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I just got my first look at "Star Charts" as well, and the biggest problems I have are with the Klingons. I was wondering about some of the movie references especially. Look at the route of the Enterprise-A (2293) -- the ship goes from Earth to Qo'noS, then heads out towards nowhere in particular, and then goest to Rura Penthe.
It doesn't make sense for the Enterprise to go all the way to Qo'noS -- they must have met Gorkon's ship at the border. And weren't they going to have the original conference on Earth?
Another weird location: In "Redemption," after Sela's ships breach the tachyon net, Picard orders the fleet to fall back to Gamma Eridon. Why the heck would they do that if Gamma Eridon were fifty light-years away?
Regarding the Dominion War maps, specifically the lower left one: Yeah, it's kinda weird that some of the arrows don't match up head to head. However, in three-dimensional space, it actually kinda makes sense that the Allies would try to attack the rear of an advancing Dominion Fleet. For that one group of red arrows just below Starbase 375, maybe it was a Dominion fleet that had been cut off by Starfleet's advance into the Bajor Sector, and the attacks we see are a follow-up advance. Yeah, DS9 never showed the Federation winning many battles aside from the really important ones, but there had to have been a FEW successful campaigns!
Overall, this was a pretty good book. Excellent artwork, and I can't argue with most of the positioning, though I've had a few different ideas myself.
Oh, I did have ONE major gripe: the map of the Dominion. By a rough estimate the "New Founder Homeworld" is approximately one thousand light-years away from the wormhole. Odo returned to the Great Link at the end of "What You Leave Behind." Are you telling me that a dinky runabout travelled one thousand light-years in the space of a commercial break??
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posted
I've had a bit more time to go through the maps now. I did find the Mutara nebula eventually - it's outside the main map area, right next to Alpha Ceti, which Mandel insists is Ceti Alpha.
I can't agree with that, since it's half a thousand lightyears too far for a sublight ship to travel. Plus SB12 and Gamma 400 aren't the closest things to it now, as required by "Space Seed". I'd have preferred another, nearby and fictional star in the constellation Cetus to stand for Ceti Alpha. Oh, well.
The Gamma Eridon thing is probably done so that the star could be the real Gamma Eridani. It does make for a weird fallback plan, though. OTOH, this could mean Picard wanted to retreat politically and not just tactically - so he'd have to go well behind the front lines of the civil war in order to truly disengage.
I agree that the routes of the E-A and the NX-01 could use some fine-tuning...
I'm not worried about the Founder hideout world issue, though. The runabout could merely have been the vehicle that took Odo through the wormhole, after which he boarded a Jem'Hadar battleship escorted by 500 battlebugs flying in formation. Did we see him use the runabout specifically to beam down to the new hideout planet?
In the Dominion war maps, the attacking arrows in the first map are clearly marked with "CU", "JH" and "RE" letters, obviously meaning Cardassian Union, Jem'Hadar and Romulan Empire/Expedition, respectively. Later on, some of the inward-pointing green arrows get labeled "JH", though...
In any case, if you superimpose the first map on Mandel's map, you get the Romulan action just about where the Romulans are supposed to be. And the main thrust of the Dominion attack goes through Betazed, threatens Vulcan, and hits Benzar and Bolarus in a flanking maneuver, just as it should.
What the Dominion is doing expanding to the left of Cardassia is a mystery, though. Are they fighting the Breen? Or just occupying the empty space in that direction before the Breen can get to it? I'd have done that part differently if I had had a better view of the war maps originally. Inserted UFP space to the left, probably, and moved the Talarians a bit to accommodate this UFP pseudopod.
About the maneuver arrows in general... I think it could be said that the big fleets in the war roamed the sectors quite independently and freely, not really minding the "lines of battle" all that much. Lines of supply would not be all that important if the fleet was only out to raid. But the major flanking attack to the upper right would definitely have required lines of supply, which were an issue in the "Rapture" briefing etc.
I wonder what's up with separate locations for AR-558 and the AR-558 comm relay. Or Argus and the Argus array. Well, the latter could be a simple mistake - my original map toyed with both general locations, and Mandel might have forgotten to erase one. And AR-558 was highly mobile on the war maps, so this might be a rationalization of sorts for that.
Incidentally, Sector Gamma is probably right "below" or "above" the Cardassia sector... Sector Beta could be in the middle of pages 64-65, and Sector Alpha somewhere off the galactic plane but near the quardant border.
posted
Gripe: The betrekke(a)d nebula is shown to be in federation space. There was a throwaway line in WOTW that the Cardies and the Klingons had a conflict over it.
Another thing, the tong beak (or whatever) nebula is shown to be in Cardassian space. Yet in Soldiers of the Empire, they had to go around the nebula before they reached the border.
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Sector Beta could be in the middle of pages 64-65, and Sector Alpha somewhere off the galactic plane but near the quardant border.
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