To really talk about the history of the Klingon Empire, the first thing we need to do is understand where it's located in the Star Trek world. To do that, we need to look at the different cartographical sources to try and develop an integrated view of the Alpha and Beta quadrant. Since the newest and clearest canonical maps are from the late 2250s, that's the era we'll look at developing.

 

So first off, what does the canonical map look like? Well, we have two partial views of the galaxy in the 2250s from Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, respectively.

 

JBobRoony did a good job cleaning up the Discovery Season 2 map, here, which reflects the state of the the Klingon border with the Federation in 2257, at the height of T'Kuvma's war: https://www.deviantart.com/jbobroony/art/Star-trek-Discovery-Map-727512212 . It's interesting to note immediately that several star systems that we'd normally think of as Romulan are under Klingon control, such as D'Deridex and Dewa (the world that in the STO timeline will eventually be come to be known as New Romulus).

 

Not visible on that cleaned map, but relevant to discussion, is the Azure Nebula, which as you can see on the canonical original is located near Acamar and Starbase 157.

 

 

Now here in Strange New Worlds Episode 10, we can see the Romulan border (including, interestingly, some evidence that the Federation is 'testing the waters' with a "science station" as to how far they can reach around the edge of Romulan territory).

 

 

This one isn't super clean, but let's see if we can align it with the Disco map to get a baseline. Assuming the positions of Vulcan and Andoria are accurate on both maps, we end up with something like this:

 

 

This is a color-inveted map on the bottom for ease of transparency, so the red triangles are the same as teh teal triangles up top, generally corresponding with the position of the Federation's neutral zone outposts with the Klingon Empire prior to the outbreak of hostilities. Here's the gross details:

 

 

Now let's look at what FASA has to show us. The map below is a cleaned up version of the Klingon map from FASA's Klingon Intelligence Manual. Unfortunately, I do not have the artist's website to provide proper credit   But it gives us a few triangulation points, notably Organia, Qo'noS, and the Romulan border (albeit, circa the 2280s)

 

 

Here it is, first in overlay and second in simplified form

 

 

 

This represents a fairly significant change in territory regarding the Federation and I suspect it mostly relates to territorial concessions made as part of the Organian peace treaty to secure the Klingon neutral zone. Note that the Klingons gave up a number of strategically important systems "south" of the cession area, so it wasn't entirely one sided, and much of this area was probably more or less underdeveloped when it was ceded. It's also possible that some of this is 3d-2d perspective error, since we know that eventually a part of the Federation will wrap around Klingon space and lead to Federation territorial claims "behind" the Empire - so take the full implications of this border change with a grain of salt.

 

Also note that now the "triangle zone" has come into existence (it may have existed de facto previously). 

 

Now what about the bigger picture? Let's look at the admittedly very simplified Federation & Empire map (circa 2267):

 

 

Blue is the Federation, Light Red is the Romulan Star Empire, Gray is the Klingon Empire, White is the Gorn Confederacy, Yellow is the Interstellar Concordat, Dark Red is the Kzint Hegemony, a.k.a. the Mirak Star League, Gold is the Lyran Star Empire, and Green is the Hydran Kingdom. On this map, we'll ignore the capital system locations except for the Tholians (who will be our pivot point for rotations, located in the Azure Nebula) and then adjust to scale.

 

 

This gives us some new context on the cession area we saw - it appears that rather than being under Klingon control, it's more unaligned space similar to the triangle zone. We can probably write off the inaccurate Romulan NZ border shown here because the canonical neutral zone was already established in its SNW shape from TOS, and therefore the F&E map is probably just a case of simplification to work with the hex map. When this is all done, we end up with a neighborhood that looks something like this:

 

 

Key takeaways:

 

• The Klingon Empire has rivals at best and enemies at worst on almost all sides.
• The Federation went from neutral-to-friendly to very hostile over the years leading up to the Organian treaty. The Klingon Empire continues to view many Federation worlds as Klingon possessions under illegal Federation control. 
• The Mirak Star League, an alliance of Kzinti and Kzintoid states to the Empire's "west" has fought multiple wars with it and is regarded as a worthy opponent, being another aggressive warrior race. However, the Klingons remember the tales of past ages where their warriors voyaged far to the "west," even battling the Breen and interacting with the Cardassians, and they view a hostile power like the Star League as preventing their return to historical Klingon territory.
• The Lyran Star Empire are more Kzintoids. The are in an alliance of convenience with the Empire mainly because they intensely hate the Miraks for various historical and cultural reasons, and have fought fierce wars with the Empire in the past. 
• The Hydran Kingdom are former Klingon vassals who threw off Klingon and Lyran domination and at one point forced the Empire to accept a humiliating treaty that allowed them access to gas giant worlds inside Klingon space. Both sides are deeply resentful and distrusting of each other.
• After a period of raiding and victimizing the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons were forced by geopolitical reality to cooperate with the Romulans, including returning some conquered star systems to their control and engaging in military cooperation and technology transfer. The Klingons have always had a suspicion that the Romulans are looking for ways to betray them and have never (and will never) trust the Star Empire.
• The Tholians arrived in the Azure Nebula region around 2213 and went undetected by either the Klingons or the Federation for years. By the time they staked a claim to their region of space, they were sufficiently established that they were able to conquer a volume of space containing many Klingon (in most cases ex-Romulan) star systems. The Klingons fought several wars to eject the Tholians, all of them fruitless.
• Not shown here, but there is a small Gornoid polity (the Gorn Hegemony/Gorn Kingdom, depending on translation) in the vicinty of the Klingon-Federation neutral zone. They are not politically significant during this time period but will eventually become Klingon allies, at least in the STO timeline, post-Splinter Event. A much larger Gornoid civilization, the Gorn Confederacy (later, Gorn Alliance) exists to the "north" of the Federation.
• The Klingon Empire does have a large unexplored "backfield" but have generally failed to extensively exploit in the timeframe of the 2260s, looking instead to their neighbors as better propositions for obtaining strategic resources and securing growth potential.

 

Now that you have a general idea of the layout of 2250s-2260s space near the Klingon Empire, in the net blog we'll start talking about the history of the Empire with a high level overview of its major historical epochs.

Our numbers for today are 1765, 496, and 555.

 

• NCC-1765 was U.S.S. Rivoli, then U.S.S. Montana. She was originally authorized as Samaara as an Achernar class cruiser, and commissioned some time before 2266 with her new name. She was destroyed some time around 2270 and then replaced with the Enterprise class Montana (same registry) in 2273. In 2288, Montana went in for refit; the goal was to upgrade her to the "Super Balson" mini-dreadnought configuration. Like Defiant II, her engineering hull was completely replaced, but her saucer was mostly intact. Montana was ultimately completed in the superior New Jersey configuration. In 2302, she refitted to the CX configuration, in which she remained until she was decomissioned and scrapped in 2324. 
• There's no record of NCC-496 in the sources.
• NCC-555 was planned as U.S.S. Cimon, a Cochise subclass tactical escort. She was then selected for conversion to a fast escort, to be named U.S.S. Brunhild. Like her sister ship Wotan, she was never completed because of an inability to secure enough high performance warp engines. 

The last mod in the kind of whimsical series of food-related mods by Hroberht is Burger Jarl. The catch is, I want to tweak it a bit to be just a smidgen less lore busting. First though, let's make sure the mod is healthy in its basic state. The mod has no asset conflicts, but it is uncompressed and has both voice and facegen files. Let's see if we can crunch it down before we proceed any further (we'll also load up its patch for the animated eating mod). 

 

 

As you can see above, the mod is indeed a candidate for ESL flagging. I'm going to try something new here today, and I'll use ESPFE Follower instead of my usual tools. Let's see how this works... I'm a bit skeptical of this mod since it feels too automated for my taste. Hopefully I'll be pleasantly surprised. We'll be using the version that doesn't have a cell record check, though if you're considering this mod and are still learning the process, you might find the 'safety rail' version more valuable. 

 

 

What the hell is this?

 

 

On further review I see that this script apparently has unresolved, game breaking bugs, so that one can wait until the author actually publishes a working tool. Back to the old ESLify tools for now.

 

The good news is that the mod itself is clean, and the conflicts are fairly limited. The main thing I needed to do was to patch the Hearthfire gift Form ID lists. It took a little longer than usual, but only because my Leveled List deconfliction patch had reached 253 masters and I had to start a new one ? 

 

 

Before we continue, let's visit the exterior location and make sure everything looks right.

 

 

 

OK, so the good news is that there's no terrain intrusion or other issues. However, I don't want this building in the game by default. We'll approach this similar to how we do it with Sausages of Solitude - the building is only enabled when the Wabbajack display for Legacy of the Dragonborn is active. 

 

 

 

Having done that for all the exterior object refs and ACHRs, we're almost done here. Let's wrap up with a few tweaks. We'll make Carl the Jarl strangely resemble a certain someone...

 

 

And his burger-flipping buddy, too:

 

 

Almost done now, let's go to the bandit death items. We'll create a new subsidiary list that gives a very small chance of a Burger Jarl item showing up (and a higher chance of it showing up on the Dremora death items)

 

 

Finally, we'll replace some of the items on Sheogorath's feast table with this mod's new food.

 

 

And last but not least, let's see how it looks in-game!

 

 

The restaurant has disappeared (since Wabbajack isn't on display) and the feast for Pelagius has been "enhanced" a bit.