Tangent
Death Blossom
Ooh, I had forgotten that! Good call.
Ahh, thankee sai.
“Remember, the enemy’s gate is down.”
(“Ender’s Game” makes a very big deal about the posibilities of zero-G combat).
See? I knew you guys would come through. I’m going to go eat me some brains now. I must be running low if I forgot Ender’s Game.
Hope this isn’t too much of a hijack, but has anyone made a good 3D map of the Star Trek galaxy? Preferably one of those VR maps you can grab and move around and view the various sectors from different angles?
I’ve always been curious where all the various empires & planets are.
Not 3-D, but this screen saver has a nice 2D map of the Trekniverse as part of its routine.
But you have to admit, when ST:TNG finally did use 3D, it was amazing! I remember letting out a cheer when the Enterprise came blazing up from below. :o
You’re thinking of All Good Things, aren’t you? One of the best eps ever.
I also must mention Stellar Cartography as shown in the TNG movies. I wonder if that’s where whathisname got his idea for the visual of Cerebo? Especially since both were used by a Patrick Stewart character!
Yes, this has sometimes bugged me too. Other posters have pretty much covered it, but one thing I could add is that in your example:
you yourself are thinking two dimensionally. The protected space wouldn’t be flat, itwould most likely be many lightyears tall as well. 
I am not as educated in Trek lore as most of you seem to be. Perhaps I can get some assistance in fighting my own ignorance.
Explain to me why everything seems to be arranged or situated on the same illusion of direction. The idea of top and bottom elude me here. How can the ships all travel with the same …what’s the word? don’t you just hate it when the word’s right there but it eludes you
You know they all have the same “up” or “down” they never show a ship passing or meeting another upside down or at an inclination?
It just doesn’t seem correct to me. It just doesn’t feel right. 
No, it isn’t correct. But rather than explain things to the viewers every time, the writers just have everything oriented in the same plane. It looks ok to the casual viwer, even though it bugs those who know more than a bit about spatial interactions. 
Orientation is the word, I think.
Easy, North is UP
On Earth, North is almost always portrayed as UP on maps and globes. So Galactic North would be UP also. Thus, every ship leaving Earth with it’s North is UP orientation would likely keep that standard.
Or…, it’s a lot easier to write and film that way!
Thanks. The site says they have an OS X version in the works, but that was two years ago.
Has the Star Trek galaxy ever been fully mapped?
Orientation will do. NCB north is up? From which hemispere? Yeah we can get deep into the ups and downs of the universe now can’t we.
What about planets that lie on a different ecliptic. Isn’t it Uranus that is tilted at a 90 degree angle? What about that? Up ain’t up no more is it? Orientation…is that what y’all called it?
Plus, think for a minute about the idea of ‘territory’ with ‘borders’ in space. First, if you create some imaginary spherical territory as large as the Federation seems to be, you’re talking about a ‘border’ of immense size. There’s no realistic way to patrol such a border (at least, none given within the realm of ST).
And, think about where those borders touch. In 2D it’s pretty clear, there’s a line, and one side is Us and the other is Them. In 3D you have a surface instead of a line, and that surface either forms an enclosed shape (so the territory would be surrounded on all sides) or it continues infinitely across a plane or two. In that case, who decides in which direction the territory extends infinitely?
All the standards are Earth-centric.
Narrowed down even further, they are Federation and StarFleet centric
StarFleet is headquartered in San Fransisco, Federation in Paris.
So, all the standards eminate from the northern hemisphere of Earth.
Not saying it’s particularly elegant or correct. But it is how Trek works.
I’m I the only one who noticed that the ships in ST don’t ALWAYS have the same orientation?
Often, an approaching ship comes in at a different angle and then turns to match the orientation of the waiting ship.
This happens most often with cloaked vessels. They come uncloaked as they’re turning.
I always figured it was some sort of futuristic sign of respect to orient your ship like the same way the other guy is.
Today on Spike they had the final 2 episodes of ST:DS9, including the last huge battle between the Dominion and Federation over Cardassia. There was plenty of “attack from odd angles” and even a couple “ship getting destroyed by shrapnel” scenes. Probably one of the best battles portrayed in ST.
Once upon a time, in the 1960’s, a man named Gene Roddenberry tried to make a “space western”. The man was reasonably intelligent, was a pilot himself and knew something of 3D manuvering, and had enough interest in space to know basic stuff like there’s no noise in space.
However, he was trying to make this for TV. In addition to limitations of budget and special effects technology, he also had to deal with the general population of 1966-68. Think about this. Star Trek was off the air before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The smallest of computers filled an entire room. “Portable phones” required a power source large enough that it was typically carried in a backpack.
So, when they filmed the opening sequence they originally didn’t have any sound at all as the ship flew by… but the test audiences couldn’t stand it. They yell out the sound was broken. The “silence in space” concept was not general knowledge at the time, so they had to put the “whoooosh!” in to keep the audience happy. Likewise, having ships meet at odd angles would likewise perturb the average viewer of 1966, so they didn’t… because they had to keep the interest of the average viewer or go off the air (which is eventually what happened anyway). Same reason the women’s uniforms were miniskirts - it kept the young male demographic watching - and no one’s uniforms had pockets - it looked better, even if it was impractical in the real world.
And, again, remember that the special effects technology was quite different back then. There were NO computers available at all to do any of the sort of work we take for granted today. Everything was models on tracks or strings, matte shots, and background paintings. It was a hell of a lot easier and less expensive to hang models in roughly the same plane and shoot them that way they to try for truly all-angles approaches. Likewise, a lot of aliens looked more or less exactly like the humans, with maybe some body paint splashed on, because the budget was limited and it was cheaper than the elaborate prostheses that came later, when more money was available for make-up. A lot of sets were cardboard. The doors were opened by people hidden behind walls, not by machinery.
Some of the look of the old series came about not through ignorance or sloppiness but because of constraints of both money and the audience of the time.
NOW audiences are much more savvy about space in general - sure, there are plenty of space battles with “whoosh!”, but when a movie or show leaves that out and show silence in space no one much minds - in fact, the most frequent comment is “cool, they got that right!”. The use of computers allows elaborate ships at all angles with proper physics… achieving that in the late 1960’s would have required not only a team of good model builders (which they had) but figuring out the math/angles/physics on paper with a slide rule - pocket calculators as we know them didn’t exist at the time.
So, if you had the time (and were crazy enough) to watch the whole Star Trek product form start to finish, you’d see as time went by that many of the early deficencies (by our current standards) of the series were reduced over time. By the end, you did see space battles with ships at all angles, among other things.
Whoa there! Nobody was complaining about the miniskirts.
OTTOMH I’d say that was true for most of the run of NextGen as well.
I thinl most of us Trekkies accept that. Note that so many of us complain about violations of established history in Enterprise, but nobody complains about the Klingon make-up.
Last time I checked, they still were. Which NextGen guest star said ‘The doors aren’t automatic. They’re actually opened and closed by guys in t-shirts and the sound effect is added later. But, I’m a such a big fan I still heard the whoosh when they opened.’ ?