Yes, when the Doctor (posing as Janeway) describes the false alien culture's borders he states it goes on for "thousands of parsecs" nearly to the Beta Quadrant border. As I said, its vague, but at least its something!
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"The Long Kiss Goodnight begins, more or less, with Geena Davis being kicked in the head by a deer. This was the high point of the film."
- Sol System, 2/24/01
Of course, they should be considerably closer to the BQ. At least 2000 parsecs, minus however far they'd traveled into the aliens' space, works out to at least 6700 LY. Too far. But at least they DID say Beta Quadrant, instead of Alpha.
These would seem to be very silly aliens. Instead of destroying every ship that comes through with conventional warp drives, why not just GIVE them the non-damaging drives, or at least a variant thereof? Otherwise, they'd have lots of unwanted settlers. Of course, they were fictional, created by that silly race that seems to have space NEARLY as large as the fictional race in question. What were they called, again?
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"How do you define fool?"
"I don't attempt it. I wait for demonstrations. They inevitably surpass my imagination."
- CJ Cherryh, Invader
[This message has been edited by TheF0rce (edited May 20, 2001).]
Well, I shall be doing a major overhaul of my equations and computations in the very near future. Perhaps I can find a way to make that statement fit. Perhaps.
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"The Long Kiss Goodnight begins, more or less, with Geena Davis being kicked in the head by a deer. This was the high point of the film."
- Sol System, 2/24/01
"the aliens from the tinor doctor episold"
Is that a sentence? Nearly thirty percent of the words aren't even real...
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"Even the colors are pompous!"
-a friend of mine, looking at a Lexus brochure
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Phasers
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"Asteroids do not concern me, Admrial. I want that ship, not excuses."
-Lord Darth Vader (Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back)
Too bad there was no such race in evidence. And I don't think we have any reason to believe that the "thousands of parsecs" statement had any truth in it - these fugitives could well have been operating safely outside Hierarchy holdings and the reach of Hierarchy law.
To justify why Chakotay bought "Janeway's" claim about an empire extending "thousands of parsecs, almost from here to Beta quadrant border", we could insert that comma in the statement. Perhaps the empire was thousands of parsecs across in some direction, but relatively narrow in the direction of the border. Or at least Chuckles would deduce so, in order to make sense of the seemingly fatigued "Janeway's" curious statement. The Doctor might have been making this stuff up on the run and been ignorant of or uninterested in the true distance to the quadrant border. (Would you want a hologram like that to pilot your shuttle, though?)
Timo Saloniemi