Attacks from space may be so devastating that there isn't much need for ground war anymore.
General Order 24
Unless the planet had defensive tech to repel bombardment.
Which doesn't change the fact the order exists.
Is the very definition of an attack from space.
Yep, just a reminder Starfleet has an order covering that.
I'm pointing out that if a planet had powerful enough defenses to repel bombardment, they'd have to fight on the ground.
Either there were no battles like that in the Romulan War, or when there were they used Slave Soldiers instead of going down themselves.
And for everyone who says "I don't care what Enterprise says because it doesn't line up with TOS!"
...TOS couldn't even be wholly consistent with itself.
You are correct. ENT was probably more consistent with TOS than TOS!
A "naval-only" Romulan war is not difficult to imagine. A border or territorial dispute, a blockade of some outposts or settlements, maybe some supply ships picked off, an escalation of warship-to-warship actions, and finally they get to the audio-only negotiations and concessions on both sides. It doesn't have to have been a massive-scale war, either. People in the US remembered the War of 1812 well a hundred years later, even though it had been a small sideshow compared to the Napoleonic wars, because it had been a formative experience.
Nuclear explosions (of torpedoes, powerplants or both) leaving little usable evidence behind doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, either. What DNA is not vaporized may be unreadable from intense radiation. There have been harder-to-swallow things in Trek, anyway.
Nuclear explosions (of torpedoes, powerplants or both) leaving little usable evidence behind doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, either. What DNA is not vaporized may be unreadable from intense radiation. There have been harder-to-swallow things in Trek, anyway.
But wouldn't it automatically follow that the planet also had defenses to repel any attempt to insert ground forces? Surely an assault shuttle must be easier to stop than an atomic projectile.
In that case, wouldn't the humas identify the Slave Soldiers as the true Romulans until their error was pointed out to them in "BoT"? Unless the slaves insisted that they were not the actual Romulans, and for some reason were believed.
But a separate cannon-fodder species (potentially for ground fighting) is an established Romulan practice from ST:NEM, and teleoperated, difficult-to-trace weapons are confirmed as another modus operandi of theirs in ENT. It would make sense to assume that Romulans took active and successful measures to remain unidentified; if need be, we can even argue they used a false language in "Minefield" and another one when signing the peace treaty.
Timo Saloniemi
Eh, tell that to Star Wars. They have shields that could stop ship bombardments but couldn't stop troops from landing on the planet.
Spock mentioned that the war was between "Human", "Romulan" and "Ally". So there's some wiggle room. If the Romulans used more than just one species for Slave Fodder it could happen.
First of all, high five to all the other Enterprise haters.
I likewise reject the broadcast and published version of Enterprise in my head canon and official canon. Click here if you want to read my (work-in-progress) version of Enterprise.
Like many others I envision the Romulan war as a grand epic interstellar war. And you kind of get that feeling by that fact the both earth and the Romulans had allies in the fight. It's not solid evidence, but I think there is enough wiggle room. Also note that Spock prefaced his historical monologue with "As you may recall from your histories." so even though he's about to explain all this stuff he's acknowledging that many people may still remember these details. Which if you think back to The Great War you may remember some of the details.
As far as captives are concerned I believe that it was pretty much the physical size of the ships that didn't allow any quarter or captives. Which is odd to think that if you had the option of taking prisoners, but couldn't because of size, you would probably be able to see them.
I'm willing to let it slide that the no ship-to-ship visual communication was between earth forces and Romulan forces, not just for all ships in general. Having visual communication isn't as simple as clicking on a youtube link. There's all sorts of encoding, compression, and formatting that would make decoding an alien visual transmission very difficult. So it's unsurprising why it was never done; and can be explained away why earth and allies never cracked it.
There may be some wiggle room with humans having seen allies of the Romulans(if you squint real hard), becasue it does say that "no human, Romulan, or ally has ever seen the other." This also touches on the ground combat idea. I think most of the battles would be fought with autonomous robots. That's the way warfare is going today. In a space battle you might only have one earth ship and one Romulan ship that even have any crew on them. The rest would be robotic vehicles. Same with ground combat, robots fighting robots. I think with this in mind humans, Romulans, and allies never seeing each other becomes very likely.
I also reject the idea that the higher ups secretly knew who the Romulans were. Sure it may make for some cool political intrigue, but I just think it ruins the spirit of what Spock talked about.
In my view that Romulans didn't really become Romulans until after they had left Vulcanis. I imagine as Surak's teachings were spreading there were multiple exoduses off planet and from colonies by disgruntled Vulcanians. So I don't think it would be easy for Vulcanian scholars to point to a specific group of people that left, and say that they were the founders of the Romulans. That's probably why Spock thinks it is likely that they are an offshoot. There were tons of offshoots, so when they find out they look like Vulcanians there's probably a pretty good chance they are related.
I likewise reject the broadcast and published version of Enterprise in my head canon and official canon. Click here if you want to read my (work-in-progress) version of Enterprise.Like many others I envision the Romulan war as a grand epic interstellar war. And you kind of get that feeling by that fact the both earth and the Romulans had allies in the fight. It's not solid evidence, but I think there is enough wiggle room. Also note that Spock prefaced his historical monologue with "As you may recall from your histories." so even though he's about to explain all this stuff he's acknowledging that many people may still remember these details. Which if you think back to The Great War you may remember some of the details.
As far as captives are concerned I believe that it was pretty much the physical size of the ships that didn't allow any quarter or captives. Which is odd to think that if you had the option of taking prisoners, but couldn't because of size, you would probably be able to see them.
I'm willing to let it slide that the no ship-to-ship visual communication was between earth forces and Romulan forces, not just for all ships in general. Having visual communication isn't as simple as clicking on a youtube link. There's all sorts of encoding, compression, and formatting that would make decoding an alien visual transmission very difficult. So it's unsurprising why it was never done; and can be explained away why earth and allies never cracked it.
There may be some wiggle room with humans having seen allies of the Romulans(if you squint real hard), becasue it does say that "no human, Romulan, or ally has ever seen the other." This also touches on the ground combat idea. I think most of the battles would be fought with autonomous robots. That's the way warfare is going today. In a space battle you might only have one earth ship and one Romulan ship that even have any crew on them. The rest would be robotic vehicles. Same with ground combat, robots fighting robots. I think with this in mind humans, Romulans, and allies never seeing each other becomes very likely.
I also reject the idea that the higher ups secretly knew who the Romulans were. Sure it may make for some cool political intrigue, but I just think it ruins the spirit of what Spock talked about.
In my view that Romulans didn't really become Romulans until after they had left Vulcanis. I imagine as Surak's teachings were spreading there were multiple exoduses off planet and from colonies by disgruntled Vulcanians. So I don't think it would be easy for Vulcanian scholars to point to a specific group of people that left, and say that they were the founders of the Romulans. That's probably why Spock thinks it is likely that they are an offshoot. There were tons of offshoots, so when they find out they look like Vulcanians there's probably a pretty good chance they are related.
I think that line was just to acknowledge Vulcans as present-day allies, not necessarily in the war. Spock obviously isn't human, but he doesn't know what the Romulans look like, either.
But in the episode it was done very easily! I guess new starships have really awesome comms hacking tools, though they can't use them to get a bead on the cloaked ship...
Yes. Isn't treknology wonderful?
Regarding the negotiations to end the war, could there have been -- in addition to the audio only communications -- an alien third party intermediary that was the go-between the humans and Romulans?
An intermediary negotiator would have further created a situation where the two sides would not have seen one another.
First of all, high five to all the other Enterprise haters.
I'm sorry, but there really is no way to create something that is 100% true to every last little thing TOS said. Mainly because TOS itself couldn't be consistent with itself.
No way.
I'm not disagreeing, but at least an effort could be made. Star Trek was remarkably consistent considering the era it was made in. But no fictional work is going to be perfect. But my issues with Enterprise aren't just that it was not cross series consistent in some facts and designs. The show had crappy writing, crappy acting, and was just a rehash of what we'd seen before. It was just TNG/DS9/VOY in the 22nd and a half century!
Yeah, I'll agree with that. ENT felt more like a prequel to TNG than anything else.
If they were going for a prequel thing, they'd have been better off rebooting and starting over from zero like the NuTrek movies.
Trek has it the opposite way, logically enough: it's quite possible to bombard Elba II to cinder but challenging to insert troops via transporter or shuttle.
A single shuttle getting through is hardly a threat to a planet, a city or even a building. A single warhead getting through may be one too many. I don't see troops being a necessary or even viable element in the greater strategic game as such, then. There's room for them (especially in the sort of action affordable and dramatically interesting in the TV format - covert strikes and whatnot), but not a pressing need to have them compromise what we know of the Romulan War.
...Or, more specifically, that no ally has seen a Romulan (or confessed to such, at any rate). Spock might be covering the collective asses of the Vulcans here: perhaps they stayed out of the war altogether, and refused to admit to knowledge even after they became postwar allies of Earth.
Certainly a possibility. The Dominion worked by these "hidden puppeteer" rules - which might be reason enough to hope that the Romulan side in the old war worked differently. It is a bit odd that Spock wouldn't bring up the slave troops issue specifically in his recap of the war. Or that the possibility of the cloakship's crew being slave troops rather than true Romulans is never brought up.
Timo Saloniemi
Well, the implication in Balance of Terror was that after the war the Romulans were supposed to be sealed up within their own Solar System. Their "Empire" was just supposed to have been their two worlds of Romulus and Remus, so maybe part of the Treaty was them giving up most of their Slave Soldiers.
Obviously the writers changed their minds later on about how big the Romulan Empire was.
Obviously the writers changed their minds later on about how big the Romulan Empire was.
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