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But they have been heard of.

Teaos wrote:If that were the case how do we have a nuetral zone? Also enemy ships could legally gets thousands of light years into your space, sit just outside you capitals solar system then plow in for a heart attack.

Well the neutral zone is in itself a very stupid concept but still....easier to control one border of your galactic empire (no matter how stupid it is) than the WHOLE SPACE of your galactic, one quarter of the galaxy spanning, empire.


Also, there is no "heart" of a solar system you could plow in. A solar system and the planet therein are a fixed position, if you want to attack it you sooner or later HAVE to approach said system. It doesn't really matter from which direction you come because from a certain distance, no matter the direction, you WILL BE detected.

That is because space being space, there is no choice but to guard against an attack from all directions. But that doesn't mean that you guard the WHOLE of your entire space. That's just nonsense. He who tries to defend everything defends nothing.


Also, there are quite a few examples where it is hinted at that all that really matters are systems and the space inbetween is not especially heavily guarded.
Breen attacking earth is a good example.
The attack on Betazed when two UFP fleets happened to be away for a short wargaming excersice comes to mind also.
The UFP attacking chin-toka without having first to fight through waves of enemies at the border etc. etc. etc.

So at best you have certain areas of control consisting of systems, starbases and patrolling ships within reasonable intercept-distances.....but I would imagine that this covers just the most heavily frequented starlanes between major systems.

The Attack on Betazoid and the attack on Shin-toka were rolling attacks on boarder systems by in large. Those systems were close to the boarders, the fleets slipped by the patrols or eliminated the small ones then took and boarder system, then another, then another.

Excellent points. Star Trek rarely demonstrates space as a 3D area as opposed to 2D.

Systems could be on top of each other if viewed from the top of the Galaxy. So major planets or even minor empires could be masked when maps are viewed from above.

I doubt for example the Romulan Neutral Zone being a perfectly perpendicular border from the galactic plane. But that would be hard to show on a 2D top view of the border as shown in TOS. Well not without making it somewhat complicated.

Yeah you really need a 3D hologram to show it properly, ironically so,ething we hardly ever see in trek, probably because it is so common in Star Wars.

They had holograms in TNG. Several times in the early episodes they had them. One that springs to mind is when Geordi was showing Picard plans for the containment device for the disease samples they were carrying.

Teaos wrote:Yeah you really need a 3D hologram to show it properly, ironically so,ething we hardly ever see in trek, probably because it is so common in Star Wars.

I suppose you could have a handful of top view maps layered at specified distances. Like if that section is 500 light years you could do five maps every 100 lys. With additional maps for more important areas of note.

Or do it in a grid pattern like a x, y, z coordinate system. Might work, but then again we are talking about Star Trek. They shouldn't need 2D maps if they can use holograms. Would be impressive though.

Imagine Sisko planning out an attack using Quark's holosuites. Could have been cool if not incredibly expensive for a TV show.

Tyyr wrote:They had holograms in TNG. Several times in the early episodes they had them. One that springs to mind is when Geordi was showing Picard plans for the containment device for the disease samples they were carrying.

It was actually reasonably common.

Most of the TNG ones were first season if I recall. Then you've got one DS9, Voyager, and then fucking Enterprise of all things. Just enough to make you wonder why they aren't more common.