Romulans getting to Bajor?

[All Seeing Eye]

I was just checking out some online startrek starcharts and it occured to me whilst looking at this one that Romulus is completely blocked by the Federation, they cant cross the Neutral Zone without permission and the space between Romulan space and Bajor is completely filled with Federation space, so how the hell do the Romulans get anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant without express permission from Starfleet? I know space is 3D but surely its a hell of a detour to have to bypass Federation space just to get to the wormhole.

It looks to me like the Romulans are getting seriously cut off, i'm surprised they havnt declared war by the 24th century.

 

[Crewman47]

Won't the Neutral Zone have been relaxed a little to allow for travel to Bajor or even regular trade and commerce with AQ races?

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Well, I think there are problems with the star charts and one of them is that they don't border the Cardassian Empire (In the Pale Moonlight specifically says they attack Dominion outposts along their border).

Still, either way, since the Federation and Romulans would be allied, the Neutral Zone wouldn't really matter.

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Alidar Jarok said:
Still, either way, since the Federation and Romulans would be allied, the Neutral Zone wouldn't really matter.

I meant before the Dominion War, the Romulans and Federation wernt allied, plus after the war (post Nemesis) the alliance is pretty much mute again, so how do they travel the AQ?

Alidar Jarok said:
Well, I think there are problems with the star charts and one of them is that they don't border the Cardassian Empire (In the Pale Moonlight specifically says they attack Dominion outposts along their border).

Thats doesnt mean Romulan space is near Cardassian space, the Dominion might have tried to spread its military might further afield.

 

[Finn]

They could have bypassed the Federation by travelling though terrorities bordering the Federation between the Romulan Empire and Cardassian Union....

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Finn said:
They could have bypassed the Federation by travelling though terrorities bordering the Federation between the Romulan Empire and Cardassian Union....

Could they?

 

[Timo]

Aren't we forgetting something rather pertinent about Romulans?

Namely, whenever their warships were spotted near Bajor, they were there on illegal business, and their presence was immediately objected to. However, there wasn't much our heroes could do about the continuing violations, because of this little Romulan invention (at least they'd claim it was theirs!) called the cloaking device.

How do the Romulans get to Bajor? The same way the Klingon fleet did for "Way of the Warrior" - by blithely flying through all sorts of no-fly zones and hostile empires under the protection of their cloaks.

As for those star maps... At the time of "Pale Moonlight", the amber lines indicating Cardassian territory on those maps have actually extended so far to the right as to touch the Romulan bird-of-prey symbol there. If you superimpose such maps (p.48 on the Star Charts book) on that big Alpha/Beta map, you'll see exactly what the Romulans were doing to the Dominion forces after the "betrayal" was exposed...

It looks to me like the Romulans are getting seriously cut off, i'm surprised they havnt declared war by the 24th century.

They have been "seriously cut off" ever since the 22nd century war with the Earthlings. That's what defines them.

You can probably meet a Romulan outside the RNZ and not have to cry "casus belli!". It's just that you theoretically can't meet a Romulan warship outside the RNZ, not unless their evil secret mission gets accidentally exposed.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ElScoob]

My guess would be that they got there the same way the Federation has a chunk of territory on the far side of Klingon and Romulan space: they probably flew above or below Federation territory. Let us not get too bogged down in two-dimensional thinking, after all.

 

[Dayton3]

Although most of the writers and map makers in Star Trek have been guilty of "two dimensional thinking" in reality, space is so empty that "borders" would be nothing of the sort

In reality, you would have the Federation control a solar system here, the Romulans one over there, the Klingons next to it..........and so on all across the galaxy.

Most solar systems are several light years apart, so you could fly entire fleets around without actually violating someones "territory".

I suspect that in reality, an interstellar empire would be like an empire on Earth composed completely of islands each separated by hundreds of miles. Enemy forces could sail all around them without being considered invading.

 

[mythme]

yes the problem is that you're looking at a two-dimenstional map. Here's how you should percieve it.

Imagine turing the Alpha-Beta quadrant maps on its side, so you're looking at a cross-section rather than a top view. Now draw in your head a valley or bowl shape; one side of the valley is Cardassian space the other half Romulan space. Fill in the bowl with the Federation. Thus the problem is resolved. The Cardies and the Romulans share a boarder at the bottom of the "galactic bowl" but along the rim there is a great chasm with the Federation in the middle.

(I hope I made that explaination clear.)

 

[Galactic Alignment]

I think the main issue here is that there isn't any canon starmaps, so as far as we know beyond conjecture the Rommies might be relatively close to the Bajor sector.

 

[Timo]

...There are some canon maps seen on screen, even if sometimes contradictory and often deliberately vague. The one in TNG "Birthright" might place Romulan space close to Bajor.

Generally, though, I don't think we should assume that two empires share a border unless this is explicitly stated. Most of Star Trek (TOS and TNG and VOY and ENT, at any rate) happens in space not claimed by any major empire, so we shouldn't artificially create a situation where such neutral space is at a minimum...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Galactic Alignment]

Slightly off on a tangent from your point there, do we know for sure if famous real-life stars Deneb and/or Antares are part of Fed territory during the c24?

 

[Dayton3]

The problem with the canon maps on Star Trek is that they look about like the World War II era border between France and Germany.

 

[Timo]

do we know for sure if famous real-life stars Deneb and/or Antares are part of Fed territory during the c24?

Not really. We hear of products and items related to the names of those stars (Antares ship yards, Denebian slime devils) - but then again, today we have cars named Saturn or Orion, even though they are manufactured right down here on Earth. We get circumstantial evidence that our heroes or their kin would have visited those places, but we don't learn whether the Federation would have a permanent presence there.

The closest thing to membership evidence is probably the TNG pilot "Encounter at Farpoint" where the Federation negotiates for starbase rights on a place called Deneb IV. Beyond this place, a grand unexplored expanse supposedly awaits Starfleet adventurers. Perhaps this is the "real" Deneb, thousands of lightyears away (even though our heroes never quite go to that unexplored expanse again in the subsequent TNG seasons). Or perhaps it's one of the other Denebs out there, closer to home and merely in an uninteresting and thus previously unexplored direction. Deneb, after all, is a word found in many constellation names (meaning "tail", like Rigel means "leg") - and Deneb can also be an alien word unrelated to old Terran constellation and star names.

Summa summarum, even if we assume that the Trek galaxy is identical to the real one (barring things like the Great Barrier, the Galactic Barrier and the umpteen dense nebulae right next door to Earth), we can't completely nail down the fictional empires by using known stars as nails. We can create "random fixes", tho. Say, Kirk visited the nearby Pollux, showing it wasn't part of the Federation in the 2260s yet, but also checked on a Federation colony at the much more distant Omicron Ceti. How one erects a Federation over these sparse datapoints is up to personal preference.

Timo Saloniemi