Protection of the borders of the the United Federation of Planets

[Simon_Jester]

Given the range of Star Trek sensors, it may well be that you only need, say, a hundred buoys to create a good sensor net across a square light-year of space. In that case, over a period of decades you COULD build up a pretty respectable and large sensor network even though Space is Big.

[Sea Skimmer]

Space is really big, and it's not a flat surface where you can dot around buoys, knowing that all ships will have to cross that plane.

Wow amazing comment, space is big. You ever notice how big a Galaxy class ship is and yet how free they feel to waste its internal space on random crap they don't need like a lounge that's never got more then a dozen people in it? Do you think I'm a moron or that Star Trek ships have unlimited FTL speed and endurance? Do you think airspace and underwater are flat surfaces? I love the zero numbers approach though. Totally useful as a response to someone trying to use them.

Add to that the fact that you've got all these weird phenomena floating around in Star Trek space, and that sensors can be blocked by many naturally occurring minerals, and you'd likely need banks of computers monitoring all these buoys and filtering out many false positives.

Oh god we'd need a big computer server farm to run our interstellar early warning network. Kinda like we used a giant building sized computers sixty years ago to run our air defense early warning network. Oh my god how impossible this would be in a universe in which a random ships computer can not only become self aware it's self but also accidentally create self aware holograms! Total deal breaker!

I also think that, given the necessary density of these buoys, you'd need maintenance teams working full time to repair or replace them...

OF COURSE YOU WOULD. You know what's another amazing problem, they'll need people working full time to repair all those giant starships they have too, and the same is true of modern radar and sonar and military electronics in general. I guess they can't exist either.

[Lord Revan]

Do I really need to repeat the fact that the bloody Neutral Zone isn't some random peice of space, it's the border of a known to be militant and aggressive enemy who is not above using sneak attacks. Still people seem to think that the federation has not done as much as they can to catalogue the Neutral in the hundred years before first wide spread use cloaking tech started in the 2260s (remember that Neutral Zone quite literally predates the Federation) let alone the 2360s when the point about federation having so good border security that crossing the border was deemed too risky for the Romulans.

I mean seriously Starfleet considers itself primarly as exploration and science organization so think they wouldn't even consider taking long range scans (at the very least) of the Neutral Zone to reduce the risk of false positives for their border security just seems like baseless Trek bashing to me.

[Batman]

Where the hell did you get that from? ALL people have been saying is that yeah, building and maintaining that border probably took/takes quite a bit of effort. Nobody argued they didn't actually do this.

[Lord Revan]

Where the hell did you get that from? ALL people have been saying is that yeah, building and maintaining that border probably took/takes quite a bit of effort. Nobody argued they didn't actually do this.

from people harping on about the bloody anomalies like it would be major issue. Maybe for the UFP/Cardassia border, but the cardies don't have cloaks and the Neutral Zone is probably the most heavily monitored area of space in the alpha and beta quadrants so the idea that would be enough unknown anomalies to seriously effect your probes is stupid, key word here being unknown, sure they might be anomalies but they would have catalogued and taken into account.

It's having a listening post for underwater sounds and not taking the sound of waves into account.

[Darth Tanner]

There is also the issue that in Unification a cloaked bird of prey can stay in orbit of Romulus to deliver Data and Picard and not be detected. If there is a sensor net Romulan side it seems to have enough holes to allow ships to sneak through from Klingon and Federation space and their most vital asset apparently is not so protected.

[Lord Revan]

Tbh Romulans wouldn't need that much cloak detection as neither the Federation nor the Klingon Empire are known for sneak attacks, also the net doesn't have to be 100% effective just good enough that it's a huge risk to cross it. I suspect that Romulan sensor net is good enough to detect uncloaked ships and you'd have to be comatose to not notice a klingon attack.