I think we can fully consider the Four Years War completely apocryphal at this point: it's solidly said in "The Vulcan Hello" that there has been no formal conflict between the Federation and the Klingon Empire since the Augment crisis in ENT, because there was no central Klingon government to have a conflict with. There's just been wildcat raids and piracy, like the one that killed Burnham's parents. --StarSword (talk) 23:30, January 27, 2019 (UTC)
- True, but we really have no mechanism in place to 'decommission' a valid source, even if it conflicts heavily with canon - nor am i interested in debating such a possibility. the Gold Key Comics and such are heavily off-key with other sources but we've explored them here without focus on whether or not their status can be reconciled with canon.
- Also, the extent of the year-long Klingon war that seems to be resolved in the show seems to have fallen into place and could leave us wiggle room to conflate the DSC war with the Four Years War - due to length of years the name of the 4YW is contradictory, but since the two conflicts have very similar themes and time periods, many of the non-canon events of the 4YW could be 'shoehorned' into the very wide DSC war - with just ignoring the apocryphal length and name of the 4YW.
- After all, we saw only a few of the key Klingon houses and war zones of what must have been a very much wider conflict in the television version. the unseen houses doing battle with the unseen parts of Starfleet could be accounted for by the FASA text(s), and especially the accounts of the Constitution fleet being too far away and too elite to be involved are actually synchronized according to our recent premiere.
- Since we can observe similarities, with only the name and length of the 4YW being completely contradictory, we could approach it from the angle of reconciling the 4YW events as background of the canon war, and heavily downplay the name "Four Years War" - captainmike
03:41, January 28, 2019 (UTC)
- Just to chime in. A similar case is the contradictory accounts of the Earth-Romulan War. I agreed with Captain Mike to treat it similarly. For all we know, it's not Earth "years" that a referenced. Or, the DSC War might be officially over but continued Klingon piracy might be considered part of it? Like how WWII has different end dates around the globe, and does not include the Asian theater of 1937. Kind regards, -- Markonian 21:00, January 30, 2019 (UTC)
- Good points, I think we are starting to see the glimmer of a workable consensus here.
- True, we allow for similar conceits with both the pre-Okuda accounts of the Romulan war (where we consider the 'Federation' part of it to refer to the Coalition that we have seen in canon) and the SFC dates, which were intended to be years but now we wholesale refer to them as 'reference stardates' as they were converted to in the RPG. in each case we have taken the backbone of the non-canon events and allowed for an interpretation of the contradictory factors, which leaves a version of the non canon event that can more easily coincide with canon.
- So we can start with this as a given: the "Four Years War" can be considered as the same conflict as the Federation-Klingon 2250s war -- this keeps Georgiou's assertion that little Klingon contact had been made by Starfleet prior to DSC. The skirmishes and raids that occured with civilians can be considered the preliminary bouts of the conflict, and could possibly even serve to extend its length to 4 years, but we'll keep off of speculating such overtly. the outbreak of war at Axanar can be considered to be slightly after T'Kuvma's unification to assign the FASA events with DSC's motives. all battles and losses of the non-canon 4YW will be considered as descriptions of the DSC war, representing branches of Starfleet and Houses of the Klingons not referenced in DSC. The dates are already in 'reference stardates' so fudging the dates will not require us to disregard anything at all.
This will actually help Memory Beta describe the scope of the war's unseen segments, as in DSC we only saw a few ships' worth of action -- captainmike 
01:20, February 1, 2019 (UTC)