Eugenics Wars: A terrible conflict developed on Earth during the early 1990's caused by genetically engineered superman, created as a part of a selective breeding program. These supermen felt they were superior to all other humans and should rule humanity. By 1993, Khan Noonien Singh was ruling over one quarter of the entire planet. Within a year, Khan's fellow supermen had seized power in forty nations, and they began to fight amongst themselves. Terrible wars ensued, and whole cities were bombed out of existence. By 1996 the supermen were overthrown, but Khan Noonien Singh and several of his followers escaped into space on the SS Botany Bay.

Khan Noonien Singh: A genetically engineered human, Khan Singh ruled more than a quarter of Earth from 1992-1996 and caused the Eugenics wars that finally drove him and and his loyal followers from Earth on the sleeper ship SS Botany Bay. His ship was discovered, and he and his crew were awakened by the USS Enterprise in 2267. After an attempted takeover of the Enterprise, Singh and his surviving followers were exiled by Capt. Kirk to Ceti Alpha V, where they remained until 2285, when the USS Reliant arrived to survey the planet as a possible test site for the Genesis Device. Embarking on a spree of revenge against Capt. Kirk, Singh commandeered the Reliant, killed most of the crew of the Regula I Space Laboratory, stole the Genesis Device, and severely crippled the Enterprise before detonating the Device on board the Reliant inside the Mutara Nebula, subsequently killing himself and creating the Genesis Planet. Singh's behavior in the late 20th century spurred Earth, and later the United Federation of Planets, to ban genetic engineering for improvement of sentient species among its members, although there are still limited ways to make genetic alterations to yourself or you child on the black market.

World War III: During the mid-21st century, some 34 million people died in this nuclear war. Equally as tragic, however, is the events that happened after the war was over. Faced with total destruction, the people of Earth reverted back to an almost barbaric state, and individual rights were frequently obstructed. Earth was still recovering in the early 22nd Century, and Philosopher Liam Dieghan advocated a return to simpler life. In contrast with popular belief, this war was NOT the same as the Eugenics Wars.

First Contact: Dr. Zefram Cochrane built the first warp-capable ship after World War 3. Built from the remains of an intercontinental ballistic missile, It was dubbed the Phoenix. It was launched April 5, 2063 from the Midwestern section of the continent of North America (formerly known as the United States of America). When the Phoenix went to warp, a nearby Vulcan scout vessel noticed the warp signature and played Earth a little visit...this was known as First Contact. This extraordinary event lead to the creation of the United Federation of Planets.
Something interesting about this event, was the attempt by the Borg to prevent the flight of the Phoenix. The Borg sent a spherical ship into the past to prevent first contact which would have allowed the Borg to assimilate the entire alpha quadrant. Another interesting fact about this event was that when Dr. Cochran was told by the crew of the USS Enterprise-E and USS Defiant survivors (who followed the Borg back in time to try and prevent their attempt at assimilation) that he was to become a great historical figure because of his warp flight; he decided that he didn't want to go through with it. It was only because the crew of the Enterprise made him go through with it that he did it.

Warp Drive: As we are all familiar, Warp, which is an abbreviation for Time Warp, is the concept of motion through the fourth dimension as a means of relative motion through three-dimensional 'normal space.' Based upon Einstein's Theory of Relativity, a.k.a. E=3DMC2, movement through normal space is impossible, as the energy required would have to increase geometrically with the amount of fuel required to move toward the speed of light. Contrapositively, if one were to achieve the speed of light within normal space, ones own mass would begin to alter geometrically as energy and speed leveled off.
Zephram Cochran discovered, after WWIII, that movement through the fourth dimension would be possible with fossil fuels and an ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile, a then-popular weapon similar to a Fulton torpedo) by creating specific gravity field immediately in front of the moving vehicle and then attaining a speed equal to 1/3 of light speed in relative motion and, essentially, driving the vehicle into the void created in space time. Because the vehicle actually moves at space-normal in real space and magnetically through the fourth dimension relative to normal, three dimensional space, Einstein's Theory is preserved, mass does not affect Energy relative to motion and the Phoenix was able to travel a light year from Earth and return in time for First Contact with the Vulcan race.
Travel through space was further revolutionized by the step from fossil fuels to matter/anti-matter interaction. By combining the two, sufficient energy was released to allow the creation of huge Warp fields, moving larger and larger vessels more and more rapidly through space.
Transwarp makes use of this technology by driving the vehicle at a higher speed in normal space prior to entering the fourth dimension. Because a matter/anti-matter reaction has almost no change in mass (mass is preserved in the conversion as matter reverts to anti-matter, anti-matter to matter), the geometric increase in the mass of fuel required is proportionately smaller until the 95th percentile of light speed.
At this point the ship's actual relative mass can begin to change and the energy and relative speed alter, and THEN enter the 4th dimension at higher relative velocity. This increases the speed and mass of the vessel in the 4th dimension and increases the motion of the vessel through time, thus increasing its relative speed in the third dimension, thus moving the vessel faster, 'Trans' Time War, hence the term transwarp.
The Borg have already mastered this technology and significant advances are possible in the field of retrieving it from them.

Romulans: The Romulans are an offshoot of the Vulcan Race, who left Vulcan two thousand years ago, not wanting to follow the teachings of Surak--the Vulcan who preached off absolute logic. Now residing primarily on their homeworlds of Romulus and Remus, this passionate and warrior-like civilization has expanded their Romulan Star Empire much further then that.
In 2344, however, the Romulans went too far, conducting a brutal attack on the Klingon outpost, Narendra III, the Romulans managed to actually assist their enemies--the Klingons and Federation--to become closer allies, as the Federation starship, Enterprise-C, was the first to arrive on the scene to provide aid to the outpost. This incident, headed by Captain Rachel Garrett of the Enterprise, led to closer Federation-Klingon ties in the following years.
However, when the Bajoran wormhole was discovered, the Romulans began to see the Dominion as their greatest threat, and in 2371, the Romulan government (commanded by the Romulan Senate) attempted to collapse the galaxy's only known stable wormhole, in order to prevent an attack by the Dominion. It was only due to Deep Space Nine's Chief of Operations, Miles O'Brien, and his accidental leap into the future, shedding light on the Romulans' intended plans, that this attack was thwarted.

Klingons: A Humanoid warrior race, originally from the planet Qo'noS. These proud and tradition-bound people value honor above all else, and look often to the insight of Khaless the Unforgettable--an emperor in ancient Klingon history, who has acquired an almost mythological history about him, he was cloned in later years, and now serves as figure head emperor of the Klingon Empire, although the Klingon Council and their chancellor make all meaningful decisions. The military power of the Empire is largely respected, and they make a powerful ally to the Federation. Although the long held peace between the Klingons and the Federation was broken recently during a Klingon incursion into Cardassian space, we have become allies again in an effort to fight off the Dominion forces.

Starfleet: Chartered by the Federation in 2161, the mission of this exploratory, scientific, diplomatic, and defensive agency is to "boldly go where no man has gone before." With their prime directive of non-interference, the most visible part of Starfleet is their extensive network of starships and space stations operating out in deep space.

Captain James Tiberius Kirk: The life, and extraordinary Starfleet career, of James Tiberius Kirk began in the wheat fields of Iowa on the North American continent of the planet Earth in the old calendar year 2238. The younger of two sons born to Starfleet Commander George Kirk and his wife Winona, James Tiberius seemed for a while a most unlikely prospect to head up one of the most vigorous and successful crews in Starfleet history, enduring a brief teenage phase of rebellious and somewhat antisocial behavior which may have been triggered in part by an horrific early experience of space travel young Kirk experienced while joining his father on a mission to liberate the surviving colonists on planet Tarsus Four from the evil predations of Governor Kodos. A later experience in space, during his sixteenth year, and meeting with legendary Captain Robert April -- fittingly enough, aboard the USS Enterprise -- helped to decide young Kirk upon a course of action which would see his entrance a year later into the Academy in San Francisco, where he befriended Doctor Carol Marcus, who would later give birth to his only son David, and Gary Mitchell, a promising cadet who became his friend and for a brief time, first officer aboard the selfsame Enterprise. Kirk demonstrated inventive thinking, the boldness of youth, and a visionary grasp of history and other subjects while at the Academy, even becoming legendary for using unorthodox tactics in order to achieve his classroom objectives; the much-storied Kobiyashi Maru exercise, which Kirk became the first person ever to defeat, albeit by using questionable methods, was only one example of the legend which quickly grew around the young firebrand. He was first posted to the USS Republic as an ensign, where he quickly distinguished himself; later he transferred to the USS Farragut, aboard which he served as one of Captain Garrovick's ablest young officers until a disastrous initial encounter with the Cloud Vampire creature of planet Tycho IV resulted in the deaths of Garrovick and many other officers, and introduced an element of self-doubt and guilt into Kirk's heretofore sturdy emotional makeup; he blamed himself for eleven years for an incident in which he thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that he has failed to act in time to save his fellow crew members, when in fact his Phaser weapon would have been useless no matter how quickly it had been fired at the creature. Kirk's entire psychological profile, in fact, displays flourishes of self-recrimination not uncommon for a deeply conscientious individuals in charge of the lives and welfare of many fellow beings but it is also Kirk's innate optimism, his often-proclaimed refusal to accept defeat gracefully so long as he believed he had a chance to yet prevail, that blazed his trail to the captaincy of a starship in his thirtieth year, making him the youngest individual ever to assume command of a Federation starship during the late twenty-third century. Kirk's brief stint as an Academy instructor, following his experience aboard the Farragut, may have enabled him to increase his body of experience in dealing with fellow officers and crew, but it was primarily useful to him in identifying his command crew for his upcoming years of service aboard the Enterprise, for it was at that time that he first acquainted himself with Lieutenant Commanders Montgomery Scott and Leonard McCoy, who became in short order his chief engineer and chief medical officer, respectively. Kirk himself held the rank of Lieutenant Commander while at the Academy, and then later, for a year's time of service, aboard the USS Yorktown under Captain Heihachiro Nogura, later promoted to Admiral and made overseer of Starfleet operations. Finally he took command of the starship Enterprise in 2265, succeeding Captain Christopher Pike, and inheriting from him a half-Vulcan second officer and science officer named Spock, with whom he formed a close friendship. Two of his former students from Starfleet Academy, ensigns Hikaru Sulu and Penda Uhura, later joined his crew, and by the year 2267, Kirk had already built for himself a solid reputation as a brilliant, decisive, and often innovative ship commander, until an unprecedented foray beyond the Great Barrier into extra-galactic space had a profound effect upon his first officer, Lieutenant Commander Gary Mitchell, altering his consciousness and greatly amplifying his latent psychic abilities, resulting in his transformation into a kind of psychic super-being whose ambition and callousness forced Kirk and crew to destroy him, which led to Spock's appointment to succeed him as Enterprise first officer. The mission records and assorted folk tales surrounding that first five-year mission would fill volumes of Data Tapes (and have done so), but Kirk was apparently gifted with the knack of being exactly where he was needed and knowing exactly what he had to do to get the job done on behalf of Starfleet and the Federation. While he was valiant in the face of armed aggression, he also showed a willingness to push aside the use of force in order to arrive at a peaceful conclusion which benefited all parties concerned. While he was forthright about his willingness to fight Gorn or Romulan or Klingon, he was equally adept at outthinking or outguessing hostile aliens and even aggressors within the Federation itself, and his inventive strategies, when combined with Spock's superior fund of knowledge and Vulcan training and McCoy's humane respect for life and doctor's instincts, proved an indomitable combination. The USS Enterprise was the first to encounter newly-cloaked Romulan ships in 2267, briefly engaged in warfare with the Klingons before the Organian Peace Treaty was imposed upon both sides, permanently disabled the so-called Doomsday Machine and effectively neutralized the extra-galactic Kalandan invasion threat, defeated subterfuge on a dozen or more worlds which was aimed at destabilizing Federation interests, and pushed out the boundaries of Federation knowledge. As the only starship of the Constitution class to survive its five-year mission, Enterprise became the logical choice to be upgraded with improved engines, weapons, and other systems; and it was the newly-promoted Admiral Kirk who reluctantly took on the desk job of overseeing its refit. Despite his hero status with the people of Earth, the Admiral was profoundly ambivalent about his new elder-statesman status, and the V'Ger crisis of 2273 enabled him to pull some strings in order to regain command of the upgraded Enterprise in time to once again command its legendary crew in order to avert catastrophe, and it was this mission which may have been the first in Starfleet history to encounter a product of Borg engineering, since it is suspected that the Voyager 6 spacecraft had encountered not a "planet of living machines," to use then Captain Spock's words, but rather, a civilization of beings who had been deeply assimilated into a planet wide Borg collective. From 2273 to 2278, the second five-year mission of the Enterprise was commanded once again by Captain Kirk, who finally resigned himself to the dull routine of the Admiralty once more, until the Mutara Nebula crisis of 2284, during which the malevolent predations of the twentieth-century madman Khan Noonien Singh, whose cryogenically sleeping form had been revived from a two-century sleep by Kirk during his initial mission on the Enterprise, resulted in the loss of the USS Reliant and its captain, as well as the reported death of Captain Spock. Later events forced Kirk to jeopardize his entire career and those of his command crew in a bizarre twist of fate, which saw him stealing his beloved Enterprise from Starbase dry-dock in order to rescue the previously thought dead Spock and avert a Klingon capture of the Genesis technology. Kirk returned to Earth aboard a captured Bird of Prey in time to use time-warp technology, which he and his crew had accidentally discovered during their first mission, during the Whale Probe crisis. A later mission to the center of the galaxy seemed to be Kirk's swan song, before he was called out of early retirement at the behest of Starfleet Command to head up the diplomatic mission to the Klingon homeworld to ferry Gorkon to Earth. Kirk's ability to survive the ordeal which followed enabled him and his crew to ferret out the conspirators on both sides of the Federation-Klingon conflict which paved the road for peace with the aliens with whom Kirk had waged a very personal, at times consuming battle for most of his career. Kirk was only married once, during a period of amnesia on a planet populated by North American Indians from the planet Earth, and his only birthed child, Doctor David Marcus, was killed during the latter half of the Genesis crisis. Kirk seemed to be a very lonely man who had thousands of friends and admirers, a warrior who enjoyed peace, a scholar who could mix it up with the best of them and who could actually beat a Vulcan at three-dimensional chess. His imagination and enthusiasm for the demands of his job distinguished Kirk in other ways, too; his inventions of "corbomite" and "fizzbin" enabled him to defuse more than one threat to his own safety and the safety of his crew. Kirk was thought to have died at the age of sixty-three, aboard the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-B, an Excelsior Class starship during its maiden run, but he mysteriously reappeared from a temporal vortex seventy-eight years later to aid Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Galaxy Class Enterprise-D in defeating the El Aurian lunatic Soran on the planet Veridian III; this mission is considered a success, despite the fact that the Enterprise-D was destroyed and the legendary Captain Kirk finally, in fact, died. That Kirk later reappeared alive, after facing been thought dead on two occasions, as a result of an insidious Romulan/Borg alliance to employ nanite technology in his body to use him against the Federation, is tribute to the durability of the man and of his service to the fleet and to our Federation; Kirk's refusal to kill Captain Picard and their combined efforts to defeat the conspiracy of Romulans and Borg's speaks volumes about his courage, spirit, and sense of dedication to Starfleet. Most recently, Kirk participated in a joint effort with Vulcans and the crew of Picard's Enterprise-E in an effort to destroy the airborne botanical plague which threatened the very continued existence of the Federation itself, in the so-called Symmetrist crisis, after the original Vulcan conspiracy of three centuries ago.

Khitomer: A Class-M planet near the Romulan/Klingon border, Khitomer was the site of the historic peace conference in 2293, that was the beginning of the rapprochement between the UFP and the Klingon Empire. A Klingon Outpost was also established here, and was the the target of the Khitomer Massacre by the Romulans in 2346.

Treaty of Algernon: Around the year 2160 the Romulan Wars between Earth and The Romulan Star Empire ended with the signing of the Treaty of Algeron. This treaty established what is known as the Romulan Neutral Zone, an area of space approximately one light year across. The treaty was negotiated by sub space radio and stated that entry into the zone by either the Federation or the Romulans would constitute an act of war. Throughout the years, the Neutral Zone has been invaded several times by both sides but diplomacy has prevented conflict. The signing of the treaty also prevented the Federation from developing or using cloaking technology on Federation Starships. This began to change in the early 2370s. With the Dominion becoming a threat, the Romulans 'loaned' a Clock to the Federation ship Defiant for use in the Gamma Quadrant. Starfleet requested an amendment to the Treaty of Algeron (Which said the Federation could not use or develop cloaks, period) because of the Borg threat (later the Dominion, Krazzle, and Order threats too) as well as the hostile nature of the area itself. They sited the Defiant and cooperation between the two governments over the Romulan Cloak used aboard her for missions in the Gamma Quadrant. The Romulans agreed, IF, they were given all Stellar Cartography and Astrometerics data learned. However the Romulans wouldn't give the Federation any cloaks, but the Klingons did. Since the war with the Dominion, tensions have risen because of this.

WOLF 359: Wolf 359 was the site of a catastrophic battle between Borg and Federation forces in early 2367. This battle, which was an attempt to halt the Borg advance into Terran space involved over 40 Starfleet and Klingon starships. In overall command,. and the head of Starfleet's' Tactical, was Starfleet Admiral J.P. Hanson. Unfortunately, the battle was a complete debacle for the Federation. The loss of over 11,000 lives and 39 starships at the hands of the Borg Collective, however, classes this as the worst Starfleet disaster since the Salem Station incident. Among the Starfleet starships lost were: USS Tolstoy (Rigel Class, NCC-62095), USS Melbourne (Nebula Class, NCC-62043), USS Kyushu (New Orleans Class, NCC-65491), and USS Saratoga (Miranda Class, NCC-31911). This affected the Federation greatly since the loss of so many ships weakened the Federation fleet. This battle was also greatly affected the lives of many of the Starfleet officers who survived, since some of their loved ones were killed during the fighting.

Bajoran Occupation: After the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor ended in 2369, the Federation offered aid to the peaceful Bajorans, and took over operation of the mining station Terok Nor that the Cardassians left behind. The station was later redesignated Deep Space Nine, and now serves as gateway to the newly discovered Bajoran Wormhole, the only known stable wormhole, and gateway to the Gamma Quadrant.

Summary: On April 5, 2063, in the aftermath of the Eugenics Wars and WWIII, Zefram Cochrane made the first warp flight in human history, which lead to First Contact with the Vulcan, and the eventual founding of the Federation. The United Federation of Planets, founded in 2161, is an ever growing alliance of approximately 150 planetary governments and colonies, united for mutual trade, exploratory, cultural, diplomatic, and defensive endeavors, based largely in the Alpha Quadrant, and expanding also into the Beta Quadrant of the Galaxy. The UFP is governed by the Federation Council, who meets in San Francisco, on Earth--the home base of the UFP--and is made up of representatives from the various member planets. Although the Federation strives to live in a peaceful manner, and has done an extraordinarily good job at it, there have been tensions between both the Klingons and the Romulans. However, after an almost century long conflict with the Klingons, we were happy to establish peace with the signing of first the Organian Peace Treaty, and later the Khitomer Accord in 2293. And yet even with the mighty Klingon-Federation Alliance, tensions still run high among the Romulans and the Cardassians, especially with Cardassia's recent alliance with the Dominion.