS9, in the immediate vicinity (which makes sense since the travel times were mere hours for Kasidy's old freighter).
Also, the planet Togra in the middle of Cardassian space is probably a reference to the world from "The Ship", yet that world supposedly was on the other side of the wormhole. But of course there could also be a Cardassian world of the same name.
quote:Originally posted by Aban Rune: Which means, if the Ferengi pod didn't have warp drive (which it might have), the planet they crashed on would have to be about 200 lightyears from the Gamma Quadrant and so would part of Voyager's course to the AQ.
And the significance of this is - considering that we have no idea where in the Gamma Quadrant the Bajoran wormhole terminates - what exactly?
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
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posted
The significance is that the map does not seem to reflect such a close approach to the Delta/Gamma border by Voyager.
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quote:3. The NX-01 has travelled more than a hundred light-years in a single year, in 2151... but the Cardassians, who are only 70 light-years from Earth, are an unknown power until the 2330's?
Interesting, cause I also see Trill (Trillius Prime) is right near Bajor and The Cardassian Union. Mayweather had BEEN to Trill.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Naah. Mayweather had been to Trillius Prime. The connection with Trill is yet to be established anywhere outside this work.
I suspect the Cardassians were a known quantity in Kirk's time already. They just didn't happen to be all that aggressive at the time. And Kirk had plenty of less ugly races to visit.
posted
This is the whole problem with them trying to do these type of maps - something I've come to terms with a long time ago. There is TOO little information to create any cohesive map. You can't do a very successful 2D map - it has to be 3D.
Everyone ends up having the races SO close together that the idea of Kirk and Picard actually doing any exploring is nullified and that all the Feds are doing is scraping themselves over every inch of near-space.
The real, and believable idea would be that these 'governments' can't be displayed with nice thick boarders. There are dots (stars) and like that 'squares' game - when you get a number of close stars, you can fill in the gaps and call it 'your space'. When you get further away from your central area of space you get less and less claimed space between each point. These interstellar areas end up becoming too hard to consistantly patrol and end up becoming neutral territory. Yeah you might have another star-system in a about 2 ly that-away, but this system is a dot that is more or less by itself, until that 'government' can build/establish itself in greater numbers around that area.
This creates lots of dots with a 'nucleus' of dots. And these governments are more often than not irregular in shape (well... as much shape as you can get from a group of dots).
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posted
You can easily interpret the continuous regions of color as a collection of separate dots, though. Just because a region of map is blue doesn't mean that a starship has visited every cubic lightyear there. It merely means that the region is within reach of UFP starships, and that the said ships have flown past, or visited some of the nearby systems - or then just that the UFP has annexed this space by treaty without necessarily visiting it. If warp speeds are Okudaic or nearly so, it is no wonder nobody visited, say, Pollux before Kirk, even if they visited the more distant Trill or Pacifica.
And the 2D map can readily be taken to "be" 3D. Not all the stars shown are supposed to be in the exact same plane or anything. And the seemingly "straight and simple" borders of empires are just what you get when you sum up all the 3D meanderings into a 2D profile...
posted
I know this is a really old thread, but (Timo) did Mandel ever mention specific coords for the systems represented on the various charts? He did a good job in keeping the 'extraneous' systems represented on each chart, so i feel that he must have a 'master' coords list. _________________________________________________________ As the light changed from red to green to yellow and back to red again, I sat there thinking about life. Was it nothing more than a bunch of honking and yelling? Sometimes it seemed that way. - Jack Handey
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posted
Revanche, the coordinates for the real stars in the Alpha/Beta quadrants were originally taken from the data available at www.stdimension.de. Chris R�hl made a 2D map out of that data, and I stole the map and redid the "national borders" on it. Mandel then stole this modified version of the map, which covered all the Alpha and Beta pages of the book. No need for a coordinate database any more when the dots were already in place. (The map at that point was a simple jpeg image without any layered structure to it. I'd set the distances by counting individual pixels...)
When adding stars and judging distances, we simply referred back to Christian's original data, which is in the easy-to-read cartesian coordinate format. I doubt Mandel really invented Z coordinates for the stars he made up, though. But he did add about as many real stars as there were originally.
The stars in the Gamma and Delta sections of the book are of course quite fictional. Save perhaps for some "highlight" phenomena that weren't mentioned in the show but are known features of our galaxy. Their rough locations can be found in just about any astronomy textbook nowadays. Or in a very nice map appendix to National Geographic.
posted
Wow, I really had no idea it was so grounded on a fan-based foundation. I appreciate the backstory. Thanks for the link to the site; I'll poke around. _________________________________________________________ Most of the time it was probably real bad being stuck down in a dungeon. But some days, when there was a bad storm outside, you'd look out your little window and think, "Boy, I'm glad I'm not out in that." - Jack Handey
Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
Rather than starting a new thread for such a minor announcement, I figured I'd put it here. Anyway, on February 4, they're having one of those online chat thingies with Mr. Mandel and the TNG Companion author guy. At 2:00 PM PST.
The only question I have is "How come you left out some confirmed Federation worlds in your list while making others up?" But it is a question so geeky and lame that to voice it would lead to my well-deserved drowning.
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