Airdate vs Stardate

[cultcross]

Actually, you can nail down the DS9/ST:FC overlap a little tighter.

In the beginning of "Trials & Tribble-ations" when Sisko is starting to tell the story to Dulmer & Lucsly, when he mentions the Enterprise...

Dulmer: Which 'Enterprise', captain? There have been five.
Lucsly: Six.

I took that as a reference to the newly built & launched NCC-1701-E, since FC came out right around the same time as T&T aired.

But how does that help with "tightening up" things? We don't know the exact launch date of the E-E, nor the relationship between that date and "Trials". All we have is a vague reference in ST:FC to the ship having been in existence for a year before the movie.

Timo Saloniemi

The other 'tell' is the uniform switch in Rapture (DS9) but, again, this is hard to pin down - the dialogue, the clumsy way they're wearing them and Bashir's wearing the old style in In Purgatory's Shadow all imply these are brand new issues in the episode, but of course we don't know how long before ST:FC (in universe) the new uniform issue occurred. Coupling the 'recent Borg attack' line with the uniform switch, however, this time gap doesn't seem to be long - the movie seems to fit best into DS9 sometime between Rapture and In Purgatory's Shadow.

One implication of the T&T dialogue and Rapture is that the E-E launched with the old, coloured-yoke uniforms. Which is utterly useless for realtive dating but kind of a fun bit of trivia