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I have watched an awful lot of Star Trek over the years, and one of the things I observed is that a lot of the courses they set end in 215. I’m sure that everyone else was as curious as me to find out how often this happened, so I have set out to investigate this important issue.

I’ve limited my investigations to The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, as they were the only ones I could get scripts for and also they’re the ones most worth watching.

Two bearings, separated by the word mark, presumably on planes at right angles to each other. It doesn’t really matter whether that’s referenced to the ship’s attitude or the centre of the galaxy or something else entirely – it’s only a TV show and we shouldn’t take it that seriously!

Through the power of terrible regular expressions, we can extract all of these directions and through some other equally terrible Python we can turn the results into integers.

By the power of matplotlib, we can turn this into a polar plot. This is heavily inspired by @lemonodor.bsky.social's code for plotting geese orientations: bsky.app/profile/lemo... The red line has been drawn at 215°, this far, no further. In TNG, there are four occurrences of a "mark 215"