this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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The United Federation of Planets straddles the line between the Alpha and Beta quadrant. They are about 50/50 on either side. In fact the line runs right through the Sol system so half the year we Earthers are in the Alpha quadrant and the other half we're in the Beta quadrant.
This of the kind of accurate pedantry I can get behind.
I'm not the least surprised that people made a map of the Star Trek star systems.
But I'm impressed anyway.
It does bother me that (afaik) we still don’t have a solid 3D model of the ST galaxy…
It's our galaxy, and it is, relatively speaking, fairly flat.
his pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking
Another one of those flat galaxyers
Wow, I legitimately never knew this. I thought all these civilizations were in the Alpha Quadrant. I only remembered the Beta Quadrant being mentioned once in TOS.
I think the much more frequent mentions of the Alpha quadrant in TOS are less about where the Federation was located and more about where the Enterprise was assigned to explore on its five-year mission.
Yeah quadrants don't pop up with regularity until the TNG. The movies make some mention, but TOS is set during the exploratory days where no one really knows what's out there
And of course later on the alpha quadrant gets most of the mentions since that's where the wormhole to the gamma quadrant is located. Though presumably Voyager would have spent half of their voyage home in the beta quadrant, had they not found a shortcut.
but when The Romulans are tricked into invading through the wormhole by the founders they do it with the excuse of making safe/saving the appha quadrant.
Although I am only halfway through DS9 I assumed the federation, Klingon and Romulans are all within the alpha quadrant.
The reality is that during the time of 90's Trek there were never any official maps of the Star Trek Galaxy put out. They were kind of just making it up on the fly. So yeah DS9 does make it seem like all the major powers are located at least partially in the Alpha Quadrent. As far as I know we didn't get any official galactic maps till the 2000's, and they were just doing their best to make the haphazard and inconsistent geography of the Star Trek Galaxy make sense.
Quadrants never made sense to be. Wouldn't you want to with octants - having the center of the galaxy being the dividing point?
Yeah I don’t see why you would want some random arm of the spiral to be the dividing point.
But quadrants still make sense though.
I spose a galaxy is largely planar. Makes sense
Yeah I was thinking a spiral galaxy such as ours, split it into quadrants. There’s some level of depth there, but still relatively “flat”
Still doesn’t quite match up with OPs pic, which might be canon?
I don't know; I always got the sense that the use of the word "quadrant" varied from writer to writer, and what makes up a "quadrant" changes not only show to show but episode to episode. Voyager spent 7 years in the Delta quadrant, while in Star Trek 6 Sulu's Excelsior was inconveniently far away from the Enterprise because "We're now in...(pause to check console) Alpha quadrant." and had to "fly her apart then!" to get to Enterprise in a matter of minutes or hours.
This map makes me more excited for that new PDX game
The what now?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1622900/Star_Trek_Infinite/
Oh, I'm jumping on this hype train for sure
So which was is the Delta quadrant in that image? Also, where does the other end of the wormhole pop out?
The Delta Quadrants is not featured in that image, only the lower two quarters. Putting into context, that map is the lower blob in this:
The Alpha-Beta blob should be shifted down a bit, and possibly shrunk. Earth is significantly closer to the galactic rim, on that arm that currently goes across the southern edge of the Alpha-Beta blob.
Is that Borg collective BJ or PJ (before Janeway/post Janeway)?
Time traveler: "Yes."
The Sol system is ~26,000 light years from the center of the galaxy. The UFP is about 8000 light years distant according to Picard in First Contact. So the Delta quadrant would be ~9 times the distance that this maps shows away in the direction of the Romulans (Kathy and crew have to travel 70000 light years). That's my best guess as I can't find a reliable quadrant map.
So, if they had had to take the long way home, would they have wound up stuck on the other side of the Romulans? I'm sure the Romulans would love the story about the Star Fleet ship just happened to end up on the other side of their border because of unexplainable godlike powers. That definitely wouldn't cause any issues. I'm sure they'd have given Voyager safe passage back to the Federation
Well the Romulan Government knew of Voyager and where they were because of that time Voyager contacted ~~Admiral Forrest~~ Telek R'mor through a micro wormhole into the past. Barclay even mentions that the Romulans were very interested in Voyager for some time.
Oh, that's a good point. It would have been cool to see that come back and save them at the end
Delta and Gamma quadrants would be on the opposite side of the galactic center and aren't pictured. I'm not sure whether they would be off the top or the bottom of the page, but that yellow line dividing the Alpha and Beta quadrants is also the line dividing Gamma and Delta.
You can't out-woke the Federation
But wait, the sun moves around in its orbit around the galaxy. How can the sun be straddling the line at all times? You can't even solve that by saying the division is exactly in the same plane as the sun's orbit because it varies up and down due to differences in the galactic make-up. Does the dividing line just move with the sun like some sort of sol-centric division?
There's no way to define a direction of a galaxy really, so you'd have to choose some arbitrary direction as "north" or whatever you call it. I assume that's what they've done. They define the direction to Sol as the line upon which everything else is measured.