The treaty boundary quadrants are a reference in stellar cartography in the Federation, based around the Federation's original treaty boundary, a roughly spherical shape defined with a center point at the Central Navigation Beacon.
Description
Although divided as wedge-shaped quadrants of a spherical area of space, this reference system also has subquadrants divided on the galactic plane between the galaxy's northern and southern expanses.
The interior of the spherical treaty boundary is referred to as Quadrant Zero. The space beyond this sphere continuing out to the limits of explored space is divided into a further eight subquadrants. (ST reference: Maps)
Treaty boundary subquadrants
- Quadrant 0 (ST reference: Star Fleet Technical Manual, FASA RPG module: The Federation)
- Quadrant 1
- Quadrant 1 North
- Quadrant 1 South
- Quadrant 2
- Quadrant 2 North
- Quadrant 2 South
- Quadrant 3
- Quadrant 3 North
- Quadrant 3 South
- Quadrant 4
- Quadrant 4 North
- Quadrant 4 South
Background
The quadrants from Star Trek Maps originated years before the development of the quadrant system used in Star Trek: The Next Generation, which describes four wedges of the galaxy with Greek language designations. For the purposes of this wiki, this article is named after the treaty boundary they are based on in order to differentiate the two unrelated systems.
These systems are never referenced together in any sources that are valid to be used for article information on this wiki. As a result, no correlation can be made as to which of these subquadrants exist in the Alpha or Beta Quadrant in particular, however it is known that all subquadrant space in this map system are contained in one of those two regions.
Since the subquadrants are centered around the Central Navigation Beacon and its position on the galactic plane, while the Alpha and Beta Quadrants are bisected by a plane based on the Earth's position, the exact relation between these two systems is placed on a somewhat different set of axis points, diagonal to each other.