I was assuming the Neutral Zone was a full planar-like surface (even if not completely flat), not just a 3d "tube" or "flat" surface like a strip of land. This Zone extends across the entire Alpha (and Beta?) Quadrants...
Territories and borders?
- Thread starter Crewman47
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Except in "The Pegasus", and also "Tin Man" and also "Face of the Enemy" and also "Timescape." The Neutral Zone need only be continuous in a very specific region that takes a really long time to get around (turning what should be a three-day warp into a six week voyage). That would imply the zone occupies some sort of open cluster formation with many dozens of stars packed extremely tightly so that they're not more than a couple of light years apart. If that cluster was the original collection of systems the Federation and the Romulans were originally fighting over, then declaring it neutral would make quite a bit of sense, and would explain why a Romulan ship entering the neutral zone is a provocative act while a Romulan ship moving around in interstellar space--or even extremely close to Federation worlds and space stations--isn't.
Depends. The technical Alpha Quadrant is huge, and I doubt the Federation can explore a 50,000 light year area in Picard/Sisko/Janeway's time.
what is called the Alpha Quadrant probably is just the area where the Federation, Romulans, Klingons, Cardassians inhabit, and it's called the Alpha Quadrant just for simplicity's sake.
The impression I got from TOS is that in that time period there were multiple (more that four) quadrants, possibily they began with four (the orginal size of the federation's claimed area) and as they began to grow instead of expanding their existing quardants in size, the federation simply "added quadrants" to the ones they already had.
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