A full-blown war erupts in the course of "Voyage of the Star Wolf", as the Morthan Solidarity starts an offensive against the Terran Alliance.
A Tribble is mentioned as a source of a "fluctuator" malfunction and it is stated that in Med, the medic has a cage full of them.
Gerrold had planned to develop this concept into a TV series, as he writes in an introduction to Voyage of the Star Wolf.
Gerrold referred to the concept as "World War II in space," and intended it as a stylistic opposite of Star Trek (particularly its Next Generation incarnation) by setting the main characters on a small, dingy spacecraft that had little respect in the fleet rather than on the flagship.
The central story, without the frame, eventually became Gerrold's Star Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool.