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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).
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
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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...
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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
Registered: Jan 2003
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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.
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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.
Registered: Mar 1999
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