There's something in Star Trek TNG that bothers me about the Federation's wars before the start of the series.
It's not the wars by themselves, in fact the sheer quantity explains how the Cardassians could push the Federation so much when the Klingon could easily smack them around while they were still recovering from their latest civil war - those wars and the looming Romulan threat (because the Federation knew better than not expect trouble with the Romulans into isolation) stretched Starfleet thin enough to keep it from dedicating fifteen Ambassadors to stomp the Cardassian navy into oblivion.
No, what bothers me is that one of those enemies is the Talarians. Because when we see one of their warship classes, the one they use to patrol the border with the Federation, with whom they recently had a war, what we see is... Disappointing, to say the least. The model is much smaller than a Galaxy-class, but they could well have larger ships around and the three that showed up were simply the closest. Their weapons, on the other hand, are neutral particle weapons, x-ray lasers, and merculite rockets - or, in other terms, near-basic particle weapons (if they were CHARGED particle weapons they would have been basic, but at least they figured out how to fire streams of neutrons), beam weapons that Starfleet got rid of the moment they figured out how to get decent range out of phasers (and if I'm right, that's the main difference between phase cannons and proper phasers, the superior range of the latter) over a century before this encounter, and kinetic weapons whose warhead wouldn't threaten an ancient K'tinga as long as it has the shields up and with propulsion that EARTH Starfleet was already phasing out a couple years before the Earth-Romulan War. And as if it wasn't bad enough, SNW confirms they were already in space when Pike was in command of the Enterprise NCC-1701, meaning that they had the chance to grab better weapons for reverse-engineering when the Klingon Empire was in near economic collapse after Praxis blew up, and yet they completely failed to procure a few disruptors and photon torpedoes. Three Talarian warships against the Enterprise-D It's the equivalent of building three Liberty Ships, arming them with twenty carronades each, and then going after a Ticonderoga-class cruiser while broadcasting their intentions. And just like Picard could have won by sending out a few shuttlecrafts with photon torpedoes strapped on them if he decided to be a jerk (though he'd never risk the pilots' lives), the Tico could just send out the Seahawks to spare the Navy the expense of decommissioning three Penguin missiles.
Exactly, how are we supposed to believe the Talarian state could survive a war with the Federation? Even with the Cardassians, the Tzenkethi, and the Tholians having their own wars, the state of hostility with a semi-resurgent Klingon Empire until the Battle of Narendra III, and the looming Romulan threat, what we see indicate that a dozen obsolescent Mirandas (budget cruisers of the 23rd century, reduced to glassy yet overgunned destroyers by the 24th) and a couple Excelsiors (once the closest thing to a Starfleet battleship we've seen on screen, now old but still serviceable cruisers) could have wiped out the entire Talarian fleet in a week. They wouldn't even have had to use fancy tactics, just a beeline toward Talar to force a confrontation and then shoot down the entire fleet from distance with photon torpedoes, with concentrated phaser fire taking out what got through - even if the Starfleet ships ran out of torpedoes before the Talarians ran out of warships, the losses would have been staggering. And the Talarian propensity for war crimes would have pissed Starfleet off enough to just reach out and slap the fight out of them.
Did anyone ever explained how the Talarian state actually survived the war?
