Uraniun235 wrote:Hey, Gil, I like how you conveniently ignored my theory that Klingon sensor outposts in the region (what, you think they're going to leave that border utterly undefended?) might make it impractical for Romulan ships to move at high warp, as well as the possibility of said sensor outposts or perhaps the "terrain" of the space in the area making any route but the one intersecting the Federation blockade impractical.
How could the sensor outposts detect them? Not one but two characters asked the Captain "You've found some way to defeat the Romulan cloak?" Those two being Sela and the Admiral who gave Picards silly blockade the thumbs up. Sela, who at this point had been crossing the border with impunity and even turned up in the Klingon capital at the Duras residence during Redemption part 1. This means up to this point, no one has been able to successful detect the current model of Romulan cloaking device, since the sensors that are bound to surround the Klingon homeworld must have failed to detect her ship.
As for "terrain in space", I direct you to an astronomy book. Look up what "hard vacuum" entails and then look about how far stars are apart and what a huge volume that is. Interstellar space is a whole colossal fucking lot of empty nothing with a particle that failed to be captured into a forming starsystem every few meters.
It cannot have terrain, because it is as close to nothing as you can get, and far closer to nothing than we can create in a lab. Likewise, it cannot have routes, because it's largely homogenous, meaning one patch of nothing is functionally identical to another patch of nothing.
Sure, it's not explicitly endorsed by canon facts, but at least they've got some basis. Can't you spare just a few moments to read->comprehend->post before cut-and-pasting your "why can't they just fly around?" argument? I think there's a logical fallacy in there somewhere...
My position is based on knowledge of astronomy and common sense. I know that space is
really fucking big and that I know that 200 million kilometers is relatively tiny compared the vastness of space. I also know that any group that can travel faster than the speed of light in ships can literally move around a blockade of that size, because I know that even if they were limited to the speed of light, light travels at 300,000 km/s, and therefore going around such a barrier wouldn't take more than a few dozen minutes of their time. I also know that space isn't filled with the crystal walls that people in the dark ages thought it was, and hard vacuum is as far from a barrier that you can get. Taking this all together, common sense would tell me that they shouldn't have any trouble flying around the blockade. This makes sense to me and in fact when I laid out the problem for a friend, the first words that came out of her mouth were literally "Why didn't they just fly around it?" meaning that flying around made sense to her as well, indicating that something is not inherently wrong with my understanding unless both of us are crazy (the second phrase out of her mouth was "Well, it's a TV show, and they wouldn't have a plot if the characters weren't completely stupid", but I know you people think that discussing the writers is worse than basing an argument on science and common sense).
