There's no evidence that the barrier surrounds the entire galaxy, since it's only been encountered in the small part of the galaxy within travel range of Federation space.
Alas, it's there in a couple of rather disparate adventures. How come intruders from Andromeda, in a very well known and narrowly defined direction, hit the very same phenomenon that Kirk hit when merely tasked with checking out whether it's possible to fly out of the Milky Way?
Then again, we already have to accept that something weird is going on there. The point where Kirk meets the Barrier in "Where No Man" may very well be "sweet" somehow - after all, astronomically against odds, Kirk ran into the recorder marker of the
Valiant there and exactly there.
Perhaps the same sweetness would draw the Kelvans to the location, too?
Indeed, the Enterprise and the Kelvans are the only ones we've ever seen to be affected by the barrier, which argues strongly against it being an all-encompassing or permanent feature of the galaxy.
The counterpoint there is that our heroes can tell some visitors are extragalactic. They do not have any justifiable reason to do so in, say, "Doomsday Machine": such things can never be divined from mere established courses, because the course from my bedroom to my toilet necessarily can be backtracked to outside the galaxy, too.
That is, unless the Barrier happens to be
right next to the location of the adventure and the trail of the intruder points undeniably at the Barrier. Which tells us something about the spatial relationship of the Barrier and the "most densely populated part of the galaxy" right there... But probably rules out the idea that the Barrier would be a highly local phenomenon, in Federation's terms.
Or then the Barrier is the justification for our heroes' outrageous claims in a less (or perhaps more) direct fashion. Perhaps an intruder coming from the outside necessarily always penetrates the (usually harmless) barrier,
and this leaves an identifiable residue?
We know in "By Any Other Name" the Feds can send unmanned probes to Andromeda. Warp drives and other systems that got burnt out in "WNMHGB" worked enough in "BAON" to get them out and back in suggesting those systems have been hardened against the barrier. And "Is There In Truth No Beauty" they were fine as long as they crossed it at FTL speeds.
So it's a fickle phenomenon - in "Where No Man", crossing by impulse was supposedly done by the
Valiant, even though said impulse could previously not fight the magnetic storm that necessitated the crossing.
Sounds attractive overall. A bit like the conquest of Antarctica: you have to get lucky with the weather, or learn to read it, in order to get there and back alive. And perhaps you also need a chain of camps and stashes, including the lithium depots Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta Vega?
Is the energy barrier in TOS even mentioned in other series?
Not onscreen. Barriers in general seem to be a TOS phenomenon exclusively: Time, Galactic, Great. And TOS is the era when those all are broken. Perhaps Starfleet just stopped believing in barriers after TOS, recognizing that they would only present an obstacle for the briefest of times between discovery and dismissal - and indeed understanding that ceasing to believe is what defeated the Great Barrier?
Timo Saloniemi
