It is, but I’ve seen this question asked earnestly so many times I just can’t tell anymore…

The hell could O'Brien have done to get such a reaction?

Nothing. Tom just wanted to scare O’Brien off. Tom was worried O’Brien knew Will well enough that an extended conversation would blow his cover.

That’s easy: unlimited SMS was common on most mobile plans in the US as early as the mid-2000s. Unlike the rest of the world, Americans had no financial incentive to use WhatsApp.

Thank you. It’s not a proper Trek vs. Wars thread until someone busts out the canon card. I can’t believe it took 5 hours!

It depends on whether you are approaching the question from a narrative perspective or an empirical perspective.

Narrative: The Federation wins because the Federation are The Good Guys™ and the Empire are The Bad Guys™. The Federation starts out on the back foot and it looks pretty grim in the middle, but ultimately they eke out a win. If this is a TNG two-parter it plays out the way "The Best of Both Worlds" did: engineering prowess combined with timely application of the human factor wins the day. If this is a DS9 arc or Discovery season, then Section 31 does what needs to be done.

Empirical: The Empire crushes the Federation like a bug. The Imperial industrial base is enormous and their power generation capabilities vastly surpass anything the 24th century Federation can muster:

• The Death Star could violently destroy an entire planet, reducing it to asteroids. In "The Die Is Cast," a combined Romulan-Cardassian fleet requires multiple volleys to simply glass the surface of a planet.
• The Millennium Falcon—a ship a little larger than a runabout—could cross the known galaxy (Tatooine on the rim, Alderaan in the core) in a day. Voyager estimated a similar journey would take 70 years at maximum cruising speed.
• In the 2360's the Federation built six Galaxy-class ships and maybe a few dozen more throughout the course of the Dominion war. These are among the largest, most powerful, most advanced ships the Federation can build, yet they are dwarfed by an Imperial II-class Star Destroyer and the Empire built hundreds of these in the mere two decades it existed.

It you could somehow snap these two spacefaring nations into existence and pit them against each other, it would be like late-WWII United States facing off against Napoleonic France. It's a blowout.

Gosh no, it's another one out of my "the Enterprise runs Windows 95" collection.

I can make a simple gif, but nothing like this. The reflection! Big props to who ever made it... 30 years ago.

I feel like you are overselling "Alliances," but to be fair, this shot was pretty cool

They definitely blew the effects budget for the season, though. They put it in the commercial and I swear, it was every other commercial on UPN that week.

Heh, of course he did. It takes a real big brain to kill a community where the only rule is “there are no rules.” A big, smooth brain.

We are absolutely worse off in the real 2024 than what "Past Tense" depicted.

• Vin asks Sisko for a "UHC card" when trying to identify him. A universal healthcare card. In the real 2024? Still no universal healthcare in the US.
• The famous billionaire's role in the story of "Past Tense" was to get residents of the districts access to "the nets" to tell their story. In the real 2024, Elon Musk would just take to Xitter and advocate for crackdowns.
• Once on the nets, the resident's stories actually swayed public opinion. Can you honestly imagine the stories they told making a dent in the zeitgeist, even if they trended on YouTube and TikTok?
• Sanctuary districts exist too, they're just on the border and privatized.

Ira Steven Behr set out to depict a horribly dystopic 2024, succeeded, and undershot.