I noticed:

• AR-558
  
• it's subspace relay/array
  
• the Badlands
  
• Cardassia - very near the front lines
  
• and a few other little details.
  

Anyone able to discern anything else on this map?

------------------
Devil: Oh look at the time! I'm late for services.
Stone: Services?
Devil: A group of young teenagers that have been celebrating the Black Sabbath are planning on deep-sixing their gym teacher tonight. I'm gonna go and give them a little encouragement.

Brimstone. May it rest in syndication.

Sorry.

------------------
Devil: Oh look at the time! I'm late for services.
Stone: Services?
Devil: A group of young teenagers that have been celebrating the Black Sabbath are planning on deep-sixing their gym teacher tonight. I'm gonna go and give them a little encouragement.

Brimstone. May it rest in syndication.

Except for the arrows and front lines, this is exactly the map from the DS9TM. I don't see any new planets except for AR-558. Nevertheless, it might be interesting to analyze the strategy.

On the bigger map, picture Rains06.jpg, we see the yellow lines form a closed circle which could indeed depict a nation or a region of space held by one party. But the details of picture 01 contradict that interpretation. Frustratingly enough, there would seem to be some sort of a legend box in the upper left corner...

Another interesting thing is that red arrows (apparent threat movements) seem to sprout from locations far away from Cardassia - in the picture 01, we see blue arrows coming from near DS9 and "chasing" red arrows towards another set of blue arrows in a pincer movement of sorts. This might indicate that the war did not consist of each side sending out forces from territory held by it - instead, whole fleets were moving freely across the battlespace, and could maneuver around each other far away from home bases. Actual "border battles" would only take place in areas where there were fixed defences and highly concentrated forces - that is, near homeworlds and major clusters of colonies.

In other words, the war between Cardassia and Earth would be waged in a great and almost empty "Pacific Ocean" between the fleets of the two nations, there being few (but important) points of strategic interest in between.

Also noteworthy is the location of Chin'toka. As we remember, AR-558 was in that system. And the AR-558 logo lies almost directly between SB375 and Ferenginar. Was that really the first part of "actual Cardassian territory" hit by Federation forces, as "Tears of the Prophets" seemed to claim? Did Cardassians hold the space between Chin'toka and Cardassia as well, or just the isolated systems?

And what would the Klingon logo symbolize? Surely not the location of Qo'noS. Perhaps there was a system there that the Klingons were still holding despite the events of "By Inferno's Light". Or a newly established Klingon forward base. Or just a major Klingon fleet.

It would be nice to see the entire map, as in picture 06. It extends "east" of the original DS9 TM map - but does it extend far enough to actually show Earth or Romulus? There are red arrows even in the far right edge of the picture...

I've never even seen the DS9 Technical Manual, so I couldn't possibly comment on this map's likeness to the map Bernd mentioned. Perhaps some generous soul with a scanner...?

Anyway, I agree with the idea that few bigass Midway-scale battles occured during the war - or even battles dealing with 30 or more ships. The flattened fleet seen in 'A Time To Stand' was probably a fairly small but important battle group tasked with keeping the Dominion at bay, and not to engage in system invasions (like the Chin'toka invasion force).

Speaking of which, where exactly is Chin'toka labeled on the map?

As for AR-558's location:
Betazed is well within the borders of the Federation, right? Well, the only reason such a fuss was made out of it being taken was that it's a core Federation world.
Now, what if AR-558 was a Federation world all the time, an unimportant unpopulated lump of rock whose tactical usefulness was obviously recognised by the Dominion. They took the planet, built a seriously major subspace relay within it, and fortified the planet to a huge degree. Fortifiers keepers.

The Arrow Situation:
I think that hese simply highlight short term ship-group movements and do not highlight where the ships originally came from e.g.) Cardassia, Starbase 375, or DS9.

Starbase 375:
It's near enough Ferenginar for a Runabout to make the trip from the station to it in a matter of days, yet near enough the "lines" for the Dominion to mount a suprise attack (both ideas scabbed from 'Valiant').

Ferenginar:
I hope to God that the Federation is located to the very right of this image, because if it's above this image, then that means Ferenginar is a soverign world inside the Federation!! The right. We need the right. Say it with me.

Looking back on what Timo wrote, I think this is what he had in mind -> Feds in the East. The red arrows over that side (Image Rains06 I'm talking about) could highlight Dominion activity in or around Betazed and it's surroundings.

I think the yellow lines might represent the "front line" at various stages of the conflict. Note DS9 is within 3 of them (corresponding to the beginning of the war when it was in Dominion hands).
As they come nowhere near AR-558, I am presuming that it was in enemy hands for no more that a month or so. It could be that the lines are very out of date, or very presumptuous in that it has a line right up against Cardassia, and the Dominion didn't pull back to there until 'The Dogs Of War' (I think).
I really don't know what the lines signify, now that I think about it.

Skipped over to Alidar Jarok's page to get these:

This is the map from the beginning of 'The Reckoning', in which Sisko and Worf mention the offensive to prevent the Dominion from opening up a supply corridor to Betazed via (I think) the Argolis Cluster.

http://kcohn.simplenet.com/alidarjarok/deepspace9/thereckoning/Reckon01.jpg

Actually, this shows what might be happneing over the other side of the quadrant - Dominion desperately trying to break out of Betazed space, and not having much luck.

http://kcohn.simplenet.com/alidarjarok/deepspace9/whenitrains/Rains03.jpg

Note also the Romulan insignia in the thingy above "Subspace Relay AR-558" - this and the Klingon symbol probabaly show fleet locations. They're covering the left while the Federation does it's little dance back at Betazed.

You know, I'll really need someone to tell me Chin'toka's location before I can go on.

Thanx in advanx.

Why do the yellow lines need to be based on time? We're talking about a map of 3D space. The lines can be cross-sections of the borders at various depths from the plane of the map. Also, Ferenginar needn't be in Fed space if the UFP is to the top. It could be well to the back or front of the map.

Even then, it seems odd that the lines do not extend "north" towards the AR-558 array when we see the map in "The Reckoning". Wouldn't Cardassia at that time still have a stranglehold of the system? Based on dialogue from "The Siege of AR-558", it seems well established that AR-558 is a planet *inside* the Chin'toka system. Probably not one of the two big twin planets where the main fleets were fighting, nor the moons we saw near them - otherwise, there would have been more activity near AR-558 than just some raiding Jem'Hadar battlebugs and a few hundred soldiers.

The Encyclopedia 2.5 has a partial map of the Chin'toka system, showing that the two big planets are co-orbiting and have at least one moon. The map doesn't seem to specifically show AR-558, though.

As for the Betazed aspect, I don't think it would be a good idea to have Betazed located close to the UFP core worlds. If betazoids lived so near to Earth, there would have been references in TOS (where telepathy was a very exotic thing and telepathic aliens were feared or eyed with suspicion). More probably, Betazed is a rather new acquisition by the UFP, and happens to lie conveniently between Cardassia and the UFP core worlds so that its loss literally opens the way to an attack "on Vulcan and eventually Earth" as the dialogue says in "In the Pale Moonlight".

Benzar, OTOH, seems to be close to the UFP core - after all, the Romulans who supposedly live "behind" the Federation from the Cardie point of view were able to "liberate" and hold this planet. I'd suggest that the red arrows far in the "east" part of the map deal with the battles near Benzar, and with the battles that took advantage of initial Romulan neutrality.

The map seems to fully support the idea that Romulans are "northeast" from Earth, since this is where the red arrows are in the map. Klingons could be "southeast" as commonly depicted, but the map wouldn't show that region. I have no problem with the location of Ferenginar as depicted, although the distance from there to SB375 is over 30 ly at least in the maps, meaning that a runabout limited to warp 4.7 wold take weeks or months to cross the distance. Perhaps modern runabouts are faster than we thought?

Also of interest is that Vulcan was supposed to fall *sooner* than Earth in many of the episodes. Perhaps Vulcan is actually located between Earth and Cardassia? Then it cannot be 40 Eridani, which lies "southeast" from Earth. Or perhaps the dialogue assumes that Vulcan would fall sooner because it is less defended than Earth, even if it is slightly farther away from Cardassia than Earth is.

Uh, these commentaries tend to become a bit long-winded. Sorry about that.

There's no Romulan logo over the AR-558 legend. The logo is identical to the subspace comm array logo used in the DS9 Tech Manual for the relay station jointly built by UFP and Cardassia in "Destiny". It shows a dish antenna facing up and sending out "waves".

The yellow lines might not be a complex way to portray 3D at all. Instead, each of them could represent a 3D situation in simple 2D terms at a different points of time . The solid lines would mean earlier situations, from the time Cardassia and Dominion controlled DS9 and the space around it. The dotted lines would depict more recent stages of the war. One could say that the two solid lines represent the "max" and "min" estimates of the inevitably fuzzy lines of battle early on, just as the two dotted lines represent the "max" and "min" estimates of the current situation (the pessimistic estimate shows DS9 retaken by Dominion, the optimistic one shows UFP-Klingon-Romulan axis forces on Cardassian doorstep!).

Again, there's the contradiction that the "past" lines do not show AR-558 in Cardassian hands, even though during the occupation of DS9 it must have been.

I guess there is still room for saying that AR-558 was in some other contested star system which the Defiant also visited during her supply run, before or after Chin'toka - I do not remember the dialogue exactly.

"Tears of the Prophets" doesn't really present Chin'toka as a gateway to Cardassia or anything. It is simply a system within old Cardassian territory, and the first such system to be attacked by the FKR axis forces in the war - previously, all the action had been on the former UFP side of the border. One could consider the Chin'toka strike a cunning surprise attack at the enemy's flank or rear, instead of a simple frontal attack at a system between Bajor and Cardassia.

And it would be a tight fit to place Chin'toka between Bajor and Cardassia anyway. There are only 5.25 lightyears between those locations, per the DS9 TM. Note that there is no mention of going through Chin'toka when the FKR fleet finally hits Cardassia Prime - the ships depart from DS9 and head directly for Cardassia.

I wholly subscribe to the idea that Cardassia could consist of isolated bubbles instead of one integrated volume. In fact, it would make sense for ALL the Trek empires to be built up that way. There would be token spacelanes between the bubbles, sometimes claimed as territory by the owners of the bubbles and sometimes not. "Cutting" such a spacelane would be like trying to "cut" a prevailing wind - the lane would be a flexible thing across empty and worthless space. "Bubbles" could only be besieged in their very proximity.

A map of Cardassia could be a vast sea of lizard green, bordering on the equally vast navy blue expanse of the Federation. But zooming in, one would realize that each side only consisted of tiny bubbles around isolated star systems, and a Cardassian fleet could in fact maneuver deep inside the blue-colored regions of the map without being challenged, and vice versa.

Anyway, what about the 'Reckoning' map? I mean, Sisko seems to be pointing way over to the left, wherever that is (Cardassian space?). Maybe he's just waving his hands about like so many men past their sexual prime do.

The notion that it's not betazed, but Benzar that we're looking at (in the east) brings up new possibilities. However, in Rains06 there appears to be an awfully large Dominion presence in that area (if the yellow lines are anything to go by) - perhaps disproportionally large if the Romulans have kicked the Dominion out off Benzar nearly a year since.

There's nothing canonical around about Benzar's and Betazed's histories in the Federation, but just because Betazed may not have been a founder member (or even an important one in TOS), we've seen plenty more Betazoids lately than we have Tellarites or Andorians (another thing for the wish list!).
Besides, I always thought that Benzar only joined the UFP in the past few years, because of events in 'A Matter Of Honour' viz. a seperate Benzite fleet. This might suggest Benzar's a good distance away from the Federation centre. Maybe I'm wrong, but then again I've not seen the ep above in about 3 years.
Nonetheless I'm sticking with my "Dominion scrapping to get out of Betazoid space" notions.

Another thing: put simply, I cannot believe that Ar-558 is in the Chin'toka system - must take over the video otnight so's I can watch 'The Siege Of AR-558' again before I make any more irrational calls.
OHH hang on, it might.

If we consider the space to the west and north-west of DS9 as being Cardassian space, then maybe Cardassian space always spilled in as far as where AR-558 is positioned on the map, and maybe that position is Chin'toka. With a 3-dimensional amp, that might not be problem concerning Ferenginar. But then Jake and Nog's (aborted)journey to Ferenginar would have taken them through enemy lines unescorted, as Chin'toka/AR-558(?) wouldn't have been taken by then.

BUT then why, if in the episode 'When It Rains' (episode the map is taken from)where the Chin'toka system has been retaken by the Dominion, are there no lines around it? Naive question, I know.

Then again, the presence of what I think is a big Klingon fleet near AR-588(and Chin'toka?) might reinforce the fact that the Klingons are the only line of defense left for the moment.
BUT did Martok know enough about the surviving BoP at the time of the discussion to have his forces placed on high alert at AR-558/Chin'toka?

Too many variables.
Head hurts.
If anyone can find a conclusive argument contained in the above let me know.

------------------
Devil: Oh look at the time! I'm late for services.
Stone: Services?
Devil: A group of young teenagers that have been celebrating the Black Sabbath are planning on deep-sixing their gym teacher tonight. I'm gonna go and give them a little encouragement.

Brimstone. May it rest in syndication.

• The activity in the east is over Betazed.

• Chin'toka and AR-558 are not in the same system.
  AR-558 is and always was an isolated but very hot warzone, well awat from Cardassian lines. That way the two brats may have been able to get from Starbase375 to Ferenginar pretty much unimpeded.

• Chin'toka then is north-west of Cardassia Prime, and well west of AR-588 - after all, Damar and Weyoun in 'Tears Of The Prophets' are worried about losing actual Cardassian territory, not just conquered planets. Perhaps it's actually behind the Badlands looking from Ar-588.
  

Still have to see the episode.
This is getting to be a bit of an obsession, i must admit.

------------------
Devil: Oh look at the time! I'm late for services.
Stone: Services?
Devil: A group of young teenagers that have been celebrating the Black Sabbath are planning on deep-sixing their gym teacher tonight. I'm gonna go and give them a little encouragement.

Brimstone. May it rest in syndication.

Anyway, the yellow lines apparently do change between "The Reckoning" and "When it Rains..." - the big bulge "northeast" disappears, which could very well reflect the moving of Betazed from Dominion to Romulan hands. Romulans are the "northernmost" empire in the big DS9 galactic map, so it would make sense for them to strike from this direction, sort of (even if the scaling of the DS9 galactic map is way off).

What is interesting are the other changes between the episodes. The blue arrows are of course added as the FKR forces go to the offensive, and the Klingon and Comm Relay logos appear on the map. The yellow lines inside the center area (the original DS9 TM map) do not move, nor do the red arrows from "The Reckoning" disappear or move.

But inexplicably, Ferenginar moves to a new location! In "The Reckoning", it's where the DS9 TM map puts it, north-northeast from Bajor, In "When it Rains...", it is directly north of Bajor, and the star labeled NX-774 has also moved out of the way of the Comm Relay logo. The yellow grid on the background has also moved.

Did the Ferengi do the Pierson Puppeteer thing and decide to move their planet out of the war zone? If so, they appear to be moving in the wrong direction...

In the original location, AR-558 and thus the war zone wouldn't have so completely blocked access from SB375 to Ferenginar. With the move, a line-of-sight exists between SB375 and Ferenginar past the Comm Relay logo, but that line goes between AR-558 and Cardassia. Using the "bubble space" theory, this could be sufficient for Jake and Nog to travel. But equally possible is that the Dominion forces at AR-558 are getting reinforcements from Cardassia (or another location near Cardassia), so our heroes would risk running to these reinforcements.

What if the Comm Relay logo is not quite centered on the relay, but is instead referring to the nearest bright star not obscured by it? If it referred to the big white dot on the lower left corner, then there'd be a line from SB375 to Ferenginar all right. But doesn't it seem as if the dot-in-brackets just above to logo is labeled "AR-558"?

If AR-558 gets a label of its own, then this would further support the hypothesis that it is in a star system of its own and not inside the Chin'toka system. Chin'toka isn't explicitly labeled anywhere, and could for example be the system "east-southeast" from Bajor where forking red arrows start towards "northeast", and blue arrows strike from DS9 and from "northeast"... Although the target of a blue assault beyond Badlands is another possibility, as you suggest.

One final note: In the "The Reckoning" picture, one can see the legend box rather close up, and it seems that the explanations are given there for red and blue arrows and for solid and dotted yellow lines. What's more, it seems that the explanations are in form of actual English words, instead of just random strings of numbers. How, oh how could we get an even closer look?!?

The most comprehensive map of the alpha quadrant to date

------------------
Try not.
Do.
Or Do not.
There is no try.