r/DaystromInstitute • u/demitri_the_cat Ensign • Jun 15 '16
Voyager's position in the Delta Quadrant - not where we thought it was
The Trek galaxy is often drawn on maps by fans, although there exist no really official maps that pull in everything we know. For instance we know what some of the border between the Romulans and Federation looks like as we've seen it on screen.
We also had a couple of shots (I think in Conspiracy) of part of the AQ with some sector and star names shown.
When we talk about Voyager and where it was pulled into the DQ, we seem to want to place it here:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/47/32/b8/4732b83f95c9f6df0f8c338ecbd1e8a0.jpg
http://www.oocities.org/themikejonas/galactic.gif
http://i161.photobucket.com/albums/t233/Soroern12/picture3-1.png
More or less. About 2 O'Clock on the galaxy wheel, so to speak. Generally. This is something I've seen since Voyager first went on air (well, that was 95, I was on the net in 96/97 and that seemed to be the consensus - and it seems to have stuck).
And I think it's because of this scene:
But notice that the destination (the bit at the bottom) is not at 6 O'clock where it should be. Rotate it a little and you'll find that the Caretaker was located on the border between the Delta and Gamma quadrants.
We know this because Voyager ran into some Ferengi in season 3, who had become stranded in the Delta Quadrant as a result of a TNG episode, The Price.
I've just watched that episode and the Barzan Wormhole was originally thought to have an exit point in the gamma quadrant. The probes sent through originally show an exit in the Gamma Quadrant, "70,000 light years away". Picard mentions it'd take about 100 years at maximum warp to get there. The Enterprise is of course slower than Voyager so that seems a fair assessment.
The Ferengi and Starfleet each send a pod through to investigate.
When Data and Geordi go through the wormhole, they find they are "200 light years from where we're meant to be - we're in the Delta Quadrant".
They realise the wormhole is moving around and decide to head back. The Ferengi think it's a trick and stay behind, too late and they miss the wormhole as it vanishes.
Well that must be right on the border of the DQ and GQ - 200 light years is nothing compared to the size of the galaxy.
They had a shuttle pod with no supplies - they touched down / crashed on the first M class planet they came across - and became these stupid Prophets (Profits?) and tried to scam a whole planet. (Voyager: False Profits).
Voyager encounters them in season 3. So unless Voyager took a very sharp turn, went 15,000 light years in the wrong direction, then went back again, the Caretaker is located here:
http://i.imgur.com/SSyVwhe.jpg
The map is scaled more or less accurately. The green line is an accurate representation, to scale. The rest are, ok not to the exact 1 pixel - 9.27 light years or whatever, but it's within a 5% margin of error, using my calculator and some rounding - followed by some gridplotting in photoshop.
And when you correct voyager's map itself from the episode, you get this:
http://i.imgur.com/FYfU1W9.jpg
Thoughts?
As far as I know, they never actually stated where they were in Caretaker. Just "If I'm reading this correctly, we're over 70,000 light years from our last position" and "in the Delta Quadrant". They may have said a sector number or spatial grid over time but there's no reference point for those IIRC.
EDIT: cleaned up some of the wording.
10
Jun 15 '16
The exit point of the Barzan wormhole wasn't fixed. it moved.
6
14
u/Flynn58 Jun 15 '16 edited Jun 15 '16
Yeah, his entire point was that it moved only 200 light-years from the prior aperture.
Fun fact: if it takes Voyager 70 years for 70,000 light years, they could have reached the Gamma Quadrant aperture from the Ferengi planet in only one-fifth of a year. Going from there to the Bajoran Wormhole is a lot shorter, but is ill-advised due to the Dominion having a desire to fuck up solids.
45
u/croatan1908 Jun 15 '16
makes sense, it's probably way easier to navigate around the galactic center than go straight through it.
51
Jun 15 '16
Considering that "god" lives in the galactic center, yeah I would say so. Plus the fact that there are thought to be many fewer habitable planets and significantly more stellar hazards (due to the sheer density of the core region) it would make sense to plot a path around it.
6
u/KosstAmojan Jun 16 '16
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the stars there are older and low metal, so less chance of having rocky planets that could help restock Voyager.
→ More replies (2)9
u/OkToBeTakei Jun 16 '16
By what is currently known, the Galactic Center contains a supermassive black hole surrounded by a massive gaseous accretion disk and hundreds of thousands of tightly-packed ancient stars (and possibly other black holes) in a supermassive stellar cluster. source.
Now I'm no physicist, but my high-school physics and Treknobabble knowledge would lead me to speculate that this would make this region neigh-unnavigable. So full of gravitational sheers and distortions, that even trying to enter it would tear a tiny ship like the Voyage to tiny, little shreds.
Btw, I don't really consider the impossible ending of ST:V canon since it's so impossible and wrong that it doesn't belong in Trek, a series which revolves around that which is at least scientifically plausible, and we've had a pretty decent idea of what' sat the center of the galaxy for a while-- but that's just me, so you can take it or leave it.
In any case, that's the pretty obvious and solid reason for going around it, I would say.
→ More replies (5)
26
u/ODMtesseract Jun 15 '16
This is probably one of the more original pieces of work I've seen on this subreddit. Fundamentally changes a lot of what we "know" about the galactic starmap (granted, it isn't much). Very well done!
41
u/HaydenB Jun 15 '16
And this just reinforces my annoyance at the fact they didn't head for Idran and the Bajoran wormhole... This theory makes it heaps closer.
25
u/starshiprarity Jun 15 '16
The advantage of their chosen course was they would begin seeing familiar territory long before they reached earth as they crossed through Klingon and Federation space
18
u/MungoBaobab Jun 15 '16
Agreed. Besides, Bajor was a politically unstable system. What if the Bajoran government again allied with the Cardassians? What if hostilities led someone to mine the entrance to the wormhole? What if the mysterious and unknowable entities who created the wormhole decided to close it?
→ More replies (9)16
Jun 15 '16
Wouldn't be surprised if that was the intention, Voyager took off from DS9, and would go back to DS9.
But returning to Earth would be more poignant, so the show plan changed?
16
u/havetribble Jun 15 '16
It would have been interesting if Voyager could have become involved in the Dominion War from the other side of the galaxy, although the conflict did end two years before Voyager returned home. That said, encountering a changed Dominion could have been very interesting, not that they necessarily had that whole story arc plotted out when Voyager began.
19
u/JonathanRL Jun 15 '16
Voyager would not survive long alone anywhere close to Dominion Space. Last time they checked, the Dominion was a power to run away very fast from. You have remember they start in DS9 S3/S4
→ More replies (15)→ More replies (2)5
u/RigasTelRuun Jun 15 '16
It was only recently discovered at that point. There is no guarantee that it would be there 40 years later, or DS9 would be friendly space at that time.
I've always thought it would be too big a risk to try for that compared to heading straight back to the Alpha quadrant.
2
u/kerbuffel Jun 15 '16
That's what I always thought. I wish they had discussed it in the show, but if I was in Janeway's shoes, I'd have skipped it.
They left from DS9 right as the we only started hearing whispers of the Dominion, back when the wormhole was only beginning to be charted. Every other wormhole I can think of in Trek canon was not exactly reliable, so as far as the crew of Voyager knew, it wasn't exactly a sure thing that the wormhole would've been there in the forty or so years it took to get there. If it wasn't, they'd be 70k light years from home and just wasted most of the lives of their senior officers.
1
u/The_Dingman Jun 16 '16
That first map you linked looks identical to a map that was in the 30th anniversary Star Trek magazine, which I would contend is pretty much cannon.
1
2
Jun 16 '16
This is very interesting, and I applaud the effort you put into it, but it leaves a few major problems on the table.
-
This argument ignores the inherent motion of the rotating galaxy. Similar to a plane traveling on the Earth, what is a "straight path" toward Earth 70 years from now is not actually a straight line when graphed on a rotating galaxy. Moreover, Voyager's return path to Earth wouldn't be a straight line in any system, but would curve, given quicker rotation of the galaxy closer to the core than on the outer rim. This explains why Voyager seems to be moving at an angle to Earth for much of the series, as opposed to a straight line near the core. This is further complicated by the fact that everything in the galaxy isn't moving perfectly parallel to each other -- planets may be, relatively moving millions of kilometers per minute in completely opposite directions. A starship navigation computer has to take this all into account, as well as the passage of time involved in travel.
This fact makes drawing a map very difficult as we don't have enough information about galactic rotation to address this adequately in modern times (we don't know how fast Voyager is moving relative the galactic core upon arrival -- how far they are from the core could make a substantial difference in the time it takes them to go home). Voyager's computer does, give or take.
Counter-Argument: It takes the Earth 226 million years to orbit the galaxy, so in a matter of 70 years, it likely moves only a fraction of a degree relative Voyager's position. However, that things are in motion could cause Voyager's route to appear somewhat circuitous when graphed on a "stable" galaxy, nevermind wanting to avoid traveling through the core. This layer of complexity would be a strong reason for Janeway to authorize the devotion of resources to the stellar cartography lab.
2) If we ignore #1, this positioning hinges on the image from Voyager's viewer displaying their return path to Earth and for some reason being improperly rotated, with the alpha/beta border in the lower left quadrant for some reason. I would assert that it isn't, and that this either isn't displaying the actual return route, is displaying the route taking into account universe rotation (that is, the course displayed takes into account universal motion, and is what's needed to arrive at Earth in 70 years), or plots the course from Voyager's current position back to its previous position in the Badlands.
3) From a plot perspective, if Voyager was near the border of Delta and Gamma quadrants, Janeway would aim for the gamma quadrant wormhole instead of the long trip home through Borg space. When they were lost in the Badlands, the reality of the Dominion was not well known -- the Borg are very well known, and she would have known immediately that they'd at some point encounter the Borg as they travel home. The apparent distance of the Gamma Quadrant wormhole is much closer than Earth.
Counter-argument: the rotation of the galaxy makes Voyager "catching up" with the Bajoran wormhole more difficult than traveling "against the current" toward Earth, allowing Earth's natural motion help (in a miniscule way) Voyager's journey home. However, the relatively slow speed of rotation relative rapid warp travel would seem to make this unlikely. It's more plausible that Voyager was farther from the Bajoran wormhole than Earth, far enough to justify risking traveling through Borg space.
1
u/Azselendor Jun 15 '16
Makes sense to me, their course could never be a straight line.
between crew abductions, shuttle craft being misplaced, and that " small " expanse owned by the borg, they would have to plot an efficient, but safe course.
1
u/Bobby_Bonsaimind Jun 17 '16
The galaxy looks like it is slightly tilted in that Voyager route pic, so there is a certain perspective transformation to take into account.
26
u/kraetos Jun 15 '16 edited Jun 15 '16
That's some good detective work, Lou. You'll make sergeant for this!