{"id":1436,"date":"2016-09-08T01:44:20","date_gmt":"2016-09-08T01:44:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/?p=1436"},"modified":"2016-09-08T01:44:20","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T01:44:20","slug":"star-trek-at-50-so-how-did-they-boldly-get-there","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/star-trek-at-50-so-how-did-they-boldly-get-there\/","title":{"rendered":"Star Trek at 50: So how did they Boldly get there?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 8th of September, 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the first screening of the original Star Trek television series.\u00a0 In this post we cover some of the locational aspects of the Star Trek phenomenon.<\/em><\/p>\n

Growing up, Star Trek<\/a> was a pretty big part of my life (more than you wanted to know, I’m sure).\u00a0 Before 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/a> and Star Wars<\/a>, the world of Star Trek was all about the future, but one where space travel was the norm and there was room for harmony amongst the races (let alone species).\u00a0 The passion of Kirk was complimented by the logic of Spock but woe betide anyone wearing a red shirt. \u00a0 In retrospect, the programme was pretty radical, with a diversity not often seen on television screens at the time.\u00a0 Gene Roddenberry described it as “wagon train in to the stars” and when it was working at its best it was always about people.\u00a0 I think I probably got many of my ideas about fairness, justice, tolerance and doing the right thing from this misspent youth (well, that and Gilligan’s Island<\/a>…).\u00a0 But I didn’t care about any of that then.\u00a0 It was just cool to be on the continuing voyages of the Starship Enterprise<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"constitutionclass\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I caught it mostly in reruns after school.<\/p>\n

From where I sit now, it’s interesting to think about the locational aspects of it (really<\/em>?).\u00a0 I remember talk of quadrants, courses and coordinates for beaming down.\u00a0 Here on backwards Earth we’ve of course got latitude and longitude and our coordinate systems, but how does that all work in the Star Trek universe?\u00a0 Let’s start with the whole quadrant thing.<\/p>\n

Don’t quote me on this because I am not all knowing of the ST universe, but most of the action takes place in our local galaxy, the Milky Way, which was broken up into four quadrants.\u00a0 The galactic centre sits at the centre of this system and gives us our central axis.\u00a0 Being essentially a disc, with a much greater horizontal extent than vertical, ST treats is essentially as a horizontal plane:<\/p>\n

\"plane\"<\/a>
http:\/\/scifi.stackexchange.com\/questions\/34533\/why-doesnt-voyager-in-star-trek-go-above-the-galactic-plane-to-get-back-home<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Seen from a slightly elevated angle, we can see the spiral arms and the Galactic Bulge.<\/p>\n

\"disc\"<\/a>
http:\/\/scifi.stackexchange.com\/questions\/34533\/why-doesnt-voyager-in-star-trek-go-above-the-galactic-plane-to-get-back-home<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our neighbourhood is in the Local Arm of the galaxy where much of the action takes place.\u00a0 Earth is the centre of the United Federation of Planets<\/a>.\u00a0 So if we draw a vertical line through galactic bulge this gives us the centre of our quadrants.\u00a0 Up points towards the North Galactic Pole (NGP).\u00a0 The plane then gets divided into four quadrant named by the first four Greek letters:<\/p>\n

\"quadrants\"<\/a>
http:\/\/scifi.stackexchange.com\/questions\/34533\/why-doesnt-voyager-in-star-trek-go-above-the-galactic-plane-to-get-back-home<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Federation straddles the alpha and beta quadrants and if you look closely you can see references to the Borg and the Voyager missions, so this chart crosses several of the programmes.\u00a0 And how did all those races (or where they species) fit together?<\/p>\n

\"galaxy3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course this is one of perhaps thousands of versions of this, developed by fervent ST fans.\u00a0 I don’t think there’s an official map per se, but this one works.\u00a0 Vulcan is in the beta quadrant by the way.<\/p>\n

So what about courses and bearings?\u00a0 Mr Sulu was always being told to plot a course for Starbase 11 or the delta quadrant.\u00a0 Like plotting courses here on earth, we can generally talk about courses as angles.\u00a0 Again, the fans have theories and hypotheses about how all this works.\u00a0 Here’s one<\/a> that I’ll rely on.<\/p>\n

Mr Sulu’s instructions were often along the lines of “403 mark 7” which, according to this theory is two angles.\u00a0 “403” is a longitude and “7” is a latitude, separated by “mark”.\u00a0 If you go back to the idea of the plane of the galaxy, we can plot a course from our current location to a next stop (whether at impulse or warp speed, depending on the urgency and Scotty’s ability to hold the ship together yet one more time) as a horizontal angle in the plane and another perpendicular to the plane.\u00a0 For this to work we need some standard zero angle within the plane of the galaxy to work with, like north being 0 degrees for us.\u00a0 Second, the above longitude is greater than 365 so there’s something different about how that longitude is measured.\u00a0 The author has done some extensive research (ahem, viewing) and reckons that circles are divided into 1000 degrees rather than 365.<\/p>\n

Now it gets a bit (more) confusing.\u00a0 For our zero longitude, how do we set it consistently?\u00a0 In this system, the zero longitude vector is drawn from your current location to the nearest point on the edge of the galaxy and then directions are measured anticlockwise from this vector.<\/p>\n

Latitude gets a bit trickier: “latitude is measured ‘down’ from a line inclined 25 degrees to the ‘equator’ plane”.\u00a0 Most locations will then be within 0 and 50 degrees.\u00a0 Hopefully this diagram clarifies some of that a bit:<\/p>\n

\"coordinate\"<\/a>
http:\/\/www.orionpressfanzines.com\/articles\/navigation_coordinates_in_star_t.htm<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Again, this is but one of probably thousands of different interpretations.\u00a0 I’m sure Gene Roddenberry never sat down and figured out what all this meant – and probably never anticipated that armies of fans would go to so much trouble to make sense of it and ensure that it was all consistent.\u00a0 One need only do a quick bit of trawling on the web to see just how much effort and energy has been put into this.\u00a0 Why as a kid I clearly remember desperately wanting a set of the blueprints for the Enterprise – and one magic Christmas there they were – a packet of incredibly detailed blueprints for something that never existed except in a few sets and models, yet fully captured so many’s imaginations.<\/p>\n

I’m still trying to get my around how the coordinates work but, in honour of the day, that’s a bit of a trip down memory lane with a geospatial bent.\u00a0 I suspect I’ll be spending the next few days in front of the telly<\/a> catching up with old friends.<\/p>\n

Live long and prosper<\/p>\n

\"spock\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Now where did I put my tricorder?<\/p>\n

C<\/p>\n

GIS Blog Table of Contents<\/a> \t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The 8th of September, 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the first screening of the original Star Trek television series.\u00a0 In this post we cover some of the locational aspects of the Star Trek phenomenon. Growing up, Star Trek was a pretty big part of my life (more than you wanted to know, I’m sure).\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lincoln.ac.nz\/gis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}