Stellar Cartography Room

[Bryan Moore]

Stellar Cartography is definitely SFX eye candy. However, it COULD be said that with the amount of visual and other information involved, a display and/or interface small enough to be convenient for bridge use would be too small to be as effective as the room-sized unit, or too small to be easily read and used.

I totally agree, but geezus, staff it with 20 people at a time. Not Data/Picard or Seven of Nine. :shakes fist:

[Teaos]

Maybe it is usually and they just kick them out when the senior officers go in.

[Mikey]

Not likely. Starfleet seems to have the least regard for authority, regulation, and chain of command of any real or fictional group I've seen which is supposedly based on a military-type organization. Even the Knights of Columbus use some sort of honorials.

[Bryan Moore]

Okay, I'm going to start resurrecting dead topics here =) This has been dead nearly a year, and was first posted a year ago yesterday. So I ask this:

Who is staffing Stellar Cartography? How many people do we think would staff this on the Enterprise-D. With a crew of 1000+, I'd imagine you'd want a lot of people in this department on a daily basis, especially if on a charting mission. Upon reflection of my original post, I would actually think a moderate chunk of an explorer would be given to astrometrics/stellar cart.

[Mark]

I can see the use of a lab whose sole purpose is charting space around the ship, even if it's only job is compiling star charts. A starship isn't going to visit EVERY single star system it runs across if long range sensors show there to be no life there. Starfleet's very charter says "to seek out new life and new civilizations", but your still going to need a pretty serious lab to compile and chart every system, planet, moon, and forth you come across. I think of it as one big map room.

[Teaos]

I wouldnt imagin it would need a big staff. Three shifts of five people. I always liked the idea of it looking for the warp highways.

[Mikey]

We catually saw a snapshot of the stellar cartography staff in "Lessons." Not a big staff, but I agree with Teaos about the personnel requirements; however, we certainly saw it presented as at least equivalent to other science departments in competition for sensor time, resources, personnel, etc.

[Bryan Moore]

I wouldnt imagin it would need a big staff. Three shifts of five people. I always liked the idea of it looking for the warp highways.

I'd think on a mission of exploration, you'd want at least 2% of your active crew working on Stellar Cartography/Astrometrics on any given mission, more with charting. Hell, I'd love to read a crew breakdown some time. Anyone know of such a site or chart?

[Mark]

Now that I think about it, it's really one of the most nessessary labs on an explorer ship

[Teaos]

There is no canon crew break down anywhere, anything would just be fanon stuff.

[Mark]

After all, somebody got to draw a map to get home again. And come up with Latin sounding names for everything they find, right?

[Sionnach Glic]

Voyager only had 3 people staffing it, IIRC.
I don't really see why you'd need many people.

[Teaos]

Voyager was a smaller ship with better stuff to do.

A GCS's main mission is to explore and map.

[Sionnach Glic]

True.

[kostmayer]

Was that 3d display room in Generations part of Stellar Cartography - that thing looked almost as much fun as Google Earth.

Wesley Crusher shouldn't have been on the bridge acting like an officer, he should have been in Stellar Cartography all night looking for asteroids shaped like cows.