I'm pretty sure every starship captain would need to know this long before they actually came face to face with one.
In universe... Why would Romulans need Klingon ship designs?
- Thread starter Shawnster
- Start date
I'm pretty sure every starship captain would need to know this long before they actually came face to face with one.
I still have my original set of Klingon plans rolled up in a closet. Of course, I never have to pull them out because the whole thing is here:
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/book-of-klingon-plans.php
http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/book-of-klingon-plans.php
Exactly. Just silly. Perhaps some more bridge dialogue and less Right of Statement nonsense might have fixed this.
Incidentally, while I enjoy TEI and am an S3 fan, this may be the TOS ep where I most distinctly differ from most fans in sizing it up. It's in my bottom 30 easily.
Well, Kirk & co. figured out how to counter the Romulan cloaking device and blew that Bird of Prey up real good, so yeah, I'd say that the Klingon ships were superior.
That was always my understanding, and it makes a lot of sense.
John Byrne told a version of the Klingon/Romulan alliance in his comic book Star Trek: Romulans: Pawns of War. Good stuff!
C
C57D
Guest
First background. John Ford in the Final Reflection suggests that MAM was impossible without Dilithium, and that tech was first used by Starfleet and the Klingons around twenty years before Kirk. Presumably before then, Warp Drive was achievable only by high power fusion reactors. But that was fuel intensive, inefficient and slow (W4 max). The vast speed increases enabled by the adoption of MAM is the sea-changing breaking of the "Time Warp" mentioned in the Cage.
My assumption is that the Roms did not have Diluthium enabled MAM, and so were stuck with the old fusion reactor WD - Scotty's "simple impulse" from BoT. The Roms sent out their latest ship with their newest secret tech and never heard from it again, so presumed it was defeated. Klingons then (seeing the Feds as a larger threat than the Roms) played the "enemy of my enemy" principle and so offered some nice shiny, fast, efficient, high energy (probably old and retired) MAM D7 cruisers in exchange for a few cloaking devices. And so FASA's "limited/semi peace treaty/aliance" .
That's my in universe explanation. Yes I know Ent and FC totally contradict all that, but this is the TOS page so I can choose to ignore that!
My assumption is that the Roms did not have Diluthium enabled MAM, and so were stuck with the old fusion reactor WD - Scotty's "simple impulse" from BoT. The Roms sent out their latest ship with their newest secret tech and never heard from it again, so presumed it was defeated. Klingons then (seeing the Feds as a larger threat than the Roms) played the "enemy of my enemy" principle and so offered some nice shiny, fast, efficient, high energy (probably old and retired) MAM D7 cruisers in exchange for a few cloaking devices. And so FASA's "limited/semi peace treaty/aliance" .
That's my in universe explanation. Yes I know Ent and FC totally contradict all that, but this is the TOS page so I can choose to ignore that!
Last edited by a moderator:
I never took that to mean that antimatter wasn't used before then -- just that dilithium intensified and focused the output from antimatter reactions (like a laser compared to white light, as TFR put it) and therefore improved their efficiency, allowing starships to go faster than the warp 4.8 limit that was the most they could achieve without dilithium. So it wasn't the first use of antimatter warp drives, it was a major upgrade in their efficiency and power.
TFR does leave that ambiguous, but at least according to Memory Beta, the SFC mentioned that antimatter refineries were in use in the 2140s, decades before dilithium was discovered. And the James Dixon chronology says that the SFC says that the Bonaventure (the first warp ship) used antimatter too.
C
C57D
Guest
Very true. I was allowing my own assumptions to colour my argument.
If I recall correctly, SFC gave the M:AM ratio for the Bonadventure and other pre-Diluthium ships to be sonething like 20:1, which gradually evened out as tech improved. But never reached 1:1 until Dilithium.
From that Dilithium is the game changer, for sure.
If I recall correctly, SFC gave the M:AM ratio for the Bonadventure and other pre-Diluthium ships to be sonething like 20:1, which gradually evened out as tech improved. But never reached 1:1 until Dilithium.
From that Dilithium is the game changer, for sure.
Honestly, a 1:1 ratio of matter to antimatter isn't really a good idea. Then you just get pure gamma rays and pions, basically, which isn't very useful for thrust or energy channeling, so it would mostly just go to waste. It's better to have an excess of matter over antimatter, because the leftover matter is heated up by the energy of the reaction and thus can be used as reaction mass for thrusters or as plasma to transport energy. It's the same principle by which a nuclear or antimatter explosion in atmosphere is more destructive than one in vacuum. Instead of just a release of intangible radiation, you get a great deal of superhot, expanding, ionized gases that can do a lot more immediate physical damage (or in other words, perform a great deal more work).
So the "trick question" in the Academy entrance exam in TNG: "Coming of Age," with the answer being that 1:1 was the only possible matter-antimatter intermix ratio, was utter BS.
So the "trick question" in the Academy entrance exam in TNG: "Coming of Age," with the answer being that 1:1 was the only possible matter-antimatter intermix ratio, was utter BS.
You'll let us know when you get your warp drive working, right?
They don't even need to be D7s. Just because two vessels look similar, it doesn't have to mean that they are the same class, or the opposite; that two different looking ships have to be of a different class.
Seems like a good explanation. The small and slow BoP may have been good for raids and sneak attacks, but came up short in battle in BoT. Maybe the effort in developing the cloak and the plasma weapon took up enough resources that the Romulans couldn't swing a more powerful fighting ship on their own, or not immediately anyway. The Praetor's "finest flagship" makes it seem like the Bird is the top of the line.
A question BoT does raise, though, is why the BoP with its weaknesses was employed by itself, instead of in numbers. They should have had some idea of Federation defensive capabilities. Enterprise would certainly have had her hands full if there was another cloaked Romulan around in BoT.
Quite so. Or in a more '60s Cold War context, the Soviet Union sold or licensed its aircraft designs and technology to not only its satellites but to China (before their breakup) and "non-aligned" countries like India and Egypt. Not just for customers, but to influence the balance of power.
OT but maybe interesting: In the late 1800s, destroyers built in Britain for other countries were often rigged with masts and delivered to their destination under sail, due to their limited fuel capacity. Some real adventures in seamanship took place on those trips, apparently.
Yes though it is questionable whether any other First Lord would have decided differently than Churchill. The Ottoman position was already questionable, because of the alliance of France with Turkey's long time enemy Russia, and the reluctance of Britain and allies to tie themselves to a nation with so many challenges. But the margin of superiority over the German fleet was narrow enough that two nearly-complete battleships sitting there were just too tempting to pass up.
Yes, from the aforementioned Star Fleet Battles, the ships were D6 class, an older and somewhat less powerful design that the Klingons had in mothball storage for an emergency reserve.
Last edited:
But there had been no contact with the Romulans until this incident, or vice versa. So neither side knew of the capability of the other. For all we know, the Romulans considered the one BoP with its weapon and cloak to be more than a match for anything Starfleet threw against them.
I agree, Decius certainly thought so.
How, Commander. How?
We are beaten. Can it be true? The Praetor's finest and proudest flagship beaten.
Not to be pedantic, but the answer is because The Enemy Below depicted a one-on-one engagement, and changing so fundamental an element would have upset the process of adapting The Enemy Below blow-by-blow into "Balance of Terror," which is basically what Paul Schneider did.
Wasn't the Romulan Bird of Prey originally meant to be a salvaged or ripped-off Earth design from the Romulan War era? That and the "simple impulse" drive makes it pretty clear that they were in dire need of modern vessels (at least in the pre-retcons TOS universe)
It's threads like this one asks the hard questions, I can't think, for the life of me, a reason why the Romulans would use Klingon ships... with a cloaking device. The new writing team of the 3rd season didn't do their homework on how inferior that device was. Now it seems the device can do things which would make a ship invincible.
A Klingon ship must be harboring some raw matter/antimatter power, if the device was activated the ship would still be seen through scanners for energy surges or something. In the same episode "The Enterprise Incident" even the Enterprise can go invisible without being detected. UGH!
I can't imagine why the Klingons would have an alliance with the Romulans??? Unless, the Romulans were thinking of secretly redesigning the Klingons' DNA to be stupid idiots and yak their flaps about honor every damn time they speak. Also, made them into space-werewolves.
God damn it. That 3rd season was an abomination for everything Star Trek.
The Romulans and The Klingons had a conference on how both their borders were under threat from Federation expansionism and they decided to pool their resources against Starfleet! The new Klingon D-7 design (that's why we didn't see one before Elaan of Troyius and I don't count ENT or TOS Remastered
) impressed them totally so they ordered a fleet of them from the Klingon government while trading with them the cloaking technology which the Klingons really wanted as they were more prepared to branch out into space for the purposes of conquest!JB
Why is it so hard to believe that the Romulans had improved their cloaking device since "Balance of Terror"?
It doesn't appear necessary or beneficial to think of the Romulan Star Empire possessing exactly one type of vessel, and having only the capacities demonstrated by that vessel in one adventure.
Very much to the contrary, the ship in "Balance of Terror" was a rarity and exception to the Romulans themselves, with her operating crew out on a mission to test these unprecedented capabilities and limitations. The very definition of Romulan starship in the mid-2260s really ought to read "everything but the characteristics of the Praetor's newest and proudest flagship"!
Except perhaps for the hull form, that is - ships of the same shape but markedly different capabilities were witnessed in "The Deadly Years", after all. But even this is no reason to think the shape would be the only one found at the RSE at the time, or even a particularly common one. For all we know, the once-defeated Praetor specifically sent sisters of his original failed champion against the Enterprise for "purposes of evaluation", that is, pure vengeance and redeeming of the original concept.
As for the introduction of the Klingon ship, my vote goes for the war prize theory. This would have the best odds of being too obscure for Scotty to know about; a likely ruse to be employed by the Romulans when they violate the RNZ (but they didn't have to, as Kirk flew all the way into Romulan space); and a plot development of minimum impact. That is, we would learn the all-new fact that two of the Federation's deadly enemies are fighting each other, too, and stealing from each other - but this would pose a reduced strategic threat to the UFP, and therefore not warrant the sort of dialogue that should accompany the existence (let alone the sudden revelation) of an alliance that increases the threat.
The cloak-and-dagger mission of "Incident" would probably very much hinge on specific strategic intel Starfleet had obtained on these rare prize vessels specifically, and facilitate the cloak theft. Heck, who knows, perhaps the Feds had baited the Romulans with Klingon prizes in the first place...
Timo Saloniemi
Very much to the contrary, the ship in "Balance of Terror" was a rarity and exception to the Romulans themselves, with her operating crew out on a mission to test these unprecedented capabilities and limitations. The very definition of Romulan starship in the mid-2260s really ought to read "everything but the characteristics of the Praetor's newest and proudest flagship"!
Except perhaps for the hull form, that is - ships of the same shape but markedly different capabilities were witnessed in "The Deadly Years", after all. But even this is no reason to think the shape would be the only one found at the RSE at the time, or even a particularly common one. For all we know, the once-defeated Praetor specifically sent sisters of his original failed champion against the Enterprise for "purposes of evaluation", that is, pure vengeance and redeeming of the original concept.
As for the introduction of the Klingon ship, my vote goes for the war prize theory. This would have the best odds of being too obscure for Scotty to know about; a likely ruse to be employed by the Romulans when they violate the RNZ (but they didn't have to, as Kirk flew all the way into Romulan space); and a plot development of minimum impact. That is, we would learn the all-new fact that two of the Federation's deadly enemies are fighting each other, too, and stealing from each other - but this would pose a reduced strategic threat to the UFP, and therefore not warrant the sort of dialogue that should accompany the existence (let alone the sudden revelation) of an alliance that increases the threat.
The cloak-and-dagger mission of "Incident" would probably very much hinge on specific strategic intel Starfleet had obtained on these rare prize vessels specifically, and facilitate the cloak theft. Heck, who knows, perhaps the Feds had baited the Romulans with Klingon prizes in the first place...
Timo Saloniemi
Similar threads
