TL;DR – We map every location on Earth used as a ship name in the Star Trek universe.

Mapping Star Trek –

At the end of last season of Star Trek: Lower Decks, we were introduced to nineteen new members of the California Class. Which made me wonder where they fit on a map of California and lo our Lower Decks Map was created. However, since then, I have wondered what would happen if we expanded it globally. We have had 849 episodes of Star Trek at the time of writing, so we have charted every ship, shuttle, class and transport named after an Earth location.  

See Full Sized Map

Given where Star Trek is made, it should be no surprise that most locations listed in the show are based out of North America. You see this, especially in the prevalence of Civil War and Revolutionary War battle locations throughout The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.
 
Given that Lower Decks was the original genesis of this map, it should be no surprise that modern California is the site of the most significant density of locations. Indeed, our only insert came from Los Angeles, being too dense. Often, a name would be for a large area like a state or an Indigenous People Group. In that case, I picked a location suggestive of the wider area. Also, thanks to the Danube Class, whenever the place was a river, we chose the point where it met the ocean or the next river.

I was surprised just how few locations exist outside of North America, even in Europe, which usually gets equal or greater billing in these situations. I think part of that can come from the fact that I expect many more locations to come out of the fleet seen in Star Trek Picard’s Season Three. There were so many ships in that sequence that you almost had to go through the footage frame by frame or use behind-the-scenes diagrams. But most of these new ships were named after people, not locations. It’s still important, just not for this map.

Full United Earth Map

And thus, we have the full-world map, all of United Earth in one place. I do have to that the archivists over at Memory Alpha because there is no way I could have done this alone, even if I went back and watched all 849 episodes myself. We have two new seasons of Star Trek yet to go this year, and who knows, maybe this map will be out of date by then, so I look forward to updating it.        

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Credits –

– The World Map that we used as a base several iterations ago was created by ‘San Jose’ which is shared with a Creative Commons Licence.

– The Nation detail maps America, Antarctica, Australia 1, Australia 2, Canada, Caribbean, China, Cook Islands, Europe Relief, Fiji, French Polynesia, Gilbert Islands, Germany, Greece, Hawaii, Italy, Japan, Karachi, India, London, Los Angles, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Micronesia, , New York City, New Zealand, Netherlands, Northern Mariana Islands, San Francisco, Samoa, Scandinavia, South Africa, Spain, Taiwan, Tonga, Valley of Mexico, Vietnam & Washington DC that we used for reference were shared with a Creative Commons Licence or was in the public domain. They were originally created by Aotearoa, Alexrk2, Antigoni, E Pluribus Anthony, Fut Perf, Htonl, Koyos, L. Claudel, Li Chao, Maximilian Dörrbecker, Mrflip, NASA, NgaViet, NordNordWest, Saqib Qayyum, Shadowfox, Silver Spoon, Szczureq, The Emirr, Tubs, Tyk, United States Department of the Interior, Wikimedia Commons, Yavidaxiu & Yug.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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