If I may, Alpha centauri was a founding member originally. The Andorians were an afterthought. The other ORIGINAL TOS founders were Earth, 40 Eridani, 61 Cygni, and epsilon Indii
Impossible 😂 They have known outposts through the alpha, beta and gama quadrant's. And allies reaching across universes and dimensions 😂🤦♂️ The Federation is OP, thats why the borg assimilation tactic was so scary, you cant reason with it. It dosent care about your words 😂 and thats usually how humans win, reason and empathy
A few thoughts. Voyager's 70kly journey is alluded to requiring 70 years to complete, suggesting the best Federation ships have a maximum sustainable speed of about 1000c, whatever their dash speed might be. DS9 suggests that certain destinations within the Federation take six months or so to travel between, when Sisko and Kassidy are talking about her brother's baseball games. Ergo the major axis of the Federation can be supposed to be about 500 light years. The minor axes are probably much smaller, perhaps as small as 100 light years based on the distances to DS9 and the various Neutral Zones, so the total area of the Federation is probably in the neighborhood of 5 million cubic light years. Average galactic density is 0.4 stars per cubic light year so this would give the Federation territorial claim over some two million systems, only a tiny fraction of which could possibly have been actually visited by crewed ships over the Federation's two-hundred-year lifespan. If one-tenth of those systems have habitable planets, and one-tenth of those habitable planets have life, and one-tenth of those have intelligent life, and one-tenth of *those* are warp-capable, this suggests two hundred warp-capable species in Federation territory, which is a surprisingly close estimate to the 154 member species quoted in TNG.
In order for the 8000ly figure to make any sense we'd have to postulate "hyperspace lanes" allowing faster-than-normal transit between fixed locations, or acceleration gates that could fling ships at faster-than-normal speeds between specific destinations, neither of which are attested to anywhere in the lore.
I was just thinking about Kassidy’s comments about how long it’d take to reach Pike City! Although of course that’s her older ship’s travel time, not necessarily a high warp travel time, but otherwise your thoughts pretty much exactly match mine. So much exploration and discovery is going to be happening within Federation “borders” due to the density of stars, not to mention they seem to send ships off in one direction at a time outside of their borders (thus a “spiky ball” of explored space rather than a smooth sphere, possibly even a rather lumpy spiky ball if they don’t properly balance their arbitrary directions). Additionally there’s also the wrinkle of various blobs of 3D space in and around Federation space could make the topology a lot more complex. Voyager shows this in the astrometrics lab once or twice about local powers, where one extends underneath the other and then comes up around it on the other side. So Kassidy’s travel time could also involve plotting a complex course through friendly space to avoid isolationist civilisations who requested first contact was last contact, or outright hostile ones who challenge Federation shipping lanes.
@@kaitlyn__L Yeah that's all true. Of course if Kassidy's ship is slower than the 1000c benchmark that implies the Federation is even smaller than our estimates, since a slower ship wouldn't be able to cover even 500ly in six months. I'm sure the actual shape is pretty amorphous, but the five million cubic light years really sounds about right to me, and it fits the on-screen evidence pretty well all around. Of course, it's somewhat worth considering what "Federation space" means anyway. Space is mostly empty -- see the 0.4 stars per cubic light year figure -- so "claiming" a system doesn't even really mean you can "claim" the space in between stars. And what does it mean to "claim" a system anyway? That's a question that's never satisfactorily answered.
@@jacksagephoenix claiming a system is when you put military resources into defending it against others who would use its resources for their own purpose. As you say, not much of a reason to do that for purely empty space. Except perhaps for securing trade routes. So it’s really just a “sponge” of spheres-of-influence surrounding a planetary body (or perhaps an entire solar system); with the “air bubbles” of space being no man’s land? I’ve seen some fascinating discussions about this when it comes to The Expanse - who can claim space and why? I’ve seen anything from radii from a celestial body to claiming specific travel lanes to/from a destination rather than outright space. Especially with the planets moving relative to each other all the time.
I’ve said it a thousand times and I’ll say it a million more, Star Trek federation would be a great docuseries, a look into the federation as a whole and how it works, see the worlds, see the federation in all its glory.
@@anthwest1883 What do you mean incorrect? He wasn't asking for your fucking opinion of what you think. People can be so fucking shot online its ludicrous. That would make an AWESOME Docu series but they won't ever do that for several reasons but mainly because they won't lock themselves into any type of cannon that is so concrete and a docu series would be considered FACTS within the star trek universe.
Ignore the first half of the comment i wrote to the buffoon who responded to your comment but the second part applies to you, ya know the not rude and insulting part that's just about cannon LOL. I would LOVE such a series.
The Federation is an idealised society… which means they have to keep it vague. The second they start defining the socia economics someone will take offence.
154 members doesn't mean 154 worlds, each world colonized a few planets nearby that didn't have sentient life on them. The UN analogy is very accurate, each member would have 1- perhaps up to a dozen colony worlds that are under their 'banner'. This would be especially true for the founding members of the Federation that had 'proto-empires' that were merged into the original Federation border. The show Enterprise suggests Earth had at least Alpha Centauri, and Vulcan, Andor and Tellar each had many colonies each before the founding of the Federation.
I always took the "8,000 light years across" comment to have been a mistake on the part of the filmmakers or script writers and I'd agree that a circumference of 8,000 ly is more likely. It would make sense as well as that would give the Federation a rough average diameter of around 2,550 ly. The only problem though is that even at 2,550 ly in diameter it would take a full year and a half to cross Federation space at Warp 9 which means that a lot of the movements of the Enterprise-D in TNG don't make any sense.
I don’t think most colonies don’t have federation council status until they reach a certain size. Take for example Jurrae IV, the colony the Borg wiped out right before Best of Both Worlds. The crater the cube left appears to be the size of a town, probably with a bunch of individual houses on the outskirts or scattered around the planet. I think that’s a pretty standard federation colony. A few thousand people mostly living on one continent all by themselves. They’re federation citizens and get to vote for President or whatever, but Jurrae IV never had a seat on the council
Yeah, all those colonies would be under “Earth” on the council I’m pretty sure, plus Mars, Jupiter’s moons, etc. Hence each of the ~150 “member worlds” could actually have dozens or hundreds of planets under their control. Bajor seems to have many colonies on its moons in the system too for example. In Trek it seems like “world” is just the term for that division of political power, instead of “nation” or “state” or something else.
Technically and originally, the federation council is the analogue to the UN Security Council (the galactic executive branch). The federation assembly would be the analogue of the UN General assembly and have one ambassador per member planet.planets. And for colonies below a certain level, they would fall under the Trusteeship Council and not under a specific planet's govt.
So all the aliens got a butt they can sit on and regular human sized chairs what they can't come up with nothing original hell they might be blobs of gelatin and they can't sit
Half the members of the Federation "council" where in Starfleet uniforms. What is this? Starfleet runs colonialism? Oh wait but that's OK. Starfleet is not a "military".
The best explanation I've heard for the Federation's inconsistent size is that the UFP is NOT one continquous area, as with the US, but is instead broken up into pockets, small regions of Fed territory, with empty space between them.
This is obvious, personally at least. 8 years across isn't all that much, when ships are built to last long over distances. It's also important to remember humans aren't automatically the ones coming those distances. I think looking at the EU and see how the Eurozone spans to a few hundred kilometers off the austrailian coast thanks to french overseas territories.
The Insurrection movie, for what any of the movie's continuity writing is worth, says that the Federation does claim vast swaths of empty space between systems likely to prevent someone from just setting up a military base but also to expand its economic hegemony.
@@Taospark Even still it'd be full of holes where the Federation claims incredibly limited rights at best because of their stance on not contacting cultures until they reach for the stars themselves.
32 ambassadors were on the Enterprise, but some may have already been on Babel. Each member might consist of many worlds, which they're finding all the time. 8,000 light years might be the furthest extents of the Federation from one extreme end to the other. I would imagine it's a big sphere centered on Earth.
I still choke laughing that in the first episode of star trek enterprise Kronos the Klingon homeworld was less than one week's travel in a warp 4-star ship...
A few members of the Federation may be groups of planets or systems rather than single planets. Some of the species pre-Federation had their own alliances and territories that existed under one government. We also have the TOS First Federation from The Corbomite Maneuver in some canons have joined the Federation or have alliances and consider themselves part of The Federation but govern themselves independently. Of course there is at least one story that The First Federation is waiting for the UFP to catch up before it joins.
Yeah, I am thinking the First Federation is NOT in the Federation because they would have been pretty impactful from a military perspective against the Borg, Dominion, and other Federation threats.
in addition to open space and pre-warp planetary systems Federation space would likely have a number of contact-level planetary systems that for whatever reason have not decided to join the Federation. A number of these might have treaties making them "Protectorates" of the Federation, independent but under Federation protection in regards to trade with treaties to allow for visitation and commerce with Federation worlds. A number of the Orion colonies would likely be such protectorates as would some of the worlds visited by TOS and NG Enterprise
@@OrangeRiver I image it's rather like the Client-State system used by the Imperium in the Traveller universe with the Federation providing protection for systems and space lanes in return for various trade and legal concessions such as providing Federation consul offices and embassies in return; local politics and laws would still be in effect but the local Federation envoy would have an advisory role with the government. Worlds that have particularly harsh laws and governments or suffer from xenophobia might have travel advisories for Federation travellers and merchants like the Amber Zones in the Traveller universe (case in point that aweful STNG episode where Picard had to violate the Prime Directive to protect Will Weaton from being killed by the local fuzz for stomping on flowers; such a planet would likely be thereafter classified 'go at your risk').
Yea, I’ve always imagined the interior of Federation space to look like a sponge, with tons of single-system isolationist species who wanted no further contact after our protagonists met them.
Really good video! although the real answer is just that writers don’t feel like doing the math while writing the script, I also like to think that the discrepancy between travel times has to do with warp factors. Warp 9 is exponentially faster than even warp 8 and is typically only used in emergencies if the ship is even capable so there’s not a consistent speed for the ships
You’ve mentioned Romans in the video. They actually never said “millions of sestertii/denarii etc” when speaking about currency; they just said 3 thousand, meaning 3,000,000. So maybe when Picard talks about 8,000 LY, he actually means something bigger (several orders of magnitude), just like the Romans. I am Russian, and many Russians dealing with a thousand rubles name it just “one ruble”, omitting the thousand. So perhaps something like this exists in Trekverse. Thanks for the video!
I think one thing not discussed here, is that there is on the order of magnitudes, differences in the speed of ships from the original series to the later ones. The Enterprise E can go 21,000 times the speed of light, so 8000 light years is not that far. Plus you do not have an empire with all your ships at the home world. Fleets would be set up across the Federation to defend sectors. While it will take you time to get a backup fleet there, it will also take the same time for an enemy to invade your space as well.
People tend to forget how big space actually is. Especially in Star Trek. The shows and films only depict highlights of the crew's adventures. It diesn't cover the day-to-day humdrum of a typical workday on a Starfleet vessel. Each episode of Trek covers an important event of note to the narrative, but one episode in a sense of time might take place weeks or even months after the previous episode. To put this into some perspective; it can take eleven days at warp 9 to travel from Earth to Vulcan. That's just short of two weeks. This is an issue I think Enterprise handled better than most. As it tended to regard distances more heavily than other series, since the writers had to emphasize that this was a much older and slower vessel than what we were used to seeing.
When dealing with galaxies shaped as ours is, I generally take any such measurement of territory to be according to a top-down view. In this context, the 8000 ly number makes sense, especially given our galaxy's 1000 ly thickness (10,000 at the central bulge).
I once heard someone say (in regards to 2d cartography) that "across" can go 'across' several axis.... So 8,000ly across can mean the maximum distance between coreward and rimward + maximum distance spinward and counter-spinward + the maximum distance between galactic-north and galactic-south...
Keep in mind Picard doesn't say its 8,000 light years wide. He says the number of Federation planets is "over 150...spread across 8,000 light years". 'Spread' can mean any number of things and not necessarily adjacent to each other. Just as the 50 United States of America includes the land masses of Alaska and Hawaii but not the vast stretches of Canada and the Pacific Ocean between them and the continental other 48. Any member planet likely controls the cubical volume of space immediately surrounding their system. Think our system's bounderies of the Oort Cloud (2 to 4 light years across or 8 to 64 cubical L/Y). Of various sizes depending on the size of each star system, collectively they could add up to 8,000 NONcontiguous light years scattered within a 3D volume of space of any diameter but probably only hundreds of light years across in any direction. Lastly, by 'light years'.....who's years? Its one thing to have Earth be a location of government and institutions but highly unlikely its solar revolutionary time duration is to be the universal unit for interstellar distance measurements above, and used by, all other planets and their inhabitants own measuring units. Some standardized 'year', calculated by some metric other than planetary solar revolution, is more likely. Which means 8,000 light years in Star Trek context could be anything.
I like the idea of the territory not been a continuous thing occupying all space between member worlds but something more like every planet (or star system) is sort of an island and some space arround it, lets say one light year, is considered its space and anything that is more than one light year away from any planet is considered "international" space. Sort of the territorial waters and international waters we have in the real world.
@@williamj.stilianessis1851 Thanks. I think it works better with the possibility that there is pre-warp civilizations that will reach warp and reclaim some space for themselves and not being inside the UFP or any other multi-system power they may not like much. I think it's a better system than just "all this chunk of space is mine" and relationships between different powers could be more dynamic even from the story telling point of view.
Just awesome, u mention Alpha Centauri. U are the first person that I remember to state so. As I remember Centauri was a colony of Earth, at some point it got it’s independent. I know this because I have the Star Trek: Star Fleet Technical Manual from 1976, my most prize possessions.
Not sure if you have the same book as me, but Alpha Centuari was a planet in its own right with their own sapient species. They were a founding member of the Federation (at least originally).
@@user-nf9xc7ww7m My book Star Trek, Starfleet Technical Manual: 1st Edition Stardate 7511.01. I bought this book on 02/27/1976 & finished reading 02/27/1976. As I remember Alpha Centauri Concordium of Planets, human. At the time of the founding of UFP, there were only four members. United Nations Planet Earth-Sol System, Planetary Confederation of Eridain (Vulcan), United Planets of 61 Cygni (Tellar) & Star Empire of Epsilon Inii (Andorian). I very vaguely remember that #1 (Una), may have been born or rise on one of Alpha’s star system. Very nice talking to u, stay well & safe!!!
actually, we can describe our galaxy as being just a diameter across using only one dimension it is now recently accepted that our galaxy is about 150, 000 light-years across. yes technically we are dealing with a volume but the size of the ratio of the galaxy's diameter to its thickness is so large the diameter usually the only measurement considering when talking about distances and size in the galaxy. so it would be reasonable for the federation to speak only of the distance across the federation
I thought the accepted value was ~100kLY. Is the extra 50% size from a recent estimate? (Also the galactic disc is ~1kLY thick; so not completely irrelevant for their actual navigation between close neighbours, but still when discussing the diameter we can consider it as basically flat. Especially since the extra length in journey time from pythagorean geometry is pretty minor so long as you pointed directly at the destination from the start.)
Simple solution: Picard likes to brag. No 8,000 ly straight line. Below someone suggests and ellipsoid 500 ly x 100 ly. x 100 ly. This feels right even though in many plots even that distance seems outside of events (kind of like the transporter that must exist in the world of Game of Thrones). A half year to cover the major axis (assuming max ship speed of 1000c) or a year if 500 c (Warp 8). This would be approximately 35,000 solar masses (0.059 solar masses/parsec3).
Some of the additional un-named Federation members could be independent autonomous former colonies of other Federation races. This would increase the Federation membership worlds without increasing the number of races.
Just recently found your page when I saw the video Klingon anatomy is weird. Sir you are the David Attenborough of Star Trek . It’s a pleasure listening to your videos and being entertained and informed.
so in First Contact they are patrolling the neutral zone and then suddenly they make the trip to Earth in presumably a few moments, but in actuality it would have taken them a couple of years. I think the battle would have been over by then.
The real answer to this age old question is. That the writers never sat down with some one who actually understood the vast distances of deep space. So they just grabbed a random number that sounded cool and threw it in the script. I don't think any of the writers ever really grasped the thought multiple dimensional movement in space. Take space combat as an example it wasn't until wraith of khan we saw the Enterprise use vertical movement in combat when it rose up through the nebula gas behind the Reliant. Granted before that the series had been limited by budget constraints. But it wasn't until six or seven years later during TNG's Klingon Civil War story that we actually saw ships fight in a three dimensional way. Before that it was all horizontal movement based on a solar systems elliptical plan. But the Klingons were actually dog fighting in ships like they were old WW2 fighter planes. 8000 light years is vast but small in relative size at the same time. I mean seriously think about it, Our solar system is considered a light year in diameter. It takes the light from our sun to travel one year in all directions to the farthest ends of the Oort cloud. So does that mean the Federation consists of 8000 solar systems. Or is it just made up of the member worlds and their colonies and the protectorates and all the empty space between those worlds. Just sitting like a lumpy blob of mashed potatoes inside the galaxy.
My guess for the 8k ly “across” stat is that it represents a lower bound estimate for the total distance you’d have to travel to visit every Federation member world.
The size and population of the federation (or any galactic civilization) was a topic I went on a binge about after the destruction of Vulcan in that film, I shall not name. It was a tragic event, but should not have been nearly the death of the Vulcan race. Logically for the survival of the species, they or any race, would spread out to colonize other worlds. There can be lots of debate over many factors, but if we limit the colonies to uninhabited worlds that are close enough to home environment, and we see in universe generally an abundance of "class M" planets, then we can start to make some educated guesses. The lowest value being an average of 1 colony established per year. Say over a 100 year time span. This means a minimum of 100 sizable colony worlds, excluding small outposts and mining or science stations. This means the early colonies have had nearly a century of growth and development. Now if we take Vulcan as an example, population numbers may still be low, as they dont seem to have large families. But according to something I recall reading, Vulcan had warp drive fore several centuries not just one, before meeting the Earthers. Having said all that, consider a race like Humans and how fast we have expanded here on Earth. Some of the Federation member races could and should have expanded to inhabit dozens of worlds if not 100s. The often encountered warp capable alien race that only lives on its home planet should be an oddity rather than the norm. An old race, that is good at terraforming or building space habitats could simply inhabit ALL the stars near its home system including the inhospitable ones. Even a supernova that came as a surprise is unlikely to destroy all their colonies. sorry for being a long post have a nice day
Certainly makes sense thematically. Would be cool to see a 3D progression of the Federation's size over the years...we need a 3D galaxy map! I would make it myself but I don't know how to upload something like that to the Internet.
We know from First Contact that the UFP comprised about 150 members. Earth during TOS had around thousand colonies and is among the youngest memeber in the Federation. But if we assume Earth was avarage member the Federation would have around 150 capitals with 150 000 colonies.
I think it's safe to say that the writers are better at story lines than they are at physical realities of space and time. Seth Shostak, in one of his talks, gives an anecdote where he asks one of the writers about how fast warp is. Their answer was less than impressive.
As far as the 32 ambassadors I don't think every federation planet was present in person because the universe is a big place and everyone getting together in one place isn't likely to happen. It would make more sense to have multiple meeting locations that are in communication with each other. This would make it more convenient and manageable and would reduce risk of something happening and then all of a sudden all the people in power in the galaxy suddenly dies leaving a massive power vacuum.
Might take a while to clarify. Starships can travel vast distances in very short periods of time; but this quickly depletes a ship's supply of anti-matter. Intrepid class vessels Can travel 1000 l y in one minute, warp 8 is something like 800-1000 l y in an hour. The Federation could be 8000 l y across, probably meaning the distance between its two furthest outposts. Voyager's problem was they can only produce a limited supply of anti-matter and there are no Starbases in the Delta Quadrant
Trying to determine the size of the Federation is almost impossible given all the contradictory statements that have been made in canon over the years. If we use Cestus III and Deep Space Nine (Deep Space Nine episode "Family Business") as the two most distant points of the Federation (Despite the fact that technically speaking Deep Space Nine isn't in Federation space, but rather Bajoran space), we end up with Earth being approximately 40-50% of the way inbetween. We know that Sisko went to Earth multiple times during the seasons, so we can used that as a metric for either calling all theories about warp velocities into question, the size of the Federation or how fast subspace messages are transmitted. According to Kasidy Yates a subspace message would take 2 weeks to reach Cestus III from Deep Space Nine. The theory is that subspace transmissions travel at warp 9.9999. This lines up pretty well with a distance between the two points of 8000 light years. In the same episode Kasidy states that her ship, the Xhosa, would take 8 weeks to reach Cestus III. That would make the Xhosa a lot faster than the Enterprise D's maximum warp by a good margin. In fact the Xhosa would be able of warp 9.9994864 continuously for 56 days if her statement was to be true. Since we assume that Earth is 40-50% of the distance between these two points, we get that after the events of the TNG episode "Best of Both Worlds", the Enterprise (And Sisko) were in the Sol system in year 2367, yet somehow it managed to reach Deep Space Nine in year 2369 when Sisko took command of the staion. The Enterprise would have taken almost 2 years at maximum warp (If it could sustain it nonstop) to reach the station, making it possible for the Enterprise to be there in time (Barely). However dialog in the DS9 episode "Emissary" indicates that Sisko spent approximately 3 years at Utopia Planetia after the "Battle of Wolf 359", which means he would have left the Sol system in 2369. Sisko would have had to leave Earth no later than April, and he would have to be transported there by an Intrepid class starship going at maximum (9.975) warp for up to 270 days to reach before years end if the Federation was 8000 light years across. Given that the Intrepid class didn't enter service until 2370, that immidietly rules out that option. But to use Sisko's trips between Deep Space Nine and Earth to more clearly indicate how wrong any estimates of 8000 light years would be, we only need to look the first time Sisko returns to Earth (1st episode of season 3 - "The Search"). He departs the station either at the end of 2370 or very beginning of 2371. We know from dialog that up to at least "Last Thursday", the Sisko's were on Earth, which means it took them at most a week to get back to the station. To travel 3-4000 light years in a week, it would require an average warp speed of 9.999875 to 9.999905. At that speed it would have taken Voyager 132 to 170 days to return to Federation space from the Delta Quadrant. However - We know that the Sisko's returned to the station onboard the Defaint. Early on the Defaint was only able to travel around warp 9 to 9.2. That means if Earth was 3-4000 light years from the station it would take 1.8 to 2.6 years one way. We also know that the "Battle of Sector 001" occurred in 2373, which means the Defaint would at best have reached the station during that year if the Federation was that large, and it definitely wouldn't have made it all the way back to intercept the Borg. And given that the Defaint travel to Earth (And back again) only 11 episodes later, episode 13 of season 3 would have occurred in 2377 at the earliest. This means that the entire timeline of the Dominion War would have to be revised (Originally 2373 to 2375 for the open war). Take into account the episodes "Homefront" and "Paradis Lost" and we add another 7.6 years till the start of the Dominion War. If we include the season 6 finale and first episode of season 7, then we would have to add another 20-22 years between Jadzia dying and Sisko returning to the station, since he travelled from Earth to Tyree by runabout (Warp 5 maximum) which would take 19 years, and a minimum of 0,78 years for an Intrepid class to bring the Sisko's to Earth. That means at this point the Dominion War would have lasted at the very least 25 years, since the "Battle of Sector 001" occurred after open war broke out, and Worf and the Defaint would need at least 4 years to take part in that battle. So based on this alone, it seems extremely unlikely that the Federation is 8000 light years across. When that has been said though, we do have another statement in Deep Space Nine that would lead to a far smaller Federation, that however would be way more consistant with what we see onscreen in terms of time spent on travel. We need to look at the episode "Valiant" for this. It is stated that the Valiant's prewar mission was to "circumnavigate the entire Federation", and it was given 3 months to do so. We know that the Valiant is a Defaint class starship, so under ideal conditions it maxes out at warp 9.5 (Though it can't sustain that indefinitely). If we assume that Starfleet expected the ship to travel at about 9.5 on average for 3 months, which is way higher than what was expected of the Intrepid class which is newer, it would mean the Valiant would travel 466 light years in 90 days. To simplify all of this, we assume that Federation space forms a circle, with 466 light years in circumference, that would mean the distance between Cestus III and Deep Space Nine would be reduced to 158 light years, plus lets say half a sector of Bajoran space (10 light years). That puts the total distance between the two at 168 light years. Using this distance, it would mean the Xhosa had a maximum sustainable warp speed of 8.02. It would also mean that the distance between Earth and Deep Space Nine would be about 84 light years. This distance would be covered by the Enterprise D in 15.2 days at maximum warp, 18.7 days for the Lakota, 20.2 by the Defaint at warp 9 and 6 days by Voyager (Rather than 270 days). All of these are far more realistic. Also - If the Federation was 8000 light years across, then it would take 7 days for Starfleet command to get any updates about activity along the Federation border, even by subspace. As such communication lag would prevent any fleet wide response to a border skirmish. On top of that the communication lag would likely also cause significant friction between the core worlds and the outer systems. And captain Sisko wouldn't have been able to have a realtime conversation with his father, when Josef was on Earth and Ben on Deep Space Nine. Even at a distance of only 84 light years, realtime communication wouldn't be possible. There would be 3,7 hours of signal lag.
There's multiple times on the show where character request support and the nearest federation ship is weeks away. So I really doubt you'd be able to cross it in weeks. I've always assumed it would be months at least
The first time Riker is offered a command in TNG involved a mission to an area on the edge of federation space and would require "months at high warp" just to get there. We're not really given any details but we know the federation has launched long-range unmannered probes and has subspace telescopes so they could reasonably say they've "explored" and area 8000 light years across.
An 8000 light year estimate does make since when you think that its probably not continuous. It even makes since when you think about the number of ships Starfleet SHOULD have. Even some of the maps seem to show this. Bajor borders Cardassian space, which the Federation has been at war with for it seems like years by the time we meet them in TNG. We also know that the Klingon and Romulans are that far away in the Beta Quadrant. So its probably on the diagonal. Also, we know that between Star Trek III and the end of Voyager, starfleet some how managed to obtain (ether built or through merger) 73,000 starships, yet they cry over losing 34 and that requires rebuilding the fleet. Its a problem because they are in fact to spread out and it is becoming a problem. So 8000lys makes a bit of since.
The Federation's fleet being spread out does seem to be a plot point that pops up from time to time, even in the Kelvin timeline, so I think you're actually onto something!
It’s my opinion that the Dominion War was the first time since the Discovery Klingon War that Starfleet had to pull all of its ships together, as best it could. Smaller conflicts like the Cardassian and Tzenkethi wars seemed to be small isolated border conflicts where Starfleet could afford simply to mobilise what they had in the immediate vicinity. In fact, the dates suggest at least TNG S1 took place during the last days of the war, but the Enterprise is way too far out exploring border territories to have been any help. This is similar to what Discovery said about the Enterprise under Pike, too far away to bother asking them to come back, wouldn’t arrive in time. In fact, needing to regroup and taking years to do it could well explain away some fans’ complaints that Starfleet took too long to retaliate against the Dominion; perhaps they spent the entire run-up preparing as best they could, and held off until the last minute simply to maximise the number of ships they could bring back. After all, they restarted the Defiant project immediately, which shows they took things pretty seriously. In further service of this, there must be more than one Starfleet Academy campus world, and many Starfleet shipyards across the entire region of space. Shipping them out centrally from Earth and its neighbours would make no sense, taking years. Just transmit the plans to the shipyards, which would take a few weeks to arrive, and they can get on it locally.
lots of fun! I'd like to see more of the local group - 20-30 light years out - and how they fit into or around canon... Where are the Tellarites relative to Vulcan, etc... I remember the battle at Wolf 359 and had to look up where it was/is on a real star map... all of that would be a kick to check out.
Here's a point to consider: Stellar Kinematics. (Note: I first read this term 3 days ago) - As the various stars move around the Galactic Centre, some travelling X fast, some Z fast, some are barely moving at all; some are literally shooting almost straight out across the disc, from the centre, across the paths (sort of) of most other stars, and some do all sorts of other different things (or not). How would we define territory across these shifting regions of stars, where some planets (albeit in terms of thousands of years, perhaps longer) would begin in one territory/empire/federation/association, and end up in another? I'm trying to visualise this by imagining coarse salt dissolving in stirred water. Some of the larger grains will be the last to dissolve, and often appear to travel at a different speed compared to the smaller, inner grains, and all of this at different depths in the water. Is it even possible to define, or describe, a territory for more than a relatively brief period of overall time? Yeah I don't sleep much *Additional: I didn't scroll the comments to see if this had already been posited.
Good comments on this video and I'll add mine. Yes that is a good point that 150 members or 350 it isn't just that amount of planets, it' essentially the amount of polities that agreed to membership of the Federation. And each one could have one or two planets/colonies or maybe even a hundred. And also its a possibility that in that 8,000 light year border of the federation that there are protectorates, pre-warp civilizations and also polities that have been contacted or know of the federation but decided not to be a member or the federation doesn't think they should. But as I have said in other trek forums if the federation from one end ot the other is 8,000 light years, it's to damn big to govern. It would take years to get to one end of the federation to the other. It takes weeks for communication (remember when Cassidy Yates on DS9 said to Sisko that her brother played baseball and that it will take weeks for the sub-space communication to get to her about his team). Even i f we had consul offices in or on those planets far away, they where essentially hostages to any situation that happens if even they could get communication out in the first place. Do you know how much mischief a burgeoning power in that area inside the federation or the other major powers outside the federation could do on the borders and deeper inside the federation if it takes the years to get to said incident in their borders? I'm so surprised that the Romulans who are known for doing this has never went deep into federation territory to gin up support for them and make the federation look bad. And if not that just do damage where the federation is looked at s bad and when they come to said planet they are attacked by the natives etc. etc.. There is just so much you could do to a power that is to overextended that I'll leave it at that. But one economic way that they could keep it together is to look into research building artificial stargates/wormholes that could connect one section of the federation to another and then once they transverse it the federation could use it's warp engines to get to the handful of sectors in that area that are a week or two away. They wouldn't need a bunch of these maybe 100 gates.
in discovery we know that the number of federation worlds numbered at arround 350 by the 31st century so i think that would mean at its Hight the federation was the dominant alpha quadrant power and possibly the dominant power in the beta quadrant as well depending on the state of the Klingons and if they ever nutted up and joined the UFP or not
The thing about space is that it's not really possible to map it in a way that most people in 2023 would think of. The UFP can have hundreds of member worlds, colonies, outposts, et cetera. But there could also be local powers or even regional powers that exist between member worlds, holes in UFP controlled space. What about independent colonies? Unsettled worlds. You'd have to use a 3D map showing the extent of UFP controlled space, but it would be more useful to just color stars based off of their allegiance rather than a bubble filled in like a traditional political map.
StarTrek writers couldnt possibly comprehend the vast scale and density of stars in our galaxy which is approx 150 million LY across (latest data indicates it may be quite a bit bigger than previous estimates). All of startrek could take place in a 100ly cubic volume of space and there would still be millions of stars to explore, billions of planetary bodies, trillions of stellar phenomena to investigate across 3D space just in that tiny sector alone...
The Federation can have empire's worth of non member space enclosed within their volume of influence. The voyager returned with slipstream technology. Starfleet starting to build slipstream vessels would help them control their huge territory.
It's an 8,000ly x 8,000ly x8000ly block of Swiss cheese. The negative space representing undeveloped species and species that just haven't joined or are hostile towards them.
The federation is eight thousand light years across the galactic plane, vertically. If you took the federation outpost the furthest below the plane of the galactic disk, and the outpost that was the furthest above the galactic disk the difference between them would measure eight thousand light years, though it may be substantially thinner at some points. It is possible that this eight thousand number represents the point at which the galactic barrier cuts off travel, making it a natural barrier to expansion. An empire which spanned the full eight thousand light years would be able to obstruct travel through their space, where as one that controlled only say, four thousand light years would see spaceships simply pass above or below them and thereby circumvent their territorial control. This matters because the ability to regulate travel in an area allows you to act as a middle-man in trades between the empires on either side of you, and allows you to tax cargo running through your space, enriching your empire beyond what a smaller empire that couldn’t project “vertical” force would be able to. It also allows you to obstruct fleet movements and thereby protect your smaller allies from attacks by simply blocking access to their space. That would explain why the Romulans have such a chip on their shoulder, as the Federation would be essentially boxing them in and limiting their ability to expand in other regions by not allowing them to pass through their space. And the cloaking technology would allow them to circumvent territorial blocks and pass through federation space to reach other areas, even with the full eight thousand lightyear blockade. If the federation acquired enough understanding of cloaking technology themselves they would be able to detect those ships, the Romulans would be cut off, and they would lose any leverage or negotiating power they might otherwise have had because the federation would be their only option for trade with the outside galaxy. Thus the federations vertical height may gave a lot more impact on how they interact with their neighbors than one would expect.
"Federation space" probably looks like a giant sponge. The holes in the sponge are areas that haven't been explored, they're too hazardous, or they are claimed by another species that the Federation either bypassed or couldn't get to join. In other words, "Federation space" is not contiguous. We should not assume when we hear things like "the edge of Federation space" that it is the farthest point away. It could simply be a region that the Feds haven't been to yet for whatever reason.
For any discussions about speed and distance to work in ST, you need to ignore Voyager.
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To me, those 8,000 light-years are simply the two furthest points in the Federation. Depending on the measurement, Deneb is up to 6000 light-years away from Earth and the "real" star Mintaka is almost 3000 light-years in the other direction. So 8000 ly makes sense.
Who says it has to be earth years? Many planets in the Federation may have shorter years, or maybe there is some interstellar standard year calculated very differently. Every world would therefore envision a different distance when talking about "lightyears".
"Member worlds" would also include a number of Earth colony worlds, of which many would be de facto members. Also, some mini-empires may have joined the Federation, such that one ambassador may represent a group of planets or even a group of allied worlds. So there may be many more worlds than there are species.
154 member worlds//thousand worlds and spreading out... star systems have multiple worlds 154 member worlds could = systems with dozens of planetoids and moons.
I think it meant that Humans had set foot on a thousand worlds at that point. Which seems small for 200 years of warp travel for humanity. Perhaps it was meant to show how many worlds humans live on or have research facilities on.
Assuming it's 8kly across the Galaxy from a top down perspective. We live in the Spiral, which remains disk shaped. From a top down, 8kly across makes a bit more sense.
What if the 8k light years is means the total sum of lengths of individual travel corridors between member worlds and colonies rather than distance from the furthest point of a bubble to the other furthest point on the opposite side. Like if you measured a spider web by counting individual threads between points where they intersect and added them up to get a length of virtual single long thread if that web untangled into a single straight line. This space "web" would be rather compact in galactic scale yet very dense with many intersections (worlds and colonies) which makes traveling across it several times like enterprise did in the show.
I think if you covered each era seperately explored memberships and just the general era's politiics with cannon nations like klingon's war might have alot more references with border's and romulan dmz draws clear line too
Probably not. The fastest most of the UFP ships can travel long term is at most a couple thousand times the speed of light if that. This suggests the UFP is at most 1000 light years across, _maybe_ 2,000 since they can communicate in near real time with relays and they already divy up regions of responsibility by sectors with their own starbases and ship assignments. In principle they could send a ship on a trip a year or more each way, but even the intrepid class couldn't cross more than 4000 light years and back in a year with ready access to refueling and maintenance all along the way. It's probably worth considering that in real life there are around 100 stars within 21 light years of earth, mostly in binary or trinary systems as most stars tend to be. Out to a hundred light years there are ~1,000,000 stars. Double the distance and there's eight times the volume and number of destinations, at least out to the surface of the galactic disk within which is where most stars are. That's believed to be about 8,000 light-years thick out here in our part of the galaxy though if you're going that far you'd start to hit the gaps between the spiral arms that are much less dense with stars and also a few thousand light years wide.
Starships would need speeds equivalent to warp 20-30 on the old warp scale to even begin to think of a galaxy spanning empire. Stargates like the Iconians had would be needed for a true galactic empire, or hyperdrives that allowed travel over 100k ly in a day or two.
@@russellharrell2747 Agreed though 100,000 ly/day is extravagant. Irl England and the Dutch maintained colonies that were a few years distant each way. That works well enough as long as nobody else can go faster. So 50,000-100,000 times the SoL anyway.
@@johnassal5838 I imagine a Galactic Empire government would be a total nightmare of bureaucracy. I am familiar with the Dune, Issac Asimov Robots/Empire/Foundation, Warhammer 40K, universes.
realistically they have the majority of the alpha quadrants under their control and by the 31st century the entire alpha and most of the beta quadrants
32 Ambassadors on the Enterprise. I remember nothing to indicate that no other ships carried parties of Ambassadors from other parts of the Federation.
I feel like despite the fact that it doesn't make much sense to measure it that way, square light years (presumably from a "top down" view of the galaxy) is the only thing that works. That could put it at roughly 150 or so light years "long" by 50 or so "wide", with the "vertical" depth being ambiguous. Travel from DS9 (supposedly on the frontier of the federation) to earth takes only a few days, and even for the NX01 Qo'nos was a short journey away. Of course with 3d territory there are all sorts of ways to make that work. Borders can fold over and under one another, empires need not be a coherent shape, nor their capitals be at their center. Many countries have capitals directly on their borders or close to. It's also possible that the main body of the federation is fairly small, but there are far flung members who are officially part of the federation but so far away they are functionally independent. Think the many small island nations in the british commonwealth. Anyway the reason the federation CANT be a blob 8KLY across is that the Valiant was supposed to circumnavigate the federation as part of red squad's training before graduation. A defiant class is a fairly slow ship, maxing out at warp 8 or 9 I believe, probably closer to warp 6 sustainable. In one ep they got warp 9.5 out of it but only after extensive modifications, and if I recall it was quite risky. Certainly not normal operation. But even for an intrepid class, fastest ship in the fleet before the sovereign, a roughly spherical area of space 8KLY in diameter would take a quarter of a century to circumnavigate. For a defiant probably 30-35. Those cadets would be getting back in their late 40s or early 50s to graduate and become ensigns or lieutenants. Clearly that doesn't work, but equally as clearly the extent of the federations borders was never very well defined.
In the prime time line Kirk's ship visited the edge of the galactic core at least once and the edge of the galaxy at least twice withing five years. I've somehow missed where the Kelvin time line has better propusion systems.
The Federation is a multi species organization, however most of their main rivals are not(or if they are, we really don't hear about their other members). The Klingons, Romulans and Cardasians all control enough space to field fleets that seem to put them on roughly equal footing with the Federation in terms of power. And those are just the main players in the shows. I roughly recall one TNG episode where the ship's computer is hijacked and sends them toward another race. Picard is quite worried about this, not bc of breaking Fed. law, but because the last war with them was brutal and fought to a stalemate. There is also the Shelliac(however it is spelled) Corporate who seem powerful enough to require a treaty of such complexity that understanding it is damn near impossible. Picard solves the problem by requiring outside arbitration, from a list of potential species(each who by definition could not be Federation or Shelliac members) who are currently in their hibernation cycle, so it stands to reason that there are potentially dozens of species both the Federation and the Shelliac view as impartial/fair enough to decide the outcome(which by extension would likely mean there are a vast number more that both sides could not agree on).
it's an interesting question to consider the rights of non-warp capable or otherwise unaware planets to suddenly become aware that you are surrounded on all sides and with no claim the resources of the surrounding region of space unless they joined the Federation.
@@pablohammerly448 I Thank You, I shouldn't be texting, at 2 or 3 in the morning, I will need to show this to my Mexican, Cuban, and Costa Rican friends, and not my Vice President of the Japanese company I work for.
I think it's just a "general" crosssection of where the federation has influence. It doesn't incorporate non-member planets that happen to be located "in" the federation for instance. Nor all the planets with sentient life that has not invented warpdrive technology yet, eventhough they may technically be "in" federation space too. The Romulans, Klingons etc might see a simpler "federation border", while the federation itself might only view memberworlds and other planets etc with resources, as "theirs" and the rest as others.
The federation can be so big thanks to his political system, a free association of previously indipendent worlds, so the superstructure don't need a strong control the territory
The federation is a UN analogue, but Roddenberry didn't like just United Planets. So he added Federation in there. Later trek (DS9) crested the executive president position (originally the Federation Council was the executive branch and required unanimity in its decisions, similar to the UN Security Council).
Being that big explains why there are not ships in the sector a lot of the time as clearly they are very far away and returning to space dock in 001 is unlikely. Hence generational family ships.
I think the idea of inconsistent growth rates makes sense. There could have been a relatively peaceful era of expansion in the early-mid 24th century that eventually led to the wars in the 2340s/2350s. Cardassians being the biggest, but also Tholians, Tzenkethi, Talarians...
The Klingon and Romulan empires are huge as well. There must be a lot of other species within their borders. I wonder what the political situation is there and why it was never mentioned in canon.
perhaps they like to measure largest size by the two planets in the federation with the furthest distance between each other, and not defined by any straight line of sight?
3D map of Federation space WHEN???!!!
My question exactly. I expected to see it on this video, but NOOOOOO! Clickbait title.
If I may, Alpha centauri was a founding member originally. The Andorians were an afterthought. The other ORIGINAL TOS founders were Earth, 40 Eridani, 61 Cygni, and epsilon Indii
@@user-nf9xc7ww7m which is meaningless, as none of those stars are the same episode per episode.
Impossible 😂
They have known outposts through the alpha, beta and gama quadrant's. And allies reaching across universes and dimensions 😂🤦♂️ The Federation is OP, thats why the borg assimilation tactic was so scary, you cant reason with it. It dosent care about your words 😂 and thats usually how humans win, reason and empathy
maybe he measures galaxy like a tv across diagnialy
A few thoughts.
Voyager's 70kly journey is alluded to requiring 70 years to complete, suggesting the best Federation ships have a maximum sustainable speed of about 1000c, whatever their dash speed might be.
DS9 suggests that certain destinations within the Federation take six months or so to travel between, when Sisko and Kassidy are talking about her brother's baseball games.
Ergo the major axis of the Federation can be supposed to be about 500 light years. The minor axes are probably much smaller, perhaps as small as 100 light years based on the distances to DS9 and the various Neutral Zones, so the total area of the Federation is probably in the neighborhood of 5 million cubic light years. Average galactic density is 0.4 stars per cubic light year so this would give the Federation territorial claim over some two million systems, only a tiny fraction of which could possibly have been actually visited by crewed ships over the Federation's two-hundred-year lifespan.
If one-tenth of those systems have habitable planets, and one-tenth of those habitable planets have life, and one-tenth of those have intelligent life, and one-tenth of *those* are warp-capable, this suggests two hundred warp-capable species in Federation territory, which is a surprisingly close estimate to the 154 member species quoted in TNG.
In order for the 8000ly figure to make any sense we'd have to postulate "hyperspace lanes" allowing faster-than-normal transit between fixed locations, or acceleration gates that could fling ships at faster-than-normal speeds between specific destinations, neither of which are attested to anywhere in the lore.
I was just thinking about Kassidy’s comments about how long it’d take to reach Pike City! Although of course that’s her older ship’s travel time, not necessarily a high warp travel time, but otherwise your thoughts pretty much exactly match mine. So much exploration and discovery is going to be happening within Federation “borders” due to the density of stars, not to mention they seem to send ships off in one direction at a time outside of their borders (thus a “spiky ball” of explored space rather than a smooth sphere, possibly even a rather lumpy spiky ball if they don’t properly balance their arbitrary directions).
Additionally there’s also the wrinkle of various blobs of 3D space in and around Federation space could make the topology a lot more complex. Voyager shows this in the astrometrics lab once or twice about local powers, where one extends underneath the other and then comes up around it on the other side. So Kassidy’s travel time could also involve plotting a complex course through friendly space to avoid isolationist civilisations who requested first contact was last contact, or outright hostile ones who challenge Federation shipping lanes.
@@kaitlyn__L Yeah that's all true. Of course if Kassidy's ship is slower than the 1000c benchmark that implies the Federation is even smaller than our estimates, since a slower ship wouldn't be able to cover even 500ly in six months.
I'm sure the actual shape is pretty amorphous, but the five million cubic light years really sounds about right to me, and it fits the on-screen evidence pretty well all around.
Of course, it's somewhat worth considering what "Federation space" means anyway. Space is mostly empty -- see the 0.4 stars per cubic light year figure -- so "claiming" a system doesn't even really mean you can "claim" the space in between stars.
And what does it mean to "claim" a system anyway? That's a question that's never satisfactorily answered.
Well done!
@@jacksagephoenix claiming a system is when you put military resources into defending it against others who would use its resources for their own purpose. As you say, not much of a reason to do that for purely empty space. Except perhaps for securing trade routes. So it’s really just a “sponge” of spheres-of-influence surrounding a planetary body (or perhaps an entire solar system); with the “air bubbles” of space being no man’s land? I’ve seen some fascinating discussions about this when it comes to The Expanse - who can claim space and why? I’ve seen anything from radii from a celestial body to claiming specific travel lanes to/from a destination rather than outright space. Especially with the planets moving relative to each other all the time.
I’ve said it a thousand times and I’ll say it a million more, Star Trek federation would be a great docuseries, a look into the federation as a whole and how it works, see the worlds, see the federation in all its glory.
Incorrect, but I hope I'm wrong.
@@anthwest1883 What do you mean incorrect? He wasn't asking for your fucking opinion of what you think. People can be so fucking shot online its ludicrous. That would make an AWESOME Docu series but they won't ever do that for several reasons but mainly because they won't lock themselves into any type of cannon that is so concrete and a docu series would be considered FACTS within the star trek universe.
Ignore the first half of the comment i wrote to the buffoon who responded to your comment but the second part applies to you, ya know the not rude and insulting part that's just about cannon LOL. I would LOVE such a series.
The Federation is an idealised society… which means they have to keep it vague. The second they start defining the socia economics someone will take offence.
@@mattwho81 yeah for sure
154 members doesn't mean 154 worlds, each world colonized a few planets nearby that didn't have sentient life on them. The UN analogy is very accurate, each member would have 1- perhaps up to a dozen colony worlds that are under their 'banner'. This would be especially true for the founding members of the Federation that had 'proto-empires' that were merged into the original Federation border. The show Enterprise suggests Earth had at least Alpha Centauri, and Vulcan, Andor and Tellar each had many colonies each before the founding of the Federation.
Accurate clarification 👍
Yes, this is exactly the sort of thing Iv often thought about.
@Jim Humphries: Federation border*
@@themercer4972 I've*
I guess Luna and Mars don’t count as full members.
The true size of the Federation? It is 8 1/2 " x 11"
...exactly the size of a page of television script.
8000 light years could be the circumference, just drawing a line on a 2d version of a starchart and measuring how long it is.
I always took the "8,000 light years across" comment to have been a mistake on the part of the filmmakers or script writers and I'd agree that a circumference of 8,000 ly is more likely. It would make sense as well as that would give the Federation a rough average diameter of around 2,550 ly. The only problem though is that even at 2,550 ly in diameter it would take a full year and a half to cross Federation space at Warp 9 which means that a lot of the movements of the Enterprise-D in TNG don't make any sense.
I don’t think most colonies don’t have federation council status until they reach a certain size. Take for example Jurrae IV, the colony the Borg wiped out right before Best of Both Worlds. The crater the cube left appears to be the size of a town, probably with a bunch of individual houses on the outskirts or scattered around the planet. I think that’s a pretty standard federation colony. A few thousand people mostly living on one continent all by themselves. They’re federation citizens and get to vote for President or whatever, but Jurrae IV never had a seat on the council
Yeah, all those colonies would be under “Earth” on the council I’m pretty sure, plus Mars, Jupiter’s moons, etc. Hence each of the ~150 “member worlds” could actually have dozens or hundreds of planets under their control. Bajor seems to have many colonies on its moons in the system too for example. In Trek it seems like “world” is just the term for that division of political power, instead of “nation” or “state” or something else.
Technically and originally, the federation council is the analogue to the UN Security Council (the galactic executive branch).
The federation assembly would be the analogue of the UN General assembly and have one ambassador per member planet.planets.
And for colonies below a certain level, they would fall under the Trusteeship Council and not under a specific planet's govt.
So all the aliens got a butt they can sit on and regular human sized chairs what they can't come up with nothing original hell they might be blobs of gelatin and they can't sit
Half the members of the Federation "council" where in Starfleet uniforms. What is this? Starfleet runs colonialism? Oh wait but that's OK. Starfleet is not a "military".
@@kaitlyn__L There is definitely some loose usage on world/planet, since Andoria/Andor is well established as a moon of a gas giant.
The best explanation I've heard for the Federation's inconsistent size is that the UFP is NOT one continquous area, as with the US, but is instead broken up into pockets, small regions of Fed territory, with empty space between them.
This makes sense when you consider how the federation expand.
This is obvious, personally at least. 8 years across isn't all that much, when ships are built to last long over distances.
It's also important to remember humans aren't automatically the ones coming those distances. I think looking at the EU and see how the Eurozone spans to a few hundred kilometers off the austrailian coast thanks to french overseas territories.
The Insurrection movie, for what any of the movie's continuity writing is worth, says that the Federation does claim vast swaths of empty space between systems likely to prevent someone from just setting up a military base but also to expand its economic hegemony.
@@Taospark Even still it'd be full of holes where the Federation claims incredibly limited rights at best because of their stance on not contacting cultures until they reach for the stars themselves.
32 ambassadors were on the Enterprise, but some may have already been on Babel.
Each member might consist of many worlds, which they're finding all the time.
8,000 light years might be the furthest extents of the Federation from one extreme end to the other. I would imagine it's a big sphere centered on Earth.
why 'centered on earth' tho?
@@Handles_Are_Bad.Phuk-them-off Duhh, because, HUMAAN!
@@Handles_Are_Bad.Phuk-them-off Why wouldn't it be? Earth is the capital,headquarters of Starfleet,has the academy etc.
Well, if there's a bright center to the universe, you're on the planet that it's farthest from.
I understood the situation to be that several other starships were picking up lots of other ambassadors too.
I still choke laughing that in the first episode of star trek enterprise Kronos the Klingon homeworld was less than one week's travel in a warp 4-star ship...
A few members of the Federation may be groups of planets or systems rather than single planets. Some of the species pre-Federation had their own alliances and territories that existed under one government. We also have the TOS First Federation from The Corbomite Maneuver in some canons have joined the Federation or have alliances and consider themselves part of The Federation but govern themselves independently. Of course there is at least one story that The First Federation is waiting for the UFP to catch up before it joins.
Yeah, I am thinking the First Federation is NOT in the Federation because they would have been pretty impactful from a military perspective against the Borg, Dominion, and other Federation threats.
in addition to open space and pre-warp planetary systems Federation space would likely have a number of contact-level planetary systems that for whatever reason have not decided to join the Federation. A number of these might have treaties making them "Protectorates" of the Federation, independent but under Federation protection in regards to trade with treaties to allow for visitation and commerce with Federation worlds. A number of the Orion colonies would likely be such protectorates as would some of the worlds visited by TOS and NG Enterprise
Excellent point. There are presumably thousands of "Federation-aligned worlds" and protectorates.
@@OrangeRiver I image it's rather like the Client-State system used by the Imperium in the Traveller universe with the Federation providing protection for systems and space lanes in return for various trade and legal concessions such as providing Federation consul offices and embassies in return; local politics and laws would still be in effect but the local Federation envoy would have an advisory role with the government. Worlds that have particularly harsh laws and governments or suffer from xenophobia might have travel advisories for Federation travellers and merchants like the Amber Zones in the Traveller universe (case in point that aweful STNG episode where Picard had to violate the Prime Directive to protect Will Weaton from being killed by the local fuzz for stomping on flowers; such a planet would likely be thereafter classified 'go at your risk').
Yea, I’ve always imagined the interior of Federation space to look like a sponge, with tons of single-system isolationist species who wanted no further contact after our protagonists met them.
Really good video! although the real answer is just that writers don’t feel like doing the math while writing the script, I also like to think that the discrepancy between travel times has to do with warp factors. Warp 9 is exponentially faster than even warp 8 and is typically only used in emergencies if the ship is even capable so there’s not a consistent speed for the ships
You’ve mentioned Romans in the video. They actually never said “millions of sestertii/denarii etc” when speaking about currency; they just said 3 thousand, meaning 3,000,000. So maybe when Picard talks about 8,000 LY, he actually means something bigger (several orders of magnitude), just like the Romans. I am Russian, and many Russians dealing with a thousand rubles name it just “one ruble”, omitting the thousand. So perhaps something like this exists in Trekverse. Thanks for the video!
I think one thing not discussed here, is that there is on the order of magnitudes, differences in the speed of ships from the original series to the later ones. The Enterprise E can go 21,000 times the speed of light, so 8000 light years is not that far. Plus you do not have an empire with all your ships at the home world. Fleets would be set up across the Federation to defend sectors. While it will take you time to get a backup fleet there, it will also take the same time for an enemy to invade your space as well.
When? Few ships, supposedly, in that era, can exceed 6000 times lightspeed.
People tend to forget how big space actually is. Especially in Star Trek. The shows and films only depict highlights of the crew's adventures. It diesn't cover the day-to-day humdrum of a typical workday on a Starfleet vessel. Each episode of Trek covers an important event of note to the narrative, but one episode in a sense of time might take place weeks or even months after the previous episode.
To put this into some perspective; it can take eleven days at warp 9 to travel from Earth to Vulcan. That's just short of two weeks. This is an issue I think Enterprise handled better than most. As it tended to regard distances more heavily than other series, since the writers had to emphasize that this was a much older and slower vessel than what we were used to seeing.
When dealing with galaxies shaped as ours is, I generally take any such measurement of territory to be according to a top-down view. In this context, the 8000 ly number makes sense, especially given our galaxy's 1000 ly thickness (10,000 at the central bulge).
We really need a more box-shaped galaxy for easier stacking.
Not too forget that not all system might contain habitable planets, or even live, Or most live is just some mono cellular lifeforms.
I once heard someone say (in regards to 2d cartography) that "across" can go 'across' several axis.... So 8,000ly across can mean the maximum distance between coreward and rimward + maximum distance spinward and counter-spinward + the maximum distance between galactic-north and galactic-south...
Ooh, that's a neat idea. Makes sense.
Keep in mind Picard doesn't say its 8,000 light years wide. He says the number of Federation planets is "over 150...spread across 8,000 light years". 'Spread' can mean any number of things and not necessarily adjacent to each other. Just as the 50 United States of America includes the land masses of Alaska and Hawaii but not the vast stretches of Canada and the Pacific Ocean between them and the continental other 48. Any member planet likely controls the cubical volume of space immediately surrounding their system. Think our system's bounderies of the Oort Cloud (2 to 4 light years across or 8 to 64 cubical L/Y). Of various sizes depending on the size of each star system, collectively they could add up to 8,000 NONcontiguous light years scattered within a 3D volume of space of any diameter but probably only hundreds of light years across in any direction. Lastly, by 'light years'.....who's years? Its one thing to have Earth be a location of government and institutions but highly unlikely its solar revolutionary time duration is to be the universal unit for interstellar distance measurements above, and used by, all other planets and their inhabitants own measuring units. Some standardized 'year', calculated by some metric other than planetary solar revolution, is more likely. Which means 8,000 light years in Star Trek context could be anything.
I like the idea of the territory not been a continuous thing occupying all space between member worlds but something more like every planet (or star system) is sort of an island and some space arround it, lets say one light year, is considered its space and anything that is more than one light year away from any planet is considered "international" space. Sort of the territorial waters and international waters we have in the real world.
Excellent analogy.
@@williamj.stilianessis1851 Thanks. I think it works better with the possibility that there is pre-warp civilizations that will reach warp and reclaim some space for themselves and not being inside the UFP or any other multi-system power they may not like much. I think it's a better system than just "all this chunk of space is mine" and relationships between different powers could be more dynamic even from the story telling point of view.
Just awesome, u mention Alpha Centauri. U are the first person that I remember to state so. As I remember Centauri was a colony of Earth, at some point it got it’s independent. I know this because I have the Star Trek: Star Fleet Technical Manual from 1976, my most prize possessions.
Not sure if you have the same book as me, but Alpha Centuari was a planet in its own right with their own sapient species. They were a founding member of the Federation (at least originally).
@@user-nf9xc7ww7m My book Star Trek, Starfleet Technical Manual: 1st Edition Stardate 7511.01. I bought this book on 02/27/1976 & finished reading 02/27/1976.
As I remember Alpha Centauri Concordium of Planets, human. At the time of the founding of UFP, there were only four members.
United Nations Planet Earth-Sol System, Planetary Confederation of Eridain (Vulcan), United Planets of 61 Cygni (Tellar) & Star Empire of Epsilon Inii (Andorian).
I very vaguely remember that #1 (Una), may have been born or rise on one of Alpha’s star system. Very nice talking to u, stay well & safe!!!
Great video. Loved the way you walked through things and your voice is well-suited to these types of videos.
actually, we can describe our galaxy as being just a diameter across using only one dimension it is now recently accepted that our galaxy is about 150, 000 light-years across. yes technically we are dealing with a volume but the size of the ratio of the galaxy's diameter to its thickness is so large the diameter usually the only measurement considering when talking about distances and size in the galaxy. so it would be reasonable for the federation to speak only of the distance across the federation
I thought the accepted value was ~100kLY. Is the extra 50% size from a recent estimate? (Also the galactic disc is ~1kLY thick; so not completely irrelevant for their actual navigation between close neighbours, but still when discussing the diameter we can consider it as basically flat. Especially since the extra length in journey time from pythagorean geometry is pretty minor so long as you pointed directly at the destination from the start.)
Simple solution: Picard likes to brag. No 8,000 ly straight line. Below someone suggests and ellipsoid 500 ly x 100 ly. x 100 ly. This feels right even though in many plots even that distance seems outside of events (kind of like the transporter that must exist in the world of Game of Thrones). A half year to cover the major axis (assuming max ship speed of 1000c) or a year if 500 c (Warp 8). This would be approximately 35,000 solar masses (0.059 solar masses/parsec3).
Some of the additional un-named Federation members could be independent autonomous former colonies of other Federation races. This would increase the Federation membership worlds without increasing the number of races.
Another comment for the TH-cam Algorithm gods
Also replying to myself for engagement
Hahaha I appreciate it 👍
idk it might be better to leave that more ambiguous , since a they seem to be extremely vigilant and strict when it comes to any slight against them
Just recently found your page when I saw the video Klingon anatomy is weird. Sir you are the David Attenborough of Star Trek . It’s a pleasure listening to your videos and being entertained and informed.
You forget that Cestus III is 3 weeks travel from DS-9
the roma empire could take month to be crossed, even by the legion (who moves on foot way faster than people walking around)
Awesome video and awesome info! Thank you! Look forward to more videos!
Nice work. Thank you for making this.
If anyone is interested, Google star trek mal's maps. He has done a really good job of mapping the area. Many sector maps that uses real stars.
so in First Contact they are patrolling the neutral zone and then suddenly they make the trip to Earth in presumably a few moments, but in actuality it would have taken them a couple of years. I think the battle would have been over by then.
The real answer to this age old question is. That the writers never sat down with some one who actually understood the vast distances of deep space. So they just grabbed a random number that sounded cool and threw it in the script. I don't think any of the writers ever really grasped the thought multiple dimensional movement in space. Take space combat as an example it wasn't until wraith of khan we saw the Enterprise use vertical movement in combat when it rose up through the nebula gas behind the Reliant. Granted before that the series had been limited by budget constraints. But it wasn't until six or seven years later during TNG's Klingon Civil War story that we actually saw ships fight in a three dimensional way. Before that it was all horizontal movement based on a solar systems elliptical plan. But the Klingons were actually dog fighting in ships like they were old WW2 fighter planes. 8000 light years is vast but small in relative size at the same time. I mean seriously think about it, Our solar system is considered a light year in diameter. It takes the light from our sun to travel one year in all directions to the farthest ends of the Oort cloud. So does that mean the Federation consists of 8000 solar systems. Or is it just made up of the member worlds and their colonies and the protectorates and all the empty space between those worlds. Just sitting like a lumpy blob of mashed potatoes inside the galaxy.
My guess for the 8k ly “across” stat is that it represents a lower bound estimate for the total distance you’d have to travel to visit every Federation member world.
The size and population of the federation (or any galactic civilization) was a topic I went on a binge about after the destruction of Vulcan in that film, I shall not name. It was a tragic event, but should not have been nearly the death of the Vulcan race. Logically for the survival of the species, they or any race, would spread out to colonize other worlds.
There can be lots of debate over many factors, but if we limit the colonies to uninhabited worlds that are close enough to home environment, and we see in universe generally an abundance of "class M" planets, then we can start to make some educated guesses. The lowest value being an average of 1 colony established per year. Say over a 100 year time span. This means a minimum of 100 sizable colony worlds, excluding small outposts and mining or science stations. This means the early colonies have had nearly a century of growth and development. Now if we take Vulcan as an example, population numbers may still be low, as they dont seem to have large families. But according to something I recall reading, Vulcan had warp drive fore several centuries not just one, before meeting the Earthers.
Having said all that, consider a race like Humans and how fast we have expanded here on Earth.
Some of the Federation member races could and should have expanded to inhabit dozens of worlds if not 100s.
The often encountered warp capable alien race that only lives on its home planet should be an oddity rather than the norm.
An old race, that is good at terraforming or building space habitats could simply inhabit ALL the stars near its home system including the inhospitable ones. Even a supernova that came as a surprise is unlikely to destroy all their colonies.
sorry for being a long post
have a nice day
Good presentation, although I'm partial to a smaller Federation myself, to help make sense of the otherwise very local "Deep" Space Nine...
Certainly makes sense thematically. Would be cool to see a 3D progression of the Federation's size over the years...we need a 3D galaxy map! I would make it myself but I don't know how to upload something like that to the Internet.
I tend to agree, if you use the original series references only, as the next generation references contradicts the original series.
We know from First Contact that the UFP comprised about 150 members. Earth during TOS had around thousand colonies and is among the youngest memeber in the Federation. But if we assume Earth was avarage member the Federation would have around 150 capitals with 150 000 colonies.
Everything suggests that Earth explore a lot more than most other planets.
Maybe 8000 light years across was a diagonal measurement of its two furthest points. Like a TV screen lol
I think it's safe to say that the writers are better at story lines than they are at physical realities of space and time. Seth Shostak, in one of his talks, gives an anecdote where he asks one of the writers about how fast warp is. Their answer was less than impressive.
As far as the 32 ambassadors I don't think every federation planet was present in person because the universe is a big place and everyone getting together in one place isn't likely to happen. It would make more sense to have multiple meeting locations that are in communication with each other. This would make it more convenient and manageable and would reduce risk of something happening and then all of a sudden all the people in power in the galaxy suddenly dies leaving a massive power vacuum.
Might take a while to clarify. Starships can travel vast distances in very short periods of time; but this quickly depletes a ship's supply of anti-matter. Intrepid class vessels Can travel 1000 l y in one minute, warp 8 is something like 800-1000 l y in an hour. The Federation could be 8000 l y across, probably meaning the distance between its two furthest outposts. Voyager's problem was they can only produce a limited supply of anti-matter and there are no Starbases in the Delta Quadrant
Trying to determine the size of the Federation is almost impossible given all the contradictory statements that have been made in canon over the years.
If we use Cestus III and Deep Space Nine (Deep Space Nine episode "Family Business") as the two most distant points of the Federation (Despite the fact that technically speaking Deep Space Nine isn't in Federation space, but rather Bajoran space), we end up with Earth being approximately 40-50% of the way inbetween.
We know that Sisko went to Earth multiple times during the seasons, so we can used that as a metric for either calling all theories about warp velocities into question, the size of the Federation or how fast subspace messages are transmitted.
According to Kasidy Yates a subspace message would take 2 weeks to reach Cestus III from Deep Space Nine. The theory is that subspace transmissions travel at warp 9.9999. This lines up pretty well with a distance between the two points of 8000 light years.
In the same episode Kasidy states that her ship, the Xhosa, would take 8 weeks to reach Cestus III. That would make the Xhosa a lot faster than the Enterprise D's maximum warp by a good margin. In fact the Xhosa would be able of warp 9.9994864 continuously for 56 days if her statement was to be true.
Since we assume that Earth is 40-50% of the distance between these two points, we get that after the events of the TNG episode "Best of Both Worlds", the Enterprise (And Sisko) were in the Sol system in year 2367, yet somehow it managed to reach Deep Space Nine in year 2369 when Sisko took command of the staion.
The Enterprise would have taken almost 2 years at maximum warp (If it could sustain it nonstop) to reach the station, making it possible for the Enterprise to be there in time (Barely). However dialog in the DS9 episode "Emissary" indicates that Sisko spent approximately 3 years at Utopia Planetia after the "Battle of Wolf 359", which means he would have left the Sol system in 2369.
Sisko would have had to leave Earth no later than April, and he would have to be transported there by an Intrepid class starship going at maximum (9.975) warp for up to 270 days to reach before years end if the Federation was 8000 light years across.
Given that the Intrepid class didn't enter service until 2370, that immidietly rules out that option.
But to use Sisko's trips between Deep Space Nine and Earth to more clearly indicate how wrong any estimates of 8000 light years would be, we only need to look the first time Sisko returns to Earth (1st episode of season 3 - "The Search"). He departs the station either at the end of 2370 or very beginning of 2371.
We know from dialog that up to at least "Last Thursday", the Sisko's were on Earth, which means it took them at most a week to get back to the station. To travel 3-4000 light years in a week, it would require an average warp speed of 9.999875 to 9.999905. At that speed it would have taken Voyager 132 to 170 days to return to Federation space from the Delta Quadrant.
However - We know that the Sisko's returned to the station onboard the Defaint. Early on the Defaint was only able to travel around warp 9 to 9.2. That means if Earth was 3-4000 light years from the station it would take 1.8 to 2.6 years one way.
We also know that the "Battle of Sector 001" occurred in 2373, which means the Defaint would at best have reached the station during that year if the Federation was that large, and it definitely wouldn't have made it all the way back to intercept the Borg.
And given that the Defaint travel to Earth (And back again) only 11 episodes later, episode 13 of season 3 would have occurred in 2377 at the earliest. This means that the entire timeline of the Dominion War would have to be revised (Originally 2373 to 2375 for the open war).
Take into account the episodes "Homefront" and "Paradis Lost" and we add another 7.6 years till the start of the Dominion War.
If we include the season 6 finale and first episode of season 7, then we would have to add another 20-22 years between Jadzia dying and Sisko returning to the station, since he travelled from Earth to Tyree by runabout (Warp 5 maximum) which would take 19 years, and a minimum of 0,78 years for an Intrepid class to bring the Sisko's to Earth.
That means at this point the Dominion War would have lasted at the very least 25 years, since the "Battle of Sector 001" occurred after open war broke out, and Worf and the Defaint would need at least 4 years to take part in that battle.
So based on this alone, it seems extremely unlikely that the Federation is 8000 light years across.
When that has been said though, we do have another statement in Deep Space Nine that would lead to a far smaller Federation, that however would be way more consistant with what we see onscreen in terms of time spent on travel.
We need to look at the episode "Valiant" for this.
It is stated that the Valiant's prewar mission was to "circumnavigate the entire Federation", and it was given 3 months to do so.
We know that the Valiant is a Defaint class starship, so under ideal conditions it maxes out at warp 9.5 (Though it can't sustain that indefinitely). If we assume that Starfleet expected the ship to travel at about 9.5 on average for 3 months, which is way higher than what was expected of the Intrepid class which is newer, it would mean the Valiant would travel 466 light years in 90 days. To simplify all of this, we assume that Federation space forms a circle, with 466 light years in circumference, that would mean the distance between Cestus III and Deep Space Nine would be reduced to 158 light years, plus lets say half a sector of Bajoran space (10 light years). That puts the total distance between the two at 168 light years.
Using this distance, it would mean the Xhosa had a maximum sustainable warp speed of 8.02.
It would also mean that the distance between Earth and Deep Space Nine would be about 84 light years. This distance would be covered by the Enterprise D in 15.2 days at maximum warp, 18.7 days for the Lakota, 20.2 by the Defaint at warp 9 and 6 days by Voyager (Rather than 270 days).
All of these are far more realistic.
Also - If the Federation was 8000 light years across, then it would take 7 days for Starfleet command to get any updates about activity along the Federation border, even by subspace. As such communication lag would prevent any fleet wide response to a border skirmish. On top of that the communication lag would likely also cause significant friction between the core worlds and the outer systems.
And captain Sisko wouldn't have been able to have a realtime conversation with his father, when Josef was on Earth and Ben on Deep Space Nine. Even at a distance of only 84 light years, realtime communication wouldn't be possible. There would be 3,7 hours of signal lag.
I love your work dudemas prime
Yeah I liked my own stuff. Take that TH-cam and your arbitrary analytics
Commenting for the algorithm. All hail the almighty algorithm, may it bless our humble creator with trending and adsense, amen.
Lol I appreciate it
Love your Trek stuff, gonna check out your other stuff eventually, but I've been on a Trek kick lately.o
You don't seem to know what an algorithm is.
@@waynemarvin5661 hush or it'll hear us!
There's multiple times on the show where character request support and the nearest federation ship is weeks away. So I really doubt you'd be able to cross it in weeks. I've always assumed it would be months at least
The first time Riker is offered a command in TNG involved a mission to an area on the edge of federation space and would require "months at high warp" just to get there.
We're not really given any details but we know the federation has launched long-range unmannered probes and has subspace telescopes so they could reasonably say they've "explored" and area 8000 light years across.
An 8000 light year estimate does make since when you think that its probably not continuous. It even makes since when you think about the number of ships Starfleet SHOULD have. Even some of the maps seem to show this. Bajor borders Cardassian space, which the Federation has been at war with for it seems like years by the time we meet them in TNG. We also know that the Klingon and Romulans are that far away in the Beta Quadrant. So its probably on the diagonal. Also, we know that between Star Trek III and the end of Voyager, starfleet some how managed to obtain (ether built or through merger) 73,000 starships, yet they cry over losing 34 and that requires rebuilding the fleet. Its a problem because they are in fact to spread out and it is becoming a problem. So 8000lys makes a bit of since.
The Federation's fleet being spread out does seem to be a plot point that pops up from time to time, even in the Kelvin timeline, so I think you're actually onto something!
It’s my opinion that the Dominion War was the first time since the Discovery Klingon War that Starfleet had to pull all of its ships together, as best it could. Smaller conflicts like the Cardassian and Tzenkethi wars seemed to be small isolated border conflicts where Starfleet could afford simply to mobilise what they had in the immediate vicinity. In fact, the dates suggest at least TNG S1 took place during the last days of the war, but the Enterprise is way too far out exploring border territories to have been any help. This is similar to what Discovery said about the Enterprise under Pike, too far away to bother asking them to come back, wouldn’t arrive in time. In fact, needing to regroup and taking years to do it could well explain away some fans’ complaints that Starfleet took too long to retaliate against the Dominion; perhaps they spent the entire run-up preparing as best they could, and held off until the last minute simply to maximise the number of ships they could bring back. After all, they restarted the Defiant project immediately, which shows they took things pretty seriously. In further service of this, there must be more than one Starfleet Academy campus world, and many Starfleet shipyards across the entire region of space. Shipping them out centrally from Earth and its neighbours would make no sense, taking years. Just transmit the plans to the shipyards, which would take a few weeks to arrive, and they can get on it locally.
lots of fun! I'd like to see more of the local group - 20-30 light years out - and how they fit into or around canon... Where are the Tellarites relative to Vulcan, etc... I remember the battle at Wolf 359 and had to look up where it was/is on a real star map... all of that would be a kick to check out.
Here's a point to consider: Stellar Kinematics. (Note: I first read this term 3 days ago) - As the various stars move around the Galactic Centre, some travelling X fast, some Z fast, some are barely moving at all; some are literally shooting almost straight out across the disc, from the centre, across the paths (sort of) of most other stars, and some do all sorts of other different things (or not). How would we define territory across these shifting regions of stars, where some planets (albeit in terms of thousands of years, perhaps longer) would begin in one territory/empire/federation/association, and end up in another? I'm trying to visualise this by imagining coarse salt dissolving in stirred water. Some of the larger grains will be the last to dissolve, and often appear to travel at a different speed compared to the smaller, inner grains, and all of this at different depths in the water. Is it even possible to define, or describe, a territory for more than a relatively brief period of overall time?
Yeah I don't sleep much
*Additional: I didn't scroll the comments to see if this had already been posited.
Good comments on this video and I'll add mine. Yes that is a good point that 150 members or 350 it isn't just that amount of planets, it' essentially the amount of polities that agreed to membership of the Federation. And each one could have one or two planets/colonies or maybe even a hundred. And also its a possibility that in that 8,000 light year border of the federation that there are protectorates, pre-warp civilizations and also polities that have been contacted or know of the federation but decided not to be a member or the federation doesn't think they should. But as I have said in other trek forums if the federation from one end ot the other is 8,000 light years, it's to damn big to govern.
It would take years to get to one end of the federation to the other. It takes weeks for communication (remember when Cassidy Yates on DS9 said to Sisko that her brother played baseball and that it will take weeks for the sub-space communication to get to her about his team). Even i f we had consul offices in or on those planets far away, they where essentially hostages to any situation that happens if even they could get communication out in the first place. Do you know how much mischief a burgeoning power in that area inside the federation or the other major powers outside the federation could do on the borders and deeper inside the federation if it takes the years to get to said incident in their borders? I'm so surprised that the Romulans who are known for doing this has never went deep into federation territory to gin up support for them and make the federation look bad. And if not that just do damage where the federation is looked at s bad and when they come to said planet they are attacked by the natives etc. etc..
There is just so much you could do to a power that is to overextended that I'll leave it at that. But one economic way that they could keep it together is to look into research building artificial stargates/wormholes that could connect one section of the federation to another and then once they transverse it the federation could use it's warp engines to get to the handful of sectors in that area that are a week or two away. They wouldn't need a bunch of these maybe 100 gates.
in discovery we know that the number of federation worlds numbered at arround 350 by the 31st century so i think that would mean at its Hight the federation was the dominant alpha quadrant power and possibly the dominant power in the beta quadrant as well depending on the state of the Klingons and if they ever nutted up and joined the UFP or not
Just found your channel. Great stuff.
Would “circumference” be what they meant with the 8k “across” statement?
Thank this is good stuff. Always curious about the Federation facts, even with a grain of salt.
The thing about space is that it's not really possible to map it in a way that most people in 2023 would think of. The UFP can have hundreds of member worlds, colonies, outposts, et cetera. But there could also be local powers or even regional powers that exist between member worlds, holes in UFP controlled space. What about independent colonies? Unsettled worlds. You'd have to use a 3D map showing the extent of UFP controlled space, but it would be more useful to just color stars based off of their allegiance rather than a bubble filled in like a traditional political map.
StarTrek writers couldnt possibly comprehend the vast scale and density of stars in our galaxy which is approx 150 million LY across (latest data indicates it may be quite a bit bigger than previous estimates).
All of startrek could take place in a 100ly cubic volume of space and there would still be millions of stars to explore, billions of planetary bodies, trillions of stellar phenomena to investigate across 3D space just in that tiny sector alone...
The Federation can have empire's worth of non member space enclosed within their volume of influence.
The voyager returned with slipstream technology. Starfleet starting to build slipstream vessels would help them control their huge territory.
Very Informative.
Very interesting thanks,! Always wonder about this subject.
I love this. Thank you!
It's an 8,000ly x 8,000ly x8000ly block of Swiss cheese. The negative space representing undeveloped species and species that just haven't joined or are hostile towards them.
I was thinking like 4000 ly in one direction 2500 to another and 1500 to the third. Summing up to 8000ly 3d cross.
Never thought about until now. United Federation of Planets can be shortened as "UFOP"
8 years old?
perfect! Untouched by the Kurtzman plague
The federation is eight thousand light years across the galactic plane, vertically. If you took the federation outpost the furthest below the plane of the galactic disk, and the outpost that was the furthest above the galactic disk the difference between them would measure eight thousand light years, though it may be substantially thinner at some points. It is possible that this eight thousand number represents the point at which the galactic barrier cuts off travel, making it a natural barrier to expansion.
An empire which spanned the full eight thousand light years would be able to obstruct travel through their space, where as one that controlled only say, four thousand light years would see spaceships simply pass above or below them and thereby circumvent their territorial control. This matters because the ability to regulate travel in an area allows you to act as a middle-man in trades between the empires on either side of you, and allows you to tax cargo running through your space, enriching your empire beyond what a smaller empire that couldn’t project “vertical” force would be able to. It also allows you to obstruct fleet movements and thereby protect your smaller allies from attacks by simply blocking access to their space.
That would explain why the Romulans have such a chip on their shoulder, as the Federation would be essentially boxing them in and limiting their ability to expand in other regions by not allowing them to pass through their space. And the cloaking technology would allow them to circumvent territorial blocks and pass through federation space to reach other areas, even with the full eight thousand lightyear blockade. If the federation acquired enough understanding of cloaking technology themselves they would be able to detect those ships, the Romulans would be cut off, and they would lose any leverage or negotiating power they might otherwise have had because the federation would be their only option for trade with the outside galaxy.
Thus the federations vertical height may gave a lot more impact on how they interact with their neighbors than one would expect.
I would love to see a video of under developed and pre-warp worlds and how far or close are those planets from earth.
"Federation space" probably looks like a giant sponge. The holes in the sponge are areas that haven't been explored, they're too hazardous, or they are claimed by another species that the Federation either bypassed or couldn't get to join. In other words, "Federation space" is not contiguous. We should not assume when we hear things like "the edge of Federation space" that it is the farthest point away. It could simply be a region that the Feds haven't been to yet for whatever reason.
For any discussions about speed and distance to work in ST, you need to ignore Voyager.
To me, those 8,000 light-years are simply the two furthest points in the Federation. Depending on the measurement, Deneb is up to 6000 light-years away from Earth and the "real" star Mintaka is almost 3000 light-years in the other direction. So 8000 ly makes sense.
Who says it has to be earth years? Many planets in the Federation may have shorter years, or maybe there is some interstellar standard year calculated very differently. Every world would therefore envision a different distance when talking about "lightyears".
"Member worlds" would also include a number of Earth colony worlds, of which many would be de facto members. Also, some mini-empires may have joined the Federation, such that one ambassador may represent a group of planets or even a group of allied worlds. So there may be many more worlds than there are species.
exactly, given how many human colony worlds we see in the shows, there is no reason that other Federation species might have many colonies as well.
154 member worlds//thousand worlds and spreading out... star systems have multiple worlds 154 member worlds could = systems with dozens of planetoids and moons.
I think it meant that Humans had set foot on a thousand worlds at that point. Which seems small for 200 years of warp travel for humanity. Perhaps it was meant to show how many worlds humans live on or have research facilities on.
I need to get that big book i love looking at maps
This is a good video 👍🏼
Maybe the answer to the 8000 light-year "problem" is that some writer just thought it sounded good.
Assuming it's 8kly across the Galaxy from a top down perspective. We live in the Spiral, which remains disk shaped. From a top down, 8kly across makes a bit more sense.
What if the 8k light years is means the total sum of lengths of individual travel corridors between member worlds and colonies rather than distance from the furthest point of a bubble to the other furthest point on the opposite side. Like if you measured a spider web by counting individual threads between points where they intersect and added them up to get a length of virtual single long thread if that web untangled into a single straight line.
This space "web" would be rather compact in galactic scale yet very dense with many intersections (worlds and colonies) which makes traveling across it several times like enterprise did in the show.
Them: size doesn't matter
Me: thats what people with small federations say
I think if you covered each era seperately explored memberships and just the general era's politiics with cannon nations like klingon's war might have alot more references with border's and romulan dmz draws clear line too
The UFP is basically, just huge. The Federation is probably about 20% into becoming a Galactic Empire? It just have to get the other 80%.
Probably not. The fastest most of the UFP ships can travel long term is at most a couple thousand times the speed of light if that. This suggests the UFP is at most 1000 light years across, _maybe_ 2,000 since they can communicate in near real time with relays and they already divy up regions of responsibility by sectors with their own starbases and ship assignments. In principle they could send a ship on a trip a year or more each way, but even the intrepid class couldn't cross more than 4000 light years and back in a year with ready access to refueling and maintenance all along the way.
It's probably worth considering that in real life there are around 100 stars within 21 light years of earth, mostly in binary or trinary systems as most stars tend to be. Out to a hundred light years there are ~1,000,000 stars. Double the distance and there's eight times the volume and number of destinations, at least out to the surface of the galactic disk within which is where most stars are. That's believed to be about 8,000 light-years thick out here in our part of the galaxy though if you're going that far you'd start to hit the gaps between the spiral arms that are much less dense with stars and also a few thousand light years wide.
Starships would need speeds equivalent to warp 20-30 on the old warp scale to even begin to think of a galaxy spanning empire. Stargates like the Iconians had would be needed for a true galactic empire, or hyperdrives that allowed travel over 100k ly in a day or two.
@@russellharrell2747 Agreed though 100,000 ly/day is extravagant. Irl England and the Dutch maintained colonies that were a few years distant each way. That works well enough as long as nobody else can go faster. So 50,000-100,000 times the SoL anyway.
@@johnassal5838 I imagine a Galactic Empire government would be a total nightmare of bureaucracy. I am familiar with the Dune, Issac Asimov Robots/Empire/Foundation, Warhammer 40K, universes.
realistically they have the majority of the alpha quadrants under their control and by the 31st century the entire alpha and most of the beta quadrants
32 Ambassadors on the Enterprise. I remember nothing to indicate that no other ships carried parties of Ambassadors from other parts of the Federation.
My apologies to Richard Vasquez, whose nearly identical comment I didn't see until after posting...
I feel like despite the fact that it doesn't make much sense to measure it that way, square light years (presumably from a "top down" view of the galaxy) is the only thing that works. That could put it at roughly 150 or so light years "long" by 50 or so "wide", with the "vertical" depth being ambiguous. Travel from DS9 (supposedly on the frontier of the federation) to earth takes only a few days, and even for the NX01 Qo'nos was a short journey away. Of course with 3d territory there are all sorts of ways to make that work. Borders can fold over and under one another, empires need not be a coherent shape, nor their capitals be at their center. Many countries have capitals directly on their borders or close to.
It's also possible that the main body of the federation is fairly small, but there are far flung members who are officially part of the federation but so far away they are functionally independent. Think the many small island nations in the british commonwealth.
Anyway the reason the federation CANT be a blob 8KLY across is that the Valiant was supposed to circumnavigate the federation as part of red squad's training before graduation. A defiant class is a fairly slow ship, maxing out at warp 8 or 9 I believe, probably closer to warp 6 sustainable. In one ep they got warp 9.5 out of it but only after extensive modifications, and if I recall it was quite risky. Certainly not normal operation. But even for an intrepid class, fastest ship in the fleet before the sovereign, a roughly spherical area of space 8KLY in diameter would take a quarter of a century to circumnavigate. For a defiant probably 30-35. Those cadets would be getting back in their late 40s or early 50s to graduate and become ensigns or lieutenants.
Clearly that doesn't work, but equally as clearly the extent of the federations borders was never very well defined.
In the prime time line Kirk's ship visited the edge of the galactic core at least once and the edge of the galaxy at least twice withing five years. I've somehow missed where the Kelvin time line has better propusion systems.
The Federation is a multi species organization, however most of their main rivals are not(or if they are, we really don't hear about their other members). The Klingons, Romulans and Cardasians all control enough space to field fleets that seem to put them on roughly equal footing with the Federation in terms of power. And those are just the main players in the shows. I roughly recall one TNG episode where the ship's computer is hijacked and sends them toward another race. Picard is quite worried about this, not bc of breaking Fed. law, but because the last war with them was brutal and fought to a stalemate. There is also the Shelliac(however it is spelled) Corporate who seem powerful enough to require a treaty of such complexity that understanding it is damn near impossible. Picard solves the problem by requiring outside arbitration, from a list of potential species(each who by definition could not be Federation or Shelliac members) who are currently in their hibernation cycle, so it stands to reason that there are potentially dozens of species both the Federation and the Shelliac view as impartial/fair enough to decide the outcome(which by extension would likely mean there are a vast number more that both sides could not agree on).
I would like to know what federation members contribute to the technology used in starfleet.
Interesting video! :)
it's an interesting question to consider the rights of non-warp capable or otherwise unaware planets to suddenly become aware that you are surrounded on all sides and with no claim the resources of the surrounding region of space unless they joined the Federation.
Other than a few parsecs from that world what use would rest of space be unless they were ready to join the Federation as a full member.
8,000 across seems to be kind of like Star Wars' Millenium Falcon "parsec" run. Distance or time.
Please go into more details, about wrap cablale races
@RONALD Jones: I think the Mexicans are definitely wrap-capable. Did you mean warp-capable? 🙄
@@pablohammerly448 I Thank You, I shouldn't be texting, at 2 or 3 in the morning, I will need to show this to my Mexican, Cuban, and Costa Rican friends, and not my Vice President of the Japanese company I work for.
It’s funny. So many of those stars are supergiants that are far to energetic for any life to orbit
The Mirror Empire had it so much simpler.
I think it's just a "general" crosssection of where the federation has influence. It doesn't incorporate non-member planets that happen to be located "in" the federation for instance. Nor all the planets with sentient life that has not invented warpdrive technology yet, eventhough they may technically be "in" federation space too.
The Romulans, Klingons etc might see a simpler "federation border", while the federation itself might only view memberworlds and other planets etc with resources, as "theirs" and the rest as others.
The federation can be so big thanks to his political system, a free association of previously indipendent worlds, so the superstructure don't need a strong control the territory
The federation is a UN analogue, but Roddenberry didn't like just United Planets. So he added Federation in there. Later trek (DS9) crested the executive president position (originally the Federation Council was the executive branch and required unanimity in its decisions, similar to the UN Security Council).
Great video
Thank you!
Being that big explains why there are not ships in the sector a lot of the time as clearly they are very far away and returning to space dock in 001 is unlikely. Hence generational family ships.
I think the idea of inconsistent growth rates makes sense. There could have been a relatively peaceful era of expansion in the early-mid 24th century that eventually led to the wars in the 2340s/2350s. Cardassians being the biggest, but also Tholians, Tzenkethi, Talarians...
Imagine a nation that one may take a life too go across
The Klingon and Romulan empires are huge as well. There must be a lot of other species within their borders. I wonder what the political situation is there and why it was never mentioned in canon.
perhaps they like to measure largest size by the two planets in the federation with the furthest distance between each other, and not defined by any straight line of sight?