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So, er, inspired by Masao, and spurred by wanting to know where a hypothetical Trek show would start, I've returned to the thankless (and reather silly) task of trying to come up with a map of Star Trek. My focus will be TOS/movie era sites with an eye towards later expansion to include TNG and DS9. Also asking after Mandel's Star Charts in this thread got me to thinking that I ought to give it another crack. Since this is a 'creative' project (and certainly is in line with the "nothing better to do" mandate) I didn't feel like it belonged in the SS&T forum.
And so I started with the above trying to work out Mandel's galactic coordinate system which, I'm still not sold on. But also intending to pull as much as I could into my 3D program for great cartography this is a massive object scaled such that one unit would be the equivalent of one LY.
After several evenings of relearning VRML and then wrestling with the data, I managed to get a subset of the Hipparchos data into my program. It ain't exactly convenient, but it does give me much more control over the way things look than, say, Celestia.
And so what I'd really like to do at this point is to maybe collaborate with somebody, or several somebodies here who might be able to help establish where things are in Star Trek. (Please don't just point me to Christian Ruhl's st.dimension site. It's a fantastic site and an incredible resource, but my eyes have been marinating in his Scandanavian thoroughness for the past week or so.) This is the stuff I've never been any good at. So if anyone has a short list (10, 50) of Star Trek stars/systems and what/where those fit with real star data/names/coordinates. I'd love to hear from you. Also feedback on aesthetics would be appreciated.
Registered: Sep 2000
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Not sure I can provide anything too concrete, other than an alternative perspective. When I was talking with Masao about the Earth-Romulan War, before ENT started (so we're talking five years ago now), I developed my own map layout to provide my own "flavor" to the relationship between the various locations. It's all on the maps from my never-finished but never-forgotten articles on the history of the Earth-Romulan War.
-------------------- “Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.” — Isaac Asimov Star Trek Minutiae | Memory Alpha
Registered: Nov 2000
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Nice- you could easily revise it to include some of Enterprise's events (first contact, Romulan policy of annexing planets with mines, suspected hostile relations with the Vulcans etc.).
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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Wow, yeah that's really cool, MM. It's well thought out, and I like what you've done with the colors and the expanding and shrinking borders on the map. Strata 3D has a feature called "Metaballs" which let's you throw together big blobs of spheres to make irregular organic shapes (even animated) and I'd hope to use those in this project to show borders and territories. I mean in a similar way to what you've shown.
My router went bust on me, so I've mostly been dealing with that and haven't really played with my maps too much. I've added sector grids using the 20ly cubes I've read so much about. And I've also placed Wolf359 and Andor (Andoria?) using the Ent. location of Procyon.
Seriously if anyone has a big list of Star Trek locations and the (conjectured) real star equivalents I'd love to start plugging shit into ISDB and making more labels...
Registered: Sep 2000
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Betazed should be i there somewhere too-as it's "striking distance" from Vulcan and Andor.
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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Incidentally, I can render this map as a flat projection as well. I mean if that's desireable. To a potential collaborator. Who wants to make a pixel-pusher do his bidding. Making custom maps for him/her. And stuff...
It's just confusing on account of the depth issue. It does make it look like Andoria and Vulcan are spitting distance from one another.
Registered: Sep 2000
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If I were to guess at Betazed's location, it would be at the bottom left of your 2- map. That would (possibly) explain Betazed's late entry to the UFP nad would allow for that whole "striking distance" comment.
Incidently, would the Borg's flightpath in BOBW be from almost due "west" on that map?
-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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Ian Andrew Troi would meet Lwaxana, daughter of the fifth house of Betazed, holder of the sacred chalice of Rixx (A mouldy old pot) and heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed.
She wouldn't have been Lwaxana Troi before meeting Ian Troi.
-------------------- "Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica." - Jim Halpert. (The Office)
I have no problem with Betazed being part of the federation well before TNG. I would presume they might be fashionably late arrivals given the TOS crew's reaction to telepathic abilities, but that's not exactly a date. What do we know about Betazed? Well specifically, what Spectral class star am I looking for?
(Also, as any boy is wont to do I have been comparing my maps with the work of others. And I am disturbed to find it different. Well namely that Christian's Z axis is the opposite of mine so that 2D projections are mirror reversed. If my calculations are correct (and I've been corresponding with Winchell Chung and my math-savant exgf to re-check this again) my map should show a view of Sol and environs from a position just above of the galactic disk with the top of the map (and the y axis) pointing towards the galactic center. Of course much of this depends on what you consider 'North'. It may be worth mentioning that I am using the convention of galactic north mentioned in this wiki as set out in 1959 by the International Astronomical Union. In a related story, I am a loser. More later.)
Registered: Sep 2000
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quote: Ian Andrew Troi would meet Lwaxana, daughter of the fifth house of Betazed, holder of the sacred chalice of Rixx (A mouldy old pot) and heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed.
She wouldn't have been Lwaxana Troi before meeting Ian Troi.
Knowing Lwaxana, do you seriously believe that she'd change her name just for a husband?
No, it's obvious that Deanna's father changed his family name from Andrew to Troi in the marriage...
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Oh, and BTW, there is nothing wrong with you coordinate system, Balaam. It just looks that your galaxy is upside down...
Most Trek maps have the cartwheel spinning clockwise, which I guess looks "natural" somehow. Even National Geographic went for that orientation, to the pleasure of Trek fans trying to get their bearings.
But everything in the Sol system spins anticlockwise (okay, Venus and Uranus and a few rocks perhaps notwithstanding) when viewed from Earth's North, which is where everything usually IS viewed from, in this day and age of "western" cultural supremacy. A mathematician would automatically orient spinning things anticlockwise, too.
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