*Sfdebris.net

Probably the most famous of the ancient sneak attacks was the battle at Teutoburg Forest. The Germanic-Roman general Arminius defected and ambushed the Roman Legions there, killing pretty much all of them. The loss was so severe that the Romans basically gave up entirely on trying to incorporate Ger...

The versus has been weird since the beginning. One of the earliest episodes, Balance of Terror, had that nuke which seriously damaged the Enterprise, but standard torpedoes didn't seem to do much but scratch the shields and shake everybody. Realistically they would be as powerful as a strategic nuke...

To be fair to Troi, her dumb getup was probably more comfortable than the actual Starfleet uniforms from TNG seasons 1 and 2. Those actually caused the actors a bunch of back problems due to how tight they were. Seven's catsuit had the same issue except it was even more extreme. When your actor is p...

Considering it's the only thing on the subject, Mandel's star maps book is probably the closest thing we have to canon for galactic geography. In there the Galaxy is show to be split into the four quadrants with the Terran system forming one of the axes running towards the galactic center. The Feder...

What's weird is that the research engaged in by the Hansens shows that knowledge of the Borg was possessed by Federation scientists decades before Q Who. Entire planets in travel distance of Earth like the El Aurian's had been wiped out already as well. Their existence couldn't have been a huge secr...

Yeah, I've tried my hardest over the years to come up with a decent theory for how the thing actually works, but I always reach a point where I realize each person on the holodeck would need to be encased in a self-contained tread-milled sub-unit, with its own gravity that is networked to every othe...

Just think of some of the actual numbers involved. The Federation sounds absudly large (thousands of light years, although my quick Googling seems to be a bit confused about whether that's across or cubic light years). That'll contain many tens of thousands of stars, maybe even millions. How's a bo...

It's hard for me to really picture a real Neutral Zone due how much time I spent looking at the big map in Geoffrey Mandel's Star Charts book back in the day. The 2D format gave the impression that the Neutral Zone was there primarily to affect containment over Romulan expansion. It was shown to alm...

Even when I was a kid I didn't really get the logistics of this whole operation. Were the soldiers/villagers just actors? Were they some sort of holograms? Maybe androids? Whatever they are, they clearly have the ability to recognize a new face and then remember it for the duration of the program, s...

A "scale model" space elevator wouldn't make any sense whatsoever if it was 1/10 or 1/100 sized. The reason the concept works at all is that the elevator goes up to a platform in geostationary orbit which is stabilized by a counterweight at something like twice the distance. Making the thing smaller...