Location of Voyager on the Galactic Map

[All Seeing Eye]

I just watched an episode of Voyager on Virgin1 and it's the one where Barclay contacts Voyager for the first time using the MIDAS Array and the pulsar.

Well during the scene where they're explaining to Admiral Paris the 3 grid location where Voyager might be it zooms in to those grids from the galaxy viewpoint which allows us to actually see the exact location at that time Voyager is in the Delta Quadrant.

The thing is the scene goes by quickly but if it was screencaptured we'd be able to see exactly where Voyager was in relation to the Galaxy and from that we could draw a line from Earth to Voyager and beyond to work out exactly what part of the Delta Quadrant Voyager was flung to.

So does anyone have the ability to screencap it?

 

[Piper]

I don't know about screencaps, but this from Wikipedia gives a rough idea:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7e/VoyagerMap.jpg

 

[Bertie]

The map that Piper linked is the best source that I know of since it:
1. Was actually used onscreen (in the Astrometics lab several times late in the show, see MA Talk:Beta Quadrant for other examples) so it is as canon as anything in Trek read from computer displays.
2. Was printed in at least one of the manuals sold to the public, so we can read it clearly.

(Incidentally, the map also pretty clearly answers the popular "why not fly to the Bajoran wormhole" question, since as you can see the distances are pretty close.)

 

[All Seeing Eye]

That map can't be accurate, the map view on the episode I saw placed Voyager much further to the right of the Delta Quadrant.

If someone is able to get a capture you'll see what I mean.

 

[Kathryn_Janeway]

http://voy.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=63&page=5

 

[Timo]

...Granted that nobody knows exactly how our galaxy would look like if viewed from "above", but the attempt in "Pathfinder" is a rather sorry sight. I much prefer the Milky Way artwork in that onscreen/Star Charts map.

So, where does the image zoom in, in "Pathfinder"? Can you give us the coordinates, Tachyon Shield - say, 5 to the right on horizontal axis and 1 to up (since the axes are so nicely marked in that "Pathfinder" screencap)?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[kipron]

In Renaissance Man, Doc-Janeway implies that Voyager is only an episode or so away from the Beta Quadrant. Which totally squares with most of those onscreen diagrams.

Nice bit of map porn.

 

[Timo]

...The one instance where VOY map porn fails to excite me is "False Profits", where the Ferengi of TNG "The Price" infamy are encountered in the Delta Quadrant. In the TNG episode, Data claimed that the wormhole was at most 200 lightyears into Delta Quadrant, as its previous position had been in Gamma and the movement since that position was those 200 ly only. So yeah, the Ferengi could be in Delta - but this should be reflected in the route map, so that the hero ship should make a detour that almost touches the Delta/Gamma border.

Apart from that, the cartography and the progression of the homeward journey makes rather good sense. What makes less sense is how certain species seem to tag along with the hero ship, even after our heroes make sudden jumps tens of thousands of lightyears long.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[T'Girl]

From everything I've ever seen about the shape of our galaxy (okay, just PBS), the picture on Kathryn Janeways' post isn't even close, it's not that orderly.

 

[Lynx]

As for maps, you might want to check out those seasons 1-3 maps:

http://lynx677.110mb.com/maps.html

 

[ProStar]

The one thing that I don't understand Pathfinder episode is how the hell did Starfleet find Voyager despite the fact that Voyager had travelled 30,000ish lights from the last reported position. How the hell did Barclay find Voyager in a vast quadrant by luck? The writers totally mucked the story which should have been a 2 Parter.

 

[Mirren Audax]

Wasn't the design of Chakotay's Chah-moo-zee supposed to be some kind of star map?

 

[Timo]

The one thing that I don't understand Pathfinder episode is how the hell did Starfleet find Voyager despite the fact that Voyager had travelled 30,000ish lights from the last reported position. How the hell did Barclay find Voyager in a vast quadrant by luck?

Agreed, it makes no sense. Happily, the writers skipped the part where Barclay would explain his logic or illogic; all we learn is that our heroic officers have done hard work and ended up with three guesses.

In theory, it might be that Starfleet had received information from third parties - rumors of the major jumps made by the ship might have circulated through, say, the Borg collective, and Starfleet could have captured a Borg Drone or ship and accessed this information.

However, Barclay could just have used statistics. He knew the ship had a tendency to leap forward - he had heard as much when Janeway sent a hello through the Hirogen network. Those three sectors he came up with could represent the three regions of highest probability in his analysis, even if each was surrounded by a plateau of almost as high probability that was hundreds or thousands of lightyears wide. The idea of statistical analysis is supported by the fact that Barclay's three candidate sectors weren't even next to each other; they thus seem to represent three best guesses arrived at by three different algorithms.

In the end, he probably simply got lucky... A valid dramatic conceit, sometimes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Lynx]

Wasn't the design of Chakotay's Chah-moo-zee supposed to be some kind of star map?

I think that you have mixed up some things here.

The Chamuzi (or how it is spelled) was the sign Chakotay saw on the Sky Spirits homeworld in "Tattoo". It reminded him of similar carved or etched signs he had seen in Central America as a kid.

The Medicine Wheel which was used as a star map in the episode "Cathexis" wasn't actually supposed to be a star map but was used as such to get Voyager out of the Komar nebula.

 

[RichMerk]

Wasn't the design of Chakotay's Chah-moo-zee supposed to be some kind of star map?

Here's what it says in the Star Trek Encyclopedia: "Voyager senior illustrator Rick Sternbach designed the Chah-mooz-ee symbol. Rick says he based the design on a map of the Milky Way galaxy, and the V lines may—or may not—suggest the paths of various wormholes and other spatial phenomena across the galaxy."

http://banshees.merknet.com/database/mapgalaxy.html

I used that idea when I drew up my own map of the galaxy. The wormhole lines match the lines on the Chah-moo-zee.

 

[Bluesteel]

Looking at the map.They are closer to the Bajoran Wormhole in the Gamma Quadrant. Why not shave a few decades of your journey?

Oh wait the writers were a bunch of idiot. They couldn't tell the difference between a spoon and spade if their life depended on it.

 

[Timo]

Only an idiot would head for a "shortcut" that had slim odds of being there when one arrived. The risk of adding a century to your trip would never be worth the benefit of shaving a single decade off it - especially since none of the crew (save perhaps Tuvok) would exactly live to see home regardless of whether the trip took 70 or 130 years.

Just take that equation back to the real world. Nobody would walk to a bus stop six miles away to catch the last bus home, if home were seven miles away and the bus driver was known to be unreliable and had admitted to being suicidal when you last met him. Especially when it was well known that a tough gang of thugs was robbing and raping people at that bus stop every night.

I truly can't figure out how witless people must be to even suggest that a side trip tens of thousands of lightyears long would be beneficial somehow. Don't people use their brains any more nowadays? The argument has never made any sense whatsoever, and shouldn't require any counterarguments.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bluesteel]

Only an idiot would head for a "shortcut" that had slim odds of being there when one arrived. The risk of adding a century to your trip would never be worth the benefit of shaving a single decade off it - especially since none of the crew (save perhaps Tuvok) would exactly live to see home regardless of whether the trip took 70 or 130 years.

Just take that equation back to the real world. Nobody would walk to a bus stop six miles away to catch the last bus home, if home were seven miles away and the bus driver was known to be unreliable and had admitted to being suicidal when you last met him. Especially when it was well known that a tough gang of thugs was robbing and raping people at that bus stop every night.

I truly can't figure out how witless people must be to even suggest that a side trip tens of thousands of lightyears long would be beneficial somehow. Don't people use their brains any more nowadays? The argument has never made any sense whatsoever, and shouldn't require any counterarguments.

Timo Saloniemi

You mean only an idiot would head for a wormhole that is more then 10,000 years old,stable and shorter then 70,000 light years to presumably Borg Territory.

Just look at it. It's half the distance and it would have made a great tie in with DS9.

 

[Timo]

1) It's not half the distance. The only canonical information we have on the distance is the first map shown upthread, and there it's 6/7 of the distance, plus the wormhole traverse itself, hence 13/7 of the distance. "Half"? More like twice!
2) It's not stable. Janeway left for her fateful trip from DS9, the station guarding the wormhole mouth. Just weeks prior, the commander of that station had sworn to blow up the wormhole at the first sign of enemy action, and had in fact done so in a simulation he mistook for reality.
3) It's guarded by the most vicious enemy the Federation has encountered so far. The presence of enemies or threats in other directions is speculation, and those threats can be sidestepped if need be. The presence of a powerful enemy at the Bajoran wormhole is dead certain, and Janeway would have to sail right into that enemy.
4) If it exists, odds are that other wormholes exist as well. Any other wormhole would be superior to the Bajoran one, which suffers from the above three damning faults that render it useless for an Ocampa/Earth trip.

It might be a tie-in between VOY and DS9, yeah. But that would be a bad thing, since it would imply that everything in the Trek universe ties together in a rather petty way. Why focus on this single wormhole out of the dozens that must be out there? Or the dozens if not hundreds of even more interesting ways by which Janeway could get home?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Bluesteel]

1) It's not half the distance. The only canonical information we have on the distance is the first map shown upthread, and there it's 6/7 of the distance, plus the wormhole traverse itself, hence 13/7 of the distance. "Half"? More like twice!

Even in that map the distance is shorter and aviods borg space. The journey from Gamma Quadrant to Alpha Quadrant is a few minutes. The wormhole doesn't take decades to transport people.

2) It's not stable. Janeway left for her fateful trip from DS9, the station guarding the wormhole mouth. Just weeks prior, the commander of that station had sworn to blow up the wormhole at the first sign of enemy action, and had in fact done so in a simulation he mistook for reality.

No Sisko destroyed the wormhole in the dream when the Federation gave away DS9 and Bajor to the Dominion and started a war with the Romulans. A disastrous event. He was very adamant otherwise that the wormhole should be kept open and explored because the region of space near the wormhole isn't Dominion territory. He even threathened to attack the Romulans when they wanted to close the wormhole.

3) It's guarded by the most vicious enemy the Federation has encountered so far. The presence of enemies or threats in other directions is speculation, and those threats can be sidestepped if need be. The presence of a powerful enemy at the Bajoran wormhole is dead certain, and Janeway would have to sail right into that enemy.

The Wormhole wasn't guarded by the Dominion. There area was far from the wormhole. They just didn't like people coming on their side. People who they had no control over.

4) If it exists, odds are that other wormholes exist as well. Any other wormhole would be superior to the Bajoran one, which suffers from the above three damning faults that render it useless for an Ocampa/Earth trip.

Yeah maybe they exist. But how can you tell where they are going? Do you traveling 70 years for a maybe when you know that a stable and artificial wormhole to AQ already exists?

It might be a tie-in between VOY and DS9, yeah. But that would be a bad thing, since it would imply that everything in the Trek universe ties together in a rather petty way. Why focus on this single wormhole out of the dozens that must be out there? Or the dozens if not hundreds of even more interesting ways by which Janeway could get home?

Timo Saloniemi

The only way Janeway could get home in 7 years was in a stupid way and surprise surprise it was in a really stupid way. How many times did they jump thousands of light years? If they can do that then why is a pain in the neck for a ship in the AQ to travel 300 light years.


Besides TNG/DS9/VOY already tied themselves together. The Cardassian Border wars/ Maquis is the one storyline that is featured and expanded on all three series.