One thing that can't be denied is that the Romulan ship was nearly out of gas and running for the NZ. If the Commander had any plans to get home after that, then some sort of refueling vessel had to be waiting or coming soon.
This I guess is the reason I want to disbelieve in the cloak being fuel-hungry. The Commander was angry when the cloak was dropped without his explicit order, or dropped on its own when not properly attended to. If and when the Commander's plan was to remain cloaked all the way, he didn't have a very good grasp of the characteristics of his vessel. Or then the vessel
was capable of the feat, i.e. didn't consume too much fuel in doing so, and was merely sloppily run by the underling who didn't have the tactical grasp of the situation.
This boss-servant dynamic appears to have been the dramatic intent of the scene, even if the writer had no underlying doctrinal ideas to offer. And it's fun to think that the Commander was a wise man and an experienced soldier whom Kirk couldn't push over quite that easily. But it sort of requires us to think that sailing home under cloak would have been possible, and that cloaking discipline, rather than fuel discipline, was the key to that.
(Another thought is that the Romulan Empire consists of only one solar system with two habitable planets, Romulus and Remus, and the NZ boarders its asteroid belt, but this is debunked in two later episodes.)
Within the confines of the episode itself, the one argument against a star system -sized sandbox is the dynamic map showing the hero ship approaching at maximum speed. But perhaps that one can be annulled, too, by saying that they were close to a single star: this would generally make maximum warp slower, and allow for the dot of light representing Kirk's ship to move at the same relative snail's pace as the Romulans apparently do.
In that case, though, Scotty and Kirk would both be wrong about being able to run rings around the enemy. If their maximum warp is little better than simple impulse, they really hold no aces.
As regards the nature of the mission, we can't even tell if it was a dismal failure or a splendid success. If the intent was to
facilitate a war by taking down the fortress chain, then everything went wrong - but it was their own damn fault, as the Commander wasn't instructed to immediately go "Tora Tora Tora" on subspace so that the fleet could get moving, and the fleet didn't get moving during their one and only time window for doing so. If the intent was to
launch a war by destroying the fortress chain, then everything went wrong - but only because the Feds didn't react as expected, and the Romulans might have been ill informed about human psyche.
If the intent was to build up interstellar reputation, it apparently was a big success, though - especially when boosted by the "we
could have launched a war there and then, you know" element, so that the Romulans appear both powerful and capable of restraint, and not only should but also could be taken seriously at negotiation tables.
In the latter case, the Commander's traitorous sacrifice was in vain, as it didn't thwart the plans of his superiors - there was no war he would have avoided by committing suicide and forcing apparent mission failure. But it would have been too late in any scenario anyway: safe return home didn't appear necessary or even desirable, and message of success had already been sent by the apparently better-informed Decius.
Timo Saloniemi
