Star Trek Slices up the Milky Way

In the mid-nineties there were two spin-offs from the Star Trek the Next Generation series, Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager.  Both of these series were somewhat substandard to the series which had spawned them, but being a bit of a science fiction nerd, I watched them anyway.  If you watched them too, you'll recall that Deep Space Nine was about a space station near a worm hole that led to the Gamma quadrant.  The idea was that this was a passage to a distant section of the galaxy that was inaccessible otherwise.  It was really, really far away.  Well, a few years later, Voyager came along, and it involved a star ship stranded in the Delta quadrant, trying to get home.  Whoa, the Delta quadrant, that's one more Greek letter than gamma!  They must have been really, really, really, far away.  Right away this set the precedent for the dumbed-down nature of Voyager, as I'll demonstrate.

Pictured above is the Milky Way.  Well, it's a spiral galaxy, at least.  Anyway, if I've got my math and my Latin correct, then "quadrant" implies something that has been divided into four equal sections, like this:

You begin to see the problem?  This would put the Delta quadrant adjacent to the Alpha quadrant, rather than on the far side of the galaxy from it.  Still, I suppose they could have designated the sections as such:

But this seems a bit convoluted, as it involves zig-zagging around for no reason:

Instead of going in a nice clockwise fashion:

I guess it's possible though.  That being the case, I guess we could map out the Star Trek galaxy as such:

See, we've got everyone nice and separated and remote from each other.  But what about the path that the USS Voyager would take to get home?  I foresee two possibilities.  First, if they had any sense they would cut across the center of the galaxy:

This would have taken them near the super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy.  That would have made for some interesting story possibilities.  I'm not sure if the scientists knew about that yet.  At least they could have stopped on the planet that was in Star Trek V and asked, "Hey, why does God need a star ship?"

Or they could have taken a more circuitous route and passed through the Gamma or Beta quadrants, as pictured above.  Passing through the Gamma quadrant would have taken them through Dominion space, so they'd probably would have wanted to go the other way.  As far as we know, there's nothing in the Beta quadrant except worms and space dust.  It must be pretty boring since they never mention it.  Yet, if that's the way they went, you'd think that at some point in the series they would have crossed the border into one of these quadrants.  They could have at least given the viewers the sense that they were making some progress instead of just jerking around on the holodeck and picking up more Borg orphans.

At any rate, I think I'll shut up now while I can still claim to only be a "little bit" of a nerd.