Per Aspera Ad Astra: Charting the Stars of Star Trek

 

Ever since the publication of Star Trek Star Charts back in 2002 I had wanted to do a 'deep dive' into the placement of all the worlds and sectors in Star Trek and how they related to each other; after many false starts over the years, I finally buckled down and completed my "Star Trek Cartography" - or at least the initial stage!

The focus here is on the Alpha/Beta Quadrant of the Star Trek galaxy; to run through all the placements in STSC - and over the years, added to by the followup two editions of Stellar Cartography and that the ST TV shows began using the maps as 'canon' in the shows themselves, making it easy to place new worlds - and put them all together - but also go through all the planets/systems mentioned, and the alien races, and other references to places.

But that is only the beginning, because this is just the foundation for a broader look at the Star Trek universe and its evolution over time through various licensed sources.  I've already gone through and added Star Trek Maps, the first concerted effort to map Star Trek (kudos for attempting a 3D look, minus points for not really checking actual star distances from Earth for real stars) followed a decade later by Worlds of the Federation which built upon the earlier material.  There's also the TTRPGs - FASA from the 1980s, Last Unicorn Games around 2000, and Modiphius, the current license holder (ignoring Decipher's cash grab that quickly petered out).

There's a lot of changes over time and disagreements.  One persistent conceit that has now been abandoned was that Alpha Centauri was home to an alien race called Centaurians - now, it's assumed that Alpha Centauri is just an early Earth colony that developed into its own world and went independent before the Federation was formed, to become one of the founding members.

There's also agreement on some some facts - well before Star Trek V and the "world of peace" between the three big powers, the idea that the Klingon Empire, Romulan Empire and Federation all met together at roughly the same area and there's a portion of 'neutral' and/or 'contested' space there is something that has persisted through all kinds of different takes on Star Trek.

Possibly the biggest change by Star Charts was creating the 'alternate' Deneb and Rigel, so that the 'true' versions were on or beyond the frontier of the Federation despite numerous references to these stars as been accessible and well-settled as well, which also allowed the 'known space' to be shrunk considerably.

Currently working on adding in the TTRPG material!

Version 1.0 of Star Trek Cartography!

Additionally, I've updated my "Galactic Travel Guide", of real star systems used in fiction, concentrating on story-universes that have a significant number of references.  (I've started to make some exceptions - you'll see under "Misc" that that star system in the Dragonriders of Pern series is a named star, and not one typically used!)  The main addition is for the TTRPG Traveller: 2300, which is not 100% complete yet at this time.

Version 2.0 of the Galactic Travel Guide!