No, the Charts just assumes that the most distant points are tiny specks that won't show up on any of the wider-scope maps. That is, the UFP thins out into almost empty space at the edges, and is very porous immediately outside the core of a couple of hundred lightyears already. (And to some degree inside that core, too, leaving places like Pollux unexplored well into the 2260s). That "Moonbase Alpha" outline of space explored by the UFP is about twice as big as Picard's boast, so obviously the extreme endpoints of exploration aren't UFP members yet. But some of the bigger blobs in that outline might indicate areas where UFP presence is strong and in fact amounts to a few bona fide members. Timo Saloniemi
It's clear from Charts that the UFP doesn't go out that far. Aslo, if the stars are changing their position in the galaxy wouldn't they move out of their designated sectors and quadrants? So Earth would not be in sector 001 after awhile
Depends on what they use to demarcate the official "line". In space there are no conveniate rivers or mountains to create borders; only the stars themselves! Therefore, borders are likely to be determined by the locations of a string of suitable systems. As such, those borders will move!
Considering the franchise was inconsistent with its continuity - the Romulan Star Empire has no border with Cardassian space ("Insurrection" map) or has a border with Cardassian space (dialog from Deep Space Nine), to give one example - it is not surprising to me that the Star Charts is as inaccurate as it is. I have gotten into heated discussions with other fans about the placement of the major and minor powers mentioned in Star Trek, and the conclusion I have come to is that any attempt to draw a map of the ST Universe is doomed to failure due to the fact that there was no effort made to reconcile what was shown in maps and what was said in dialog. There is a strange omission in the Star Charts. The list of planetary classifications does not have a classification for ice giants, like Neptune and Uranus. Do ice giants exist in the ST Universe? As for stars moving about the galaxy, this is a long process. It would not probably be felt by mortal creatures, especially those who draw maps. For example, one galactic year - the time it would take our solar system to travel around the galactic core - has been estimated as being between 225 and 250 million years.
Over the course of centuries, yes. Slowly enough for the diplomats of all nations involved to be prepared for it.
In First Contact it's unusual that the borg don't try to assimilate Zefram Cochrane and his encampent instead they fire on it
It's escalated to a bit of a vendetta by that point, so the Borg Queen AI is already throwing out the old rules.
Then you're just reading 'em wrong. Not within anything short of geological timespans. And the Ministry of Silly Charts could always post updates every ten thousand years or so anyway. No such dialogue in DS9. People seem to be misreading "Improbable Cause" where there's a bunch of Romulans lurking beyond "the Cardassian border". That episode makes no suggestion that said border would be against Romulan space; indeed, odds are heavily against that. OTOH, there so little being said and so much less being shown that the gaps can always be filled to satisfaction. It's just that the Charts is an outdated piece of work, contradicted by new pseudofacts (including some that popped up during the process of making the Charts) - and contains its share of clear-cut errors (such as the NX-01 launching to her interstellar odyssey from Earth rather than Qo'noS, an order-of-magnitude mishap with the Dominion, and some things about the VOY timeline that could have been interpreted more consistently). The reworkings for Stellar Cartography and STO fix some of the errors, but a clean start would do more good. Yet that's the thing: a minor addition to canon data requires a massive reworking of charts, but there's nothing about that that would be undoable. Massive reworkings can be done infinitely many times, as there's an infinite number of ways to put the pieces together. Apparently, that's basically what class J is for: the difference between "gas giants" and "ice giants" is too small to register, when the next step is a full order of magnitude larger in size. But the scale as presented there, and in the preceding fan/RPG works from which most of the noncanon designations derive, isn't about planetary physics anyway. It's about exploitability, with M smack in the middle, almost habitable or industrially interesting worlds next to it, and less exploitation-friendly planets towards the A and Z ends. Or that's the logic that the Charts tries to shoehorn into the fan/RPG precedent and the precious few canon datapoints, FWIW. As for whatever the Borg were doing in ST:FC, the overarching issue there is that they must have won. They can time travel at will; the movie presents us with nothing that would stop them from doing that; and the movie presents us with nothing that would suggest this is the first time these events took place, in an endless sequence of time loops that would converge towards Borg victory as long as the Borg retain their ability to time travel and the heroes have nothing to trump that. Since we know how it ended, on this loop we saw, we must use that as the definition of Borg victory. And it does meet the criteria we'd expect: a big fat assimilable target is made available (the UFP is born) in unlikely circumstances (where midwifery by the Borg seems like a vital ingredient) and is ripe for picking at a later date (and we know the Borg not only can wait for aeons, but love to hide and wait). Killing Cochrane wouldn't fit that picture. Helping him make the warp flight by sending him an engineering team from the 24th century would. OTOH, assimilating Cochrane would make no sense no matter what. The Borg scorn inferior material. What would be interesting about Cochrane? He'd only get assimilated to improve his standard of living, or to bolster the drone resources of an ailing Borg ship, but there's little time for the former and little need for the latter. Timo Saloniemi
The film's a bit muddled about it all, but the Borg don't always seem to value technology, but biological distinctiveness. There seems to be some kind of "human factor" that the Borg want to add to their collective, regardless of technological ability. They aren't especially interested in the Federation, only Earth. They choose Picard to become their spokesman, not Worf or Mr Mot, because they want a human voice. They make a beeline for Earth on two occasions, they don't stop at Vulcan or Betazed or Romulus. It's a very ethnocentric plot, but then TNG has always placed Roddenberry's New Humans at the pinnacle, and Holywood studios think filmgoers want to see Earth under threat. On the other hand, if they just wanted humans, they could have gone back to the Roman Empire or the Renaissance (both early story ideas!), so there must be something about that particular period. I think you're on to something about picking that date specifically to ensure First Contact happens for humans (especially if the 24th century Borg got a transmission from that crashed sphere telling them what happened), but the logic of the plot doesn't string together. Why does the Queen try to destroy the Phoenix? Why nearly destroy the Enterprise? Moreover, why don't the Borg make any kind of concerted effort to assimilate Earth? They send just two cubes! You could argue they are busy with 8472 I suppose.
according to Q Who starfleet didn't know about the Borg until then yet decades earlier Dark Frontier establishes that Starfleet knew about the Borg.
Well, Picard, and the crew of the Enterprise-D as such might not have been aware of the Borg for one thing. Also, we know the El'Aurians were the ones who fled the Borg into the Alpha Quadrant in the 23rd century and got rescued by SF. It stands to reason that the El'Aurians would be able to provide pieces of information, but they might not have had conclusive evidence of Borg (though their ships would likely contain some partial sensor sweeps). Data would have likely searched the entire database for Borg references upon contact in Q Who, unless those files became classified, or required a different security clearance. The Hansens were said to have been quite known exobiologists (I think) in the Federation, and given what we know of them, they might have had clearance to some classified files given their expertise and contributions. They also spoke of 'burned bridges' in Dark Frontier, which could easily mean several things. And besides, according to Dark Frontier, they mostly had rumours about the Borg. Rumours in this sense might indicate where they are located, not of their actual existence (as the Hansens already had quite a bit of information on the Borg - which was likely pieced together from the historical archives - dating back from Archer's time). Unless of course First Contact changed things in the timeline to the degree to include the Borg in Humanity's history (meaning that from our heroes point of view, and when we/the audience were observing Q Who events,SF might not have known of the Borg in any sufficient amount, or they could have heard some reports from El'Aurians, but no conclusive data that could be connected to the Borg in the first place).
The Borg issue ties to the maps issue in many ways. Space simply is vast, and a lot of it remains unexplored by UFP parties - endless rumors no doubt abound, and only a certain percentage turn out to be true. The Borg just stand out because what was "known" about them in the 2340s turned out to be more or less true in the 2360s, whereas several other such "knowns" proved to be misunderstandings, hoaxes or enduring mysteries... The Borg also move across the map at will. Beelines matter little to them, at the speeds they utilize: that they would head straight for Earth one day does not mean they wouldn't head equally straight for Romulus some other day. And if they did, would Romulans be eager to tell? Among the refugees was Guinan, who by her own words never was on the El-Aurian (home?)world when it got assimilated, and supposedly never saw the Borg in action. Quite possibly everybody who managed to flee would be similarly unable to testify much. El-Aurian ships were not seen, unless El-Aurians give their ships human names (as one of the refugee ships was named Robert Fox, not mentioned in dialogue but glimpsed in the graphics). Sensor sweeps thus might never have reached Earth. Or were so obscure that several hours of searching at Data speeds would reveal nothing relevant. Nothing would be listed under "Borg", after all, while overwhelming amounts of data might exist on "scary cyborgs". Basically all we know about the Borg comes from VOY - anything the TNG thought they knew has turned out to have been a misunderstanding. And VOY "Child's Play" shows the Borg toying with civilizations to stimulate them into developing better and better countermeasures, which will be harvested in due time; what we see in "BoBW" would appear to match that mode of operations pretty well, with lots of pitched battles with Starfleet even when the Borg could simply ignore Starfleet and go assimilate Earth at their leisure. Timo Saloniemi
Timo I was not thinking of "Improbable Cause". I was thinking of "In the Pale Moonlight" when I spoke about the shared border between Cardassia and the Romulans. In the episode, Benjamin Sisko said, I'd pick the side most likely to leave us in peace when the dust settles. Maybe you're right. Maybe the Dominion will win in the end. Then the Founders will control what we now call Cardassia, the Klingon Empire and the Federation. So, instead of facing three separate opponents with three separate agendas, you'll find yourselves facing the same opponent on every side. There's a word for that. Surrounded. In the same episode, there is a map of Cardassian forces passing through the border on the way to Romulus. http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/File:Crossing_the_Glintara_sector.jpg This is the basis for what I said earlier.
Ah, now I see. And that graphic is pretty telling, in that something that irregular is unlikely to be a "sector border" and more likely to be a "national border". Being surrounded doesn't mean being in physical contact, though. Most of Trek space is empty, as in unclaimed or at most theoretically claimed by single-system cultures who don't play interstellar politics yet. And Sisko's musings related to a much-changed future in any case. Significantly, the graphic from "Moonlight" also refers to a changed situation: Cardassia has vastly expanded due to the war of conquest. And the Star Charts assumed much of that expansion to have been in the direction of the curious long pseudopod on the lower right of the various "tactical maps" on the Briefing Room display wall - a natural way to reach for something that is to the lower left of Romulan space! Also, a natural way to start threatening the UFP core from the direction of Vulcan, as per Kira's worry of a sequence of conquest in that episode: "With Betazed in the hands of the Jem'Hadar, the Dominion is in a position to threaten Vulcan, Andor, Tellar, Alpha Centauri...". Perhaps the most significantly, though, the graphic further refers to a completely fictional situation. As far as we can tell, the real Dominion had no plans of moving through the Glintara section and invading Romulus in the manner described. But if it did, then crossing a border would be involved - yet nothing would require this to be a shared border. In a war, it only takes one to tango. In the end, my choice to defend a bare minimum of shared borders is a matter of keeping things as simple as possible, mostly to keep painting myself rather literally to a corner (although this is not much of an issue with Star Charts, a publication that is done, sold out and outdated and cannot be altered). Sure, there was a lot going on between Cardassia and Romulus in DS9. But there was very little going on between those two before DS9, supposedly. If Romulus shared a border with somebody who wasn't a mortal enemy like the Feds and the Klingons, their culture might have been far less isolated, and OTOH said mortal enemies more concerned with this potential Romulan ally... Timo Saloniemi
I am not so willing to dismiss the Star Charts completely. The Star Charts is a step in the process of imaging the Star Trek universe, which began with the Technical Manual in the 1970s and continues to this day. This is as much as I am going to say. There is a YouTuber named Lorerunner who does ruminations on Star Trek: Voyager episodes and did the same with the movies. In his opinion, speaking from experience, the Star Trek fanbase can be the worst to talk with when it comes to discussions about continuity. My own experience aligns with his. So, I am stepping aside for others to come forward and express their beliefs.
Meaning what? You are willing to establish a Romulan/Cardassian border against what is shown in the Star Charts. I am willing to try and rationalize why there might be no need to contradict the Charts on this particular detail. So... What? Timo Saloniemi