The Nekrit expanse is a natural divide of nebulae and dust clouds as well as vast levels of interference that runs through the Delta Quadrant. Voyager had to pass through it over a month long voyage and once it did, things became a lot more difficult for the intrepid Starfleet ship.
00:00 Introduction
00:41 What is the Nekrit Expanse?
03:12 North of the Expanse
05:51 South of the Expanse
10:12 What does this tell us?
12:02 Outro
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This Video is for critical purposes with commentary.
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just wondering if you have/will make a video about the galactic center?
It makes perfect sense to me that the Borg are relative newcomers. They would have likely hit a point after some form of technological singularity when they began to advance exponentially, so they hit a point when advancing was no longer linear. So yeah. Sounds about right to me that they were noobs a millennium ago.
Also, I thought the communication network Voyager found was also discovered, and not created, by the Hirogen? I could be wrong though, I'm not as big into Voyager as I am DS9 or TNG.
So the grabby aliens were winning till they shot themselves in the foot.
A month of travel is a few hundred light-years at the most for Voyager.
Borg aren’t new – Guinan said they had been around for thousands of centuries & 7 said the Borgs memories from 700 yrs ago was fragmentary – that suggests damage from war. I took 7’s comment to mean that every 1000 yrs or so the borg get their ass handed to them by someone more powerful
I love how you use so much STO footage in your videos to illustrate your points, it really goes to show how amazing that game actually is 🥰
Great video as always. One tiny error, you wrote the ancient humanoids were around 4,500,000 years ago, that's 4.5 million. You should have put 4,500,000,000, which is 4.5 billion.
Please make a video lore of the Presidio Class Battlecruiser and the other two science and operations variants!
Did the Hirogen create the communication grid? I may be misremembering, but I was under the impression that they were just using it.
I think youre missing a Zero on the Preservers estimated time line? Billions not millions
i would love a video where you talk about the territory and the history of the Dominion. Where were the beginnings, how many years have they been around, location in the Gamma Quadrant.
So many concepts introuduced in the St milky way I wish the would just expand more.
It's like they purposely left this huge plot device with great pitential and never reused it again.
The nekrit expanse was the borderwall separating richville from the khazon ghetto.
11:06 That depiction fits pretty well with the theory that "the Founders" of the Gamma Quadrant are the remnants of the species that originally seeded humanoid life across the galaxy.
In my head they'd start from somewhere in the Gamma Quadrant and circle around the galaxy counter-clockwise, seeding every promising planet they find. Not in a rush, careful and coordinated (and possibly even on sub-light ships) it took them ages to come full circle. So areas like the Gamma and Alpha Quadrants would on average have the oldest ancient civilizations, followed by Beta and then Delta, with the youngest somewhere around the Delta/Gamma border. That lines up decently well with what we see, especially considering that there's still a large degree of randomness in that and we only know of very few ancient species, many either regressed or extinct.
Since they took so long, meticulously seeding the entire galaxy, they would come back to their former homeworld overrun by the first stellar empires that arose in the Gamma Quadrant. While billions of years ahead of the newcomers in scientific progress, they were pacifists that couldn't comprehend how someone would want to hurt others… So they insisted on trying to negotiate, while chipped away at, one "minor setback" or "missed opportunity" at a time – until there wasn't much left.
The last survivors, of both the group that stayed and the one that set out across the galaxy, would then come up with a last resort: With their vast genetic and biochemical knowledge, they would modify themselves enough to survive on an otherwise uninhabitable planet, a rock so insignificant and uninteresting, no one would think to ever claim for themselves. But the necessary adaptations would be so extreme, they had to basically destabilize their entire bodies to adapt to the constantly shifting conditions – and with time (and nothing much to do) they learned to use this shapeshifting ability to hibernate, linked together as one big mass, every mind preserved even if they were to suffer damage.
There they stewed in their own thoughts for ages, festering with xenophobia and a sense of entitlement, due to them effectively being the founders of every humanoid civilization… Until finally someone did visit the planet. While vulnerable, their shapeshifting allowed them to sneak individuals of theirs off-planet (their own tech long decayed by now), trying to "bring order" to the civilization of these "inexperienced children" by manipulating them. But they weren't as experienced yet, and soon discovered – leading into the conflict that would eventually lead them to conquer most of the Delta Quadrant.
By the way, @Certifiably Ingame, when you wonder what the Nekrit expanse most likely is: The space between the arms of the milky way. That's also a possible reason why the more advanced races are not in the outer rim where Voyager started their journey: That arm of the milky way is the same arm as that of the Iconians, as you showed correctly – so no other advanced race dared to go through the Icodian area to get to some people like the Kazon.
There are a couple of real life explanation to this.
First is simply that the star systems and the planets formed earlier are closer to the center of the Galaxy, hence life in this sector of the Galaxy has a chance to be much older.
There's also something of an habitable zone in the Galaxy, much like in solar systems. Too close and you get bombarded with radiations but too far and you'll lack the building blocks for life and for building an advanced civilization.
Earth enjoy both, we're in the oldest part of the habitable zone of our Galaxy, we really have a shot at becoming the Federation or… It's mirror counterpart that gets toppled.
Rick do an episode on the "Think Tank" from Voyager, more importantly how they also cured the verdean feige 🤨
One of the major faults in Trek lore is The Federation never meeting a truly advanced culture that's friendly like they are. Why is everyone in space a fool or a jerk?
I pose a new question, why didn't voyager just go outside the galactic plane in order to chart a more less cluttered course back to the alpha quadrant?
If your map of the Borg transwarp network is accurate, it would explain why they never seem to have encountered the Dominion.
I loved this video! It reminded me of a non-canon story I read which asserted that the Hirogen were one of the first victims of the Borg. This explained their nomadic lifestyle, their obsession with hunting and being hunted, their technology and their affinity for the relay station network. Maybe even their interest in Wolf 359 in The Killing Game.
I don't think I've really thought about how areas of the Delta Quadrant compare overall to the rest of the Trek universe. This edge of the Delta Quadrant kinda makes me think of the "backwater" outer rim of the Star Wars galaxy. Thank you for another interesting episode!
God be with you out there everybody! ✝️ 🙂
The Waffle House Has Found Its New Host
I should point out that asside from the Borg, all of the races Voyager encountered after crossing the expanse were after one or more jumps, the first being shortly after their initial encounter with the Borg. Kes sent Voyager 10 years (probably about 10kly) from a position it took them 3 years to get to; assuming that most of the races on the "south" side have roughly the same warp capabilities as the Federation, that puts them in a COMPLETELY different theater then they were before. Enterprise-D encountered several regions in its travels to the edge of known Federation space that were inhabited entirely by races that were less advanced then them like the Lysians/Satarans.
it is also worth noting that the area north of the expanse was near the edge of the galaxy, while south of it you were moving closer to the core. the closer you get to the core, the density of stars in a given volume of space goes up and the average age of the stars goes down, since star forming regions tend to be located closer to the center of the galaxy than its rim. so the reason there are more 'elder empires' might just be that in regions with a denser population of younger stars, you'd get more habitable worlds and thus more chances for life to emerge. leading to those regions having more civilizations over a given era of time, and those civilizations having access to more of the resources needed to grow and develop.
i find this more probable than putting the area around earth as a center of ancient civilization origin. after all, we don't know where the ancient humanoids came from, just that they seeded the whole galaxy. (and likely with many duplicate copies of the message) and while we've seen the ancient empires of the alpha and beta quadrants with the, Sargonians, iconians and Tkon, it seems likely that other parts of the galaxy also produced empires in the same eras. the delta quadrant's were probably the Voth and Hirogen.
Or, as Robbie McNeill and Garrett Wang started calling it on the Delta Flyers podcast, the Nekkid Expanse.
Another reason could be conflict as well. A lot of species were not only advanced but in constant warfare. It could be they became advanced due to a cycle of development to survive the next day. While the other side had conflict, but few and mostly contained border skirmishes.
i thought the nekritt expanse was the nebula which caused everyone to get headaches and die until around the 2 min mark lol.
I really love how you utilize Star Trek Online for using "footage" for these videos!
Did the Hirogen actually build the communication network….I thought they just claimed it
What if in real life we are a less developed species while somewhere out there are a thriving space ferrying civilization
I've always thought that the Hirogen co-opted the relay network, not built it. Iirc, the Iconian empire was around 100,000 years ago. Maybe the relays are from one of their contemporaries that helped destroy them
OMG I always thought they were saying "Necrid"
North and South in space! ^^
how could you not mention species 7482 in this… oh,… you're saving it for a future episode…
I feel like navigation should not have been as major in issue as you make it sound. The reason is that starships are equipped with a Starship Inertial Navigation System, which will allow the ship to keep track of its own position and direction without any external references at all. Modern-day submarines have been using us for over half-a-century (called Submarine Internal Navigational System), and airliners have been using this for over a quarter of a century (known as their Inertial Reference System). The only information they really should have needed to keep going in the right direction is simply which direction they wanted to go after they avoided all the storms that were in their way.
Isn't your theory already confirmed by the episode from TNG "The Chase" Where the ancients confirmed seeding that part of the milky way? So logically they migrate from that point on wards and is a pretty good unintentional bit of lore from the writers of Voyager.
Sometimes episodes in Star Trek just happen to collide with each other and create lore, I think this is one of those moments.
It's interesting that the Delta Quadrant seems divided by at least two huge natural barriers that would make exploration a challenge, even for the Borg. Next to the Nekrit Expanse there was the seemingly endless stretch of starless space, which Voyager encountered in the episode Night. There's also the large, radiation filled nebula they had to pass through in season 4's One. That keeps everything more bottled up compared to the situation in the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.
According to Guinan, the Borg have been around for thousands of centuries. I wonder if the Borg periodically get taken down and are forced to reset.
I wonder if counter-spinward would be more apt than south to north, as DS9 seems to indicate Gamma Quadrant civilizations, both ancient/lost and some current, with advancements beyond Federation levels.
If the "caretaker" would have used its trans-galatic ship transporter to, I don't know, TRANSPORT WATER, I think it could have found a way to terraform the planet or maybe just transport them elsewhere… I hate "alien idiot" scenarios.
It's a shame that Star Trek has such an expansive lore to it, but despite having four new series, no one's really touching on any of it.
I think that's more thought put into Voyager's over arching plot that there actually was.
Why do you and everyone else keep saying the hirogen created the relay network? They DIDN'T! They found it, much the same as voyager did. They only took it over – that has even been STATED in canon!
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I HATE technologically inept warp capable species, they make no sense. How are they still in space, why are they still in space? Find a planet, settle down, read a book.
While I don't disagree with your hypothesis, you made 2 errors with your evidence. The voth are at least semi nomadic and while believed to be from earth, as the voyager episode they appear in suggests but we don't know for certain and we don't know if they developed their own tech. As for the hirogen, I don't think there is any evidence that the com network was built by them. They could simply being using it the way voyager was attempting.
The necrit expanse is one of the reasons I actually really like Voyager's 3rd season.
I love that it's this natural barrier that kept them from encountering the Borg despite being deep in their back yard.