Saturday, February 16, 2008

Location, Location, Location: Charting The Star Trek Universe

Apparently this scan shows up on Digg every now and then, though I'd never seen it before. It's a map of the United Federation of Planets, or at least most of them. Some of them anyway. Look, it has Romulans and Klingons on it, isn't that what you really care about anyway?! This map was pieced together from pages of Star Trek Charts: The Complete Atlas of Star Trek, and can therefore can be considered cannon, not to mention extremely geeky.

As a Deep Space Nine fan (it was on when I came of age, I didn't have a choice!), I immediately honed in on this little section:

I wish I had this when I was watching the show, through I'm aghast that the cartographer didn't think the Bajoran wormhole was important enough to be charted. It was like the whole point of that show! That's the only bit of geek nitpickery I can offer, but after the jump I've compiled some quotes from Digg commenters playing I'm-A-Bigger-Trekkie-Than-You. Ah Diggers; geeking out so I don't have to.


"In the future... the capital of earth is... Paris?" - Shoseki
(He's right of course, though LeeMaple points out "No worries, Starfleet headquarters is still in the US, even if it's in San Fransisco." PS: San Fransisco rules.)

"This is NOT a map of the Star Trek Universe, just a map of the Alpha and Beta quadrants." - wop4life

"Not even that. As you can see in the upper right-hand corner, it's only a small cross-section of these. This map is intended to show the majority of the United Federation of Planets...the Klingon Empire is much larger than just the portion on this map, not to mention the Tholians or the Breen." - kyouteki

"I would like to see a map of the Delta quadrant. The Borg's territory should be massive. What about the Dominion? o_O Call me when the geeks make one, I shall applaud it." - BillyElliot
(seriously. Don't the Borg own like 99.9 percent of the universe? Isn't that what makes them the Borg?)

"I call BS, given that arrangement how could the Dominion enter Romulan space from Cardassian territory to raid federation bases during the war? (As described in "In the Pale Moon Light.")" - Pinkertickle

"Two words: Plot hole. ST writers are notorious for making shit up that's convenient at the time. Accepted canon is that Cardassia is to the galactic west of Earth, while Romulus is to the northeast and Qo'noS is to the southeast." - AdmiralKarelia

There's also a tremendous amount of bitching about how space is 3-D, not 2-D, to which I say "*wankingoffhandgesture*" And finally, a comment from a poor soul who's attempt to join the conversation was doomed by a lack of Star Trek terminology on spell check:

"I don't see volcans anywhere." - Dualaudi

1 comment:

Johnny said...

You do know that Star Trek is ranked as the #1 geekiest pastime, right?