Balance of Terror Question

[highlander]

Just a couple of quick questions. I just finished this episode and was wondering.....

1) Did the Romulans really only have impulse power engines? If so how did they build an empire and keep it with such slow transportation?

2) When they were firing phasers why did it look like photon torpedoes?

 

[Antihero]

Just a couple of quick questions. I just finished this episode and was wondering.....

1) Did the Romulans really only have impulse power engines? If so how did they build an empire and keep it with such slow transportation?

2) When they were firing phasers why did it look like photon torpedoes?

The Bird of Prey did not have warp......"only simple impulse" as I recall Spock saying. However, that does not mean other Romulan ships did not have warp capability. Maybe the BOP was part of a battle group with a larger base ship or something.

 

[Shaw]

Just a couple of quick questions. I just finished this episode and was wondering.....

1) Did the Romulans really only have impulse power engines? If so how did they build an empire and keep it with such slow transportation?

The "Balance of Terror" was based in large part on the 1957 film "The Enemy Below", and it was important to the story that the Romulan ship mirror the characteristics of the German U-Boat when compared to the Enterprise. When submerged U-Boats were significantly slower as they had to run off of batteries rather than use their diesel engines as they would on the surface.

The following represents the best information on the speeds of the two ships portrayed in "The Enemy Below":

German U-Boat Speeds: 17.7 knots on the surface, 7.6 knots submerged
U.S. Destroyer Speed: 24 knots​

So I'm sure that the Romulan ship could reach warp equivalent speeds (though not as fast as the Enterprise), but while cloaked she was forced to run at impulse power (similar to the limited speeds of battery power the U-boat was limited to while submerged).

They knew that without proof of them having attacked, the Enterprise wouldn't cross the boarder, so all they had to do was stay cloaked while they were on the Earth's side and could drop the cloak (and their speed limited) once they crossed back. But all of the action takes place in enemy territory so they had to remain cloaked during that time (other than to fire their weapon).

2) When they were firing phasers why did it look like photon torpedoes?

It should be noted that this was a very early episode in Star Trek history. In production order, it followed these episodes:

"The Cage"
"Where No Man Has Gone Before"
"The Corbomite Maneuver"
"Mudd's Women"
"The Enemy Within"
"The Man Trap"
"The Naked Time"
"Charlie X"​

And in all of those previous episodes the Enterprise had only fired it's weapons once (to destroy the cube marker in "The Corbomite Maneuver"). So, at this point the Enterprise's weapons were called phasers, but they needed something that worked like depth charges from "The Enemy Below".

Later they would separate the abilities shown in "Balance of Terror" to the photon torpedoes, but those hadn't been invented in Trek by this point. As I recall, there wasn't a Starfleet or United Federation of Planets by this point in Trek either. This is very early Trek and much of the back story we take for granted today didn't exist yet.

 

[Shatmandu]

2) When they were firing phasers why did it look like photon torpedoes?

I think they called them "proximity phasers."

Those look different coming out. Almost exactly like photon torpedoes.

Joe, making sense

 

[Forbin]

Not that we haven't discussed both these points to death here, but I'm on the side that contends that the BoP certainly did have warp capability - it would have taken centuries to cross the neutral zone if it hadn't. A recent discussion here suggested that, based on the fact they had to decloak to fire, they also didn't have enough power to stay cloaked and go to warp speed.

Therefore it travelled only under "simple impulse" while it was trying to escape and staying cloaked.

As said above, that gave the writers the best analogy to a U-boat.

 

[FalTorPan]

Not that we haven't discussed both these points to death here, but I'm on the side that contends that the BoP certainly did have warp capability - it would have taken centuries to cross the neutral zone if it hadn't. A recent discussion here suggested that, based on the fact they had to decloak to fire, they also didn't have enough power to stay cloaked and go to warp speed.

Therefore it travelled only under "simple impulse" while it was trying to escape and staying cloaked.

This is my opinion as well.

 

[Solariabsg25]

"Centurion, we have been ordered by the Preator to invade Tolkar IV - our fleet launches tomorrow, and the invasion begins" he checks his watch, "in 1,437 years, 8 months, 4 days and 7 hours!!"

At the end of the day it was simply a writing snafu - at this time the writers had still not got their heads around the tech, and so things slid. Romulan vessels travelling only at sublight was never mentioned again. Strangely enough, they also forgot about the cloaking device, as lines in "The Enterprise Incident" seem to indicate the cloak is brand new at that time.

I just lump it in with one of the unexplained items, like how they were worried in TNG that another starship could not survive battle against Romulan Battlecruisers without the Enterprise's help (Data was able to give a pretty good estimate of how long the other ship would last IIRC), way before the Romulans were first encountered for decades in "The Neutral Zone".

As to the effects, they made a new one for the "photons", but as a prior poster said, hadn't yet established what they were. We never saw the phaser control rooms again afterwards, they were only used so we could have the scene of Spock rescue Stiles and prove he was not a spy, and to draw greater parallels to the sub-chase drama.

 

[Forbin]

The cloak in Enterprise Incident was an improved model. Remember, they could track the BoP easily with their sensors. But the three battlecruisers completely surprised them. Their mission was to steal the new model cloaking device.

 

[Outpost4]

Wowzah, Forbin, thank you! I never thought of this and how many times have I seen both episodes?

I always wrote off the contradiction as a byproduct of episodic television of the era, where continuity from episode to episode wasn't that important. This makes so much more sense. It isn't even a Trekkie rationalizing unexplained changes, like the knobs in the engineering console only in Space Seed or the ever changing wall behind the control console in the Transporter Room.

Thanks, Forbin. You're a good man. I'll sleep better tonight.

 

[GSchnitzer]

It's a common misunderstanding that Mister Spock says that the Romulans have developed a cloaking device; actually, he says they have now developed a particular kind of cloaking device:

KIRK

Mr. Spock, you said you had a
theory on why your sensors didn't
pick up the new ships until they
were upon us.

SPOCK

I believe the Romulans have
developed a cloaking device
which renders our tracking
sensors useless."

Clearly, they already knew all about the existence of the cloaking device. That was the very point of this covert mission: to try and steal the device. They can't both not know about the existence of the device and also plan in advance an elaborate "Mission: Impossible" scheme to try and steal it. It has to be one or the other. It looks like the simplest explanation is that Spock's theory is that the Romulans now have a cloaking device that can fool sensors--unlike the Romulan's old "Balance of Terror" cloaking device which could only fool eyes and not sensors.

Greg Schnitzer
Gaithersburg, Maryland

 

[Swarles Barkley]

IIRC it's been posted in some other thread that there was actually something in "The Enterprise Incident" script that indicated that the Romulans had a "new and improved" cloak, but the sequence was dropped from the finished episode. Not sure what the source of that info was. Just remembered seeing it somewhere.

 

[Outpost4]

Yeah, too bad they didn't add the word "improved" to the above Spock quote. It would have explained it all.

Spock: I believe the Romulans have developed an improved cloaking device...

 

[Solariabsg25]

Agreed guys, an ongoing problem with episodic television, especially in the 60's when no-one had VCRs and it wasn't expected that people would be able to re-watch the episodes time after time.

How often have we discussed not only Trek but other shows where there appears an oversight or plot hole, only to discover that the scene or lines of dialogue that explained it were on the cutting room floor, to make space for the commercials?

 

[Sir Rhosis]

The line Swarles refers to is in the first draft script. Spock specifically says "improved" before "cloaking."

Sir Rhosis

 

[TIN_MAN]

Or it could have been that Nimoy simply didn't deliver the line quite right, and nobody caught, or it was decided it just wasn't worth reshooting the scene for such a minor omission?

 

[GSchnitzer]

Or it could have been that Nimoy simply didn't deliver the line quite right, and nobody caught, or it was decided it just wasn't worth reshooting the scene for such a minor omission?

It's possible.

For what it's worth, the June 13, 1969 Final Draft for "The Enterprise Incidnet" has the following line for Mister Spock:

"I believe the Romulans have
devised an improved cloaking
system which renders our
tracking sensors useless."

As delivered:

I believe the Romulans have
developed a cloaking device
which renders our tracking
sensors useless."

So, there isn't just one word delivered differently from how it was scripted in the Final Draft; the one line actually has three differences. I'd be surprised if Nimoy could make three changes and have it go uncaught by script supervisor George Rutter. My hunch is there were some last minute changes in the script.

Greg Schnitzer
Gaithersburg, Maryland

 

[Timo]

They might have been clever and deliberate ones: the way the line reads in the aired ep allows for two interpretations, one for those who have never seen "Balance of Terror" ("Hey, cool, the villains have an invisibility device! I wonder where this might lead to..."), and another for those who have ("Ah, they make a reference to my favorite ep - and now their invisibility device is even villainier!").

As for the use of phasers instead of the introduction of an all-new weapon (say, "photon torpedoes" or "subspatial charges"), it has a few logical as well as dramatic upsides. For one thing, the Enterprise could not plausibly carry a special weapon analogous to depth charges, because the story logic forbids the Feds from knowing beforehand that the submarine, sorry, the cloakship exists. One of the standard weapons would have to do. And if the writers introduced a "new standard weapon" such as the photon torpedo, it would look all too much like a special weapon as forbidden by story logic...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Rush Limborg]

2) When they were firing phasers why did it look like photon torpedoes?

The Remastering team actually "explained" this error by correcting it. The new BoT has the Enterprise firing what is clearly pulses of blue phaser power. This has been dubbed "Proximity Phasers".

By the way... in VGR and First Contact onward, the Starfleet phaser rifles fired compression phasers, which came out in pulses. Even before the Remastering, I had always assumed that the phasers in BoT were compressions.

 

[highlander]

Thanks for the info guys. Watching these episodes for the first time has been great and the input from you all has made it that much more enjoyable.
I am a very grateful Trekkie!