this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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I think the much more frequent mentions of the Alpha quadrant in TOS are less about where the Federation was located and more about where the Enterprise was assigned to explore on its five-year mission.
Yeah quadrants don't pop up with regularity until the TNG. The movies make some mention, but TOS is set during the exploratory days where no one really knows what's out there
And of course later on the alpha quadrant gets most of the mentions since that's where the wormhole to the gamma quadrant is located. Though presumably Voyager would have spent half of their voyage home in the beta quadrant, had they not found a shortcut.
but when The Romulans are tricked into invading through the wormhole by the founders they do it with the excuse of making safe/saving the appha quadrant.
Although I am only halfway through DS9 I assumed the federation, Klingon and Romulans are all within the alpha quadrant.
The reality is that during the time of 90's Trek there were never any official maps of the Star Trek Galaxy put out. They were kind of just making it up on the fly. So yeah DS9 does make it seem like all the major powers are located at least partially in the Alpha Quadrent. As far as I know we didn't get any official galactic maps till the 2000's, and they were just doing their best to make the haphazard and inconsistent geography of the Star Trek Galaxy make sense.