How many starsystems in a sector/ federation?

rustiswordz

OK I was watching my ship fly through sector space today and you see the faint blobs of stars passing your ship. I then was watching Star Trek. next Gen in this case watching the Enterprise at warp and seeing all those thousands of dots which are stars streaking past and I realized the Federation/ Klingon/ Romulan empires must be made up of thousands of starsystems. With that many I can't believe all of them have been explored even within their own borders.

Just a thought.

hypl

There's still a significant portion of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants left unexplored. Known canon space is relatively small compared to the rest of the galaxy. You can google Star Trek star charts and take a look.

xiaoping88

rustiswordz wrote: »

OK I was watching my ship fly through sector space today and you see the faint blobs of stars passing your ship. I then was watching Star Trek. next Gen in this case watching the Enterprise at warp and seeing all those thousands of dots which are stars streaking past and I realized the Federation/ Klingon/ Romulan empires must be made up of thousands of starsystems. With that many I can't believe all of them have been explored even within their own borders.

Just a thought.

http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/sto.gamepedia.com/e/e6/STO_milky_way.png?version=c1fe6ad49a27c7fb9214202d6c800464

We are insignificant.

dukeskyloafer

I don't remember which book it is, but I believe Zefram Cochrane believed that they were not actually stars streaking by, but just a byproduct of the warp field distorting some background radiation or something. Its soft canon for sure, and it's fairly obvious that they were originally intended to be stars. I like the radiation explanation better, because them being stars raises too many weird implications.

thecosmic1

There are approximately 2,000 stars within 50 LYS of Earth. I would imagine most of those have been scouted by the TNG era. Of course we see millions of stars in the sky every night - and most of them are well out of the reach of most Trek ships. Those are the ones you see distorting in the warp field.

jonsills

Given the sparsity of stars in certain regions, it seems more likely that many of those streaks are in fact an artifact of the warp field itself.

In the novel Star Surgeon, James White made a case for the maximum size of a centralized interstellar empire being about fifty systems. More than that, and you have to spend more time squashing rebellions than, say, feeding the royal palace or the massive military forces necessary to maintain order.

guriphu

Guestimating from a few very rough maps, the territorial expanse of the Federation is something on the volumetric equivalent of a cube five thousand light years to a side - probably not more than twice that and not less than half that. The density of stars in Earth's neighborhood of the galaxy is between .1 and .2 stars per cubic parsec, so ten seconds with a calculator gives us a very rough estimate of somewhere between 180 million and 1.4 billion stars.

So yes, it's safe to say that most of the stars in the Federation's territorial expanse have not received an extensive up-close visit from a starship.

lilchibiclari

On the other hand, the Federation is a federal state rather than a centralized one--each member planet/system manages its own internal affairs as long as it obeys Federation law and pays its taxes (sending manpower and resources if not money). This allows it to tolerate being more spread-out than more centralized governments such as the Romulan Star Empire or the Cardassian Union.

AFAIK, the streaks that we see while at warp are bits of space junk that we are zipping past--you know, all that dust and meteroids and stuff that the Main Deflector exists to shield us from, that would slam into us like relativistic bullets otherwise.

As for the size of sectors, Memory Alpha says that a sector is approximately a cube twenty light years on an edge (just barely big enough to keep Earth, Vulcan, and Andoria all in one sector). Sectors in STO seem to be about ten light years on an edge.

originalspock

jonsills wrote: »

Given the sparsity of stars in certain regions, it seems more likely that many of those streaks are in fact an artifact of the warp field itself.

In the novel Star Surgeon, James White made a case for the maximum size of a centralized interstellar empire being about fifty systems. More than that, and you have to spend more time squashing rebellions than, say, feeding the royal palace or the massive military forces necessary to maintain order.

Or you could look at it as a point to point representation of an omnidirectional effect due to the stars positions changing a point of view due to the bending of space, it would make sense that all the visible stars look like a compressed light show.

warmaker001b

xiaoping88 wrote: »

http://hydra-media.cursecdn.com/sto.gamepedia.com/e/e6/STO_milky_way.png?version=c1fe6ad49a27c7fb9214202d6c800464

We are insignificant.

Alpha & Beta quadrant powers are insects compared to the Borg & Dominion. The only issue is distance and being able to bring that power to bear over such a long distance. The Dominion tried, and only got a sliver of its power through for the war. Yet that sliver of power was enough to bring the combined power of all the major factions of the area to their knees.

mirrorchaos

rustiswordz wrote: »

OK I was watching my ship fly through sector space today and you see the faint blobs of stars passing your ship. I then was watching Star Trek. next Gen in this case watching the Enterprise at warp and seeing all those thousands of dots which are stars streaking past and I realized the Federation/ Klingon/ Romulan empires must be made up of thousands of starsystems. With that many I can't believe all of them have been explored even within their own borders.

Just a thought.

two references come to mind, one from picard another from archer. the picard one was along the lines of over 150 members and their worlds spread over some light years, the second one was with archer about 1 in every 43,000 planets containing life.

so most of these planets are just floating unwanted rocks or gas giants in space, some systems may have no planets at all and so on.. so just because an empires borders are huge doesnt mean that over half the star systems within the empire are even habitable.