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how it was handled there's 2 ways you rationalized it a) the writers felt it was too restrictive and it was retconned out b)writers felt it was too restrictive and it was solved off screen somehow.

It's clearly option b) as the writers stated as much.

As far as in-universe goes there is no reason why it should be considered non-canon just because its not mentioned after a few episodes. It's more likely the Federation simply resolved the issue off-screen.

Tribble wrote:It doesn't mean that the Warp 5 restriction became non-canon. It's just a moot point because we almost always see starships in some kind of crisis or another. There is no "Star Trek: Freighter Run" reality TV series... at least not yet.

No, quite right, it never became non-canon.

And the bits you said - the folding warp naecells and the new designs we see that look more like the Sov ones seen in ST:FC (Akira class, Nova class etc) - we just "fanon" them into the idea that they found a way around it.

Works for me - I'm more than happy with that assumption.

A good gauge of the accuracy of statements regarding the Federation's size is asking the question:

How many Star Systems can be fit into 8000LY of space? Taking into account, the majority of them would not contain habitable planets.

Or

If the Federation has 150 homeworlds plus however many outposts and colonies, all of them on habitable planets, how much space would that take up?

That question is essentially unanswerable without knowing what those 8,000ly mean. A sphere or a cube 8,000ly across will unsurprisingly contain a lot more star systems than a tube or brick 8,000ly long but only 1ly wide and high, or a handful of colonized areas of space with lots of No Man's Land in between scattered across 8,000ly, and so on.

And if we're taking the 8,000ly sphere (leave alone a cube), I know it's a lot more star systems than I expected (still trying to find the thread that happened in).

It can't realistically be a sphere or cube that big, since the galactic disc is only ~3,000 ly thick. That puts a hard limit on how far "up" and "down" the Federation and others can expand.

Of course, it does raise the point of why Voyager didn't fly "up" out of the disk a little way and travel hime in sprints across much more open space. You'd have to drop back "down" periodicalyl to refuel and resupply, but it would remove the problem of uncharted anomalies/stars etc. and runing into hostile species.

If you want to pick nits, there could be stars in the galactic halo that they're including. But yeah I have always wondered why nobody ever flies up and around to get around Borg space, or a Dominion fleet, or anything like that.

I'll just chalk it up to ST writers having no sense of scale and/or no knowledge of 3-D space.

Eternal_Freedom wrote:I'll just chalk it up to ST writers having no sense of scale and/or no knowledge of 3-D space.

Well, that, and if they're in the "middle", that's 1,500 light years up and down to get out - that's a year or two at maximum warp - not great for a detour around a Dominion fleet.

Borg, OTOH, yes.

Prometheus Unbound wrote:

Eternal_Freedom wrote:I'll just chalk it up to ST writers having no sense of scale and/or no knowledge of 3-D space.

Well, that, and if they're in the "middle", that's 1,500 light years up and down to get out - that's a year or two at maximum warp - not great for a detour around a Dominion fleet.

Borg, OTOH, yes.

Well you don't need to go all the way out of the galactic plane to avoid the dominion fleet. Sensors are limited in how far away they can detect ships. Just fly the fleet a few LY up and over the dominion fleet and you'll have a straight shot to DS9. They'll have to scramble their fleet to intercept you which gives you an advantage. For the Borg, then yeah I'd say go way more than a few LY up...

I don't think it's as simple as that, particularly with "Operation Return". Remember that the Federation had to accelerate their original plan because they learned that the minefield was going to fall in three days, and would take at least four for the all the fleets to assemble. Sisko had no choice but to take the most direct path to DS9 with the ships he had available as any delay would result in the minefield's destruction (which in the end was exactly what happened.)

As we established earlier warp speed is not that fast, and a few extra light years could easily translate into a several hours/day worth of travel. Sisko did not have the time to spare. And Dukat knew that all he had to do was delay the Federation ships long enough for the minefield to be destroyed, so he deployed the fleet along the shortest path the Federation could take. Sure, the Federation fleet may have been able to avoid the Dominion fleet (assuming they were not detected and the Dominion fleet could not catch up), but it would be a moot point as by the time they arrived at DS9 another fleet of over 2,000 Dominion warships would have been waiting for them.

Basically,the Federation was screwed either way, and it took Divine Intervention from some space gods to save them. Note that this was a deliberate plot point which the writers intended on using later on.