How many ships did Starfleet begin with? I'd have to peg Starfleet at 40,000 ships, maximum strength: warships, supply ships, troop transports, everything lumped in that number. A rough guess, I would say that at least 25% of Starfleet's ships were destroyed outright, with a much larger number heavily damaged, crippled, and in desperate needs of repair.

-How Many Ships Have The Carddasians Got?

None. Well, there may be several Galor-Class warships left over from when the Cardies switched sides, but those ships are in Federation Alliance custody as the Cardies are an occupied state. While they may get those ships back, it won't be for many *many* years...

-What is the state of San Francisco?

California.

-What is the state of Betazed?

Probably pretty bad off. It depends on whether or not the Dominion forces were *forced* off, or left peacefully when the war ended. If the Federation had to send in ground troops to retake it, its probably in about as bad condition as Cardassia, because I doubt the Dominion wouldn't practice "scorched earth" as an effective tactic.

Although, I vaguely remember hearing something about the possibilities of the Romulans liberating Betazed? Not sure about that one, although, if that *did* happen, it would be like Poland ... forcefully added to the Romulan's list of worlds ... (like Poland and the USSR)

-What are borders like in the Alpha Quadrant?

I think its safe to say that each of the "Big Three" (Fed, Klingons, Romulans) have gotten a big chunk of new territory, either out of Breen space, or Cardassian space.

Here's a question: did the Breen surrender too? I know they stopped fighting, but did they take all their ships back to their sector and close it off and play by themselves again; or did they completely surrender, which would mean there might be occupation forces on the Breen homeworld as well ...

-How many Federation lives were lost?

How about we just go for Allied losses total, okay? I'd say tens of billions, from the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, and whichever non-aligned worlds were attacked as well. In "Yesterday's Enterprise", Picard said 40 billion people had died in the war with the Klingons, so I'd think a number of 35 - 55 billion dead wouldn't be that far from the mark.

-What are the Klingons and Romulans up too?

Well, the Klingons are probably trying to rebuild their fleet. I think of the Three, theirs was the smallest, so they've got a lot of work to do. They're also occupying parts of Cardassia, and possibly even Breen. Hell, I wouldn't put it past them to be building a fleet to go into the Gamma Quadrant and finish off the Dominion!

I'd imagine the Romulans are doing much the same thing, rebuilding, laying low. Unless Breen space borders the Empire, the Romulans probably suffered the least (which isn't to say they didn't suffer, however). Since the Romulans represent the Soviets (sorta), I'd imagine there was some sort of massive Dominion push into Romulan space which was repelled at some point.

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Gore/Lieberman 2000
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"You still don't understand, do you MacLeod? I am the End of Time!" - Kronos

"You're history!" - MacLeod
***
"I think anybody who doesn't think I'm smart enough to handle the job is underestimating." - George "Dubya" Bush

[This message has been edited by JeffKardde (edited November 12, 2000).]

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"I do prefer the arse, but you can't dismiss the leg. They're joined at the hip, so to speak."

To defnd DarkStar, he is perhaps refering to the entire fleets including non-combat and small craft. To him this might have been an educated guess.

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Predict the unpredictable, but how do you unpredict the unpredictable?

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Communism. Who wouldn't like their neighbour thrown into a goulag?

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"I do prefer the arse, but you can't dismiss the leg. They're joined at the hip, so to speak."

Okay, let's clarify the whole "TPTB think the public are stupid thing".

TPTB by and large assume for the Trek movies that the audience has little or no prior Trek knowledge. If they reuse a previos character/plot device, it has to be something that can be explained easily. For instance, when I first say Star Trek II over a decade ago, I had no idea who Kahn was. Hell, I barely knew who Kirk was, having seen about 20 TNG episodes in total. It didn't matter ajot. It was quickly explained what Kirk had done, and then we got on with the movie. Sure, it might have had more resonance if you had seen "Space Seed", but even if you hadn't, you still understood everything. Even if you only had the barest of ideas of who Spock was, you were still moved by his death.

Star Trek III was, in some ways, a better Trek movie, but for the general public, it was less good, because it relied on them having seen the previous movie, and it was more steeped in "Trek Lore".

Again, this is reflected in the relative successes of Generations and First Contact. STG was much more "Trek mythology" than FC. Big time travel thing brings two generations of Enterprise Captain together in an anti-climatic way? Pah. Half-humans half-robits who are very scarey try to take over? Much better. (You could argue that the B-plot was VERY steeped in Trek's history, but it wsa presented in a relatively light-hearted manner that for the mainstream audience, it worked as a breather or comic relief from the heavy Borg stuff).

And factoring in how popular TNG was, a large number of people might actually know of the Borg anyway (refering to the casual watchers TSN once mentioned that actually watched TNG, but don't watch DS9 or Voyager). And in any case, the Borg are pissingly easy to explain. The first minuter of that movie is brilliant. In one short sequence, we're shown:
1/ The Borg do things on a BIG scale (and therefore, they're powerful)
2/ They turned Picard into one of them
3/ He has nightmares about it (and therefore is still scared by it).

Pretty much all the information you need to understand the movie. They didn't sit down and go into detail over Wolf 359, and (thank Primus) they didn't mention Hugh.
The Dominion would need a fair amount of explanation to be effective as villians. IN fact, I'm not sure how effective they'd be in a movie. The are a bit too complex to explain and use in 120 minutes. It could be pulled off, and I'd like to see it pulled off, but I'm not confident, and glad that they're not touching them.

Oh, and don't ask me to explain Trek VI. Maybe the cold war parallels were enough for everyone to get it. Maybe because it was the last TOS adventure everyone liked it. Maybe it was just really cool (gotta love that torpedo going straight through the Enterprise's hull), but still, in the end, it wasn't as successful as Trek VI.

Oh (again), Insurrection failed because it was lightweight pap. I love light-hearted Trek episodes, because they're a break from the norm. However, that's a norm of 26 episodes a year, not 1 movie every two.

But don't sit back too far - you've no arms.

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Remember December '59
The howling wind and the driving rain,
Remember the gallant men who drowned
On the lifeboat, Mona was her name.

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What did it mean to you
An early chat with death
To pull your body for a moment from your soul
--
Camper Van Beethoven
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Read chapter one of "Dirk Tungsten in...The Disappearing Planet"! Gonna donate half my money to the city.

For my bit, I enjoyed your post ... er, the first one, not the ranting one ... but I really didn't think I could contribute anything ...

I'll post a reply to your post if you'll post a reply to mine

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Star Trek Gamma Quadrant

Continuing to boldly go ...

Every single letter I write is like honey from the literature gods. They should all be studied, and stored in memory. For ever. For they are some of the finest arrangements of words that you will ever see. Worship my words, poor fools, for they have power.