How did the Romulans leave Vulcan?

[T'Girl]

Who knows why they have ridges. There could have been mutation from atomic wars, genetic predisposition or interstellar travel.

If the planet Vulcan experienced numerous atomic wars then perhaps the ridges are common to Vulcanoids in general and it was the Vulcans who stayed behind who mutated and lost their ridges. This might also explain why Spock and other Vulcans have a high resistance to radiation, the Vulcans with low resistance did live long enough to reproduce.

Three thousand years is a long time to remain a high technology civilization. If the Vulcan had a series of large non-atomic wars every few centuries, then they might have periodically lost the technology to achieve warp flight, perhaps even space flight. The Vulcans at the P'Jem monastery could have been marooned for decades or centuries on occasion. Also later, under the teachings of Surak, the Vulcan could have turned inward culturally, the lack of the need to explore on Vulcans parts that we saw in Enterprise (from T'Pol) easily could be philosophical aspect of their "new" culture, rather than part of Vulcans natural physiological make up.

 

[Myasishchev]

I personally think they used generation ships, like in The Romulan Way. Giving Vulcans warp drive in the distant past makes their technological and political stasis even more jarring.

And naturally it's probably best to think of the Debrune and Mintakans as non-Romulan emigrants from the "Sundering" era, who didn't like the Surakists but didn't like the proto-Romulans any better.

I've never understood the Romulan ridges...I don't think TNG should have changed the Romulans. Part of the 'sinister' villain (or devious semi-allies) aspect of the Romulans is that they were outwardly identical to Vulcans. But it's canon, so I bite my tongue.

Greyish skin tones I understand, but the goblin faces I don't. They should be pale, almost albino Romulans, not gargoyles. Oh well.

I've always blamed rickets. It's sensible.

Why they'd willingly choose a planet that has such extreme conditions as to be burning on one side and in constant darkness on the other is something I can't really come up with an answer for.

If Remus has an atmosphere, it could easily have a liveable band around its terminator, if it were in the habitable zone of its star. The real question is how such a planet got tidally locked in the habitable zone in the first place, although if Romulus' sun is thought of as a red dwarf, this is less of a problem.

I would guess they would abduct Vulcans and experiment on them, since Romulans appear to have lost their Touch telepathy ability. Diane Duane's My Enemy, My Ally, deals with this scenario.

I never much cared for that. I prefer the explanation that the Romulans are too undisciplined/emotionally wrought-up to be serious telepaths, but would still have the general physiological makeup to make a go of it, and still have some abilities at it, like comparing an accomplished portraitist to a guy whose talents are limited to stick figures for lack of training.

The Remans seem to be pretty good at it, so if you buy that the Remans are Romulans subject to vitamin deficiency/radiation/gengineering/evolution/whatever, that's evidence that the talent isn't lost, just valued by their society less than the religious fanatics who want a Surak in every brain, wagging his finger and tsking whenever one does something illogical.

Also later, under the teachings of Surak, the Vulcan could have turned inward culturally, the lack of the need to explore on Vulcans parts that we saw in Enterprise (from T'Pol) easily could be philosophical aspect of their "new" culture, rather than part of Vulcans natural physiological make up.

That's probably the easiest way to see it.

If there were many-centuries long generation ship exodus by the Rommies, with commensurately retarded technological progress, it could still be made up for by rampant breeding (increasing the physical intellectual resources of their species) and a more pluralistic society, while the Vulcans had less population growth over the long run because of their hellish planet, and further spent most of their time dicking around with inner discipline in what in most incarnations is shown to be a somewhat totalitarian theocracy. (We never see a human complain bitterly that Alien X is acting in an unchristian manner, but whining about Alien X's illogic is 90% of any given Vulcan's day!)

 

[Finn]

^except Soval said Vulcans had to rebuild their world for a thosand years while commenting on how Humans did it in less than a century. It implied they lost a lot of technological development.

 

[ConRefit79]

^except Soval said Vulcans had to rebuild their world for a thosand years while commenting on how Humans did it in less than a century. It implied they lost a lot of technological development.

When did he say this?

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^except Soval said Vulcans had to rebuild their world for a thosand years while commenting on how Humans did it in less than a century. It implied they lost a lot of technological development.

When did he say this?

AFAIK, it was "The Forge", in his brief scene with Admiral Forrest (before the bomb goes off).

And, non-canon though it may be, I thought it might be significant that the spear that Nero uses in ST XI is, in Countdown, named the Debrune Teral'n.

 

[Myasishchev]

^except Soval said Vulcans had to rebuild their world for a thosand years while commenting on how Humans did it in less than a century. It implied they lost a lot of technological development.

I'm not sure what you're contradicting. That they didn't have warp travel until later? I don't see why that's at all necessary or even useful, because of the terrible problems it brings up--principally, the Romulans being an unknown force in the 2100s and only slightly more known in the 2200s. A thousand years might be what it took to get back to the same economic levels, sure, because of the loss of population from war and exodus and the homogenization of their society afterwards, but giving the Vulcans warp around the time of Jesus presents major issues.

All we can say for certain is that, while Surak was alive, they had technology greater than or equal to Earth's in the 1940s and 1950s--enough to produce A-bombs.

But heck, Soval might have only meant that humans are the only goofballs in the galaxy who would expend significant resources* pursuing a crazy, theoretical FTL program while millions starved to death, and before the craters were even cold.

*Is anyone else bothered by First Contact's suggestion that humans acheived faster-than-light travel through the equivalent of a few dozen people working in a garage? I mean, that was a great premise... for Joe Dante's Explorers. Less so here.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

*Is anyone else bothered by First Contact's suggestion that humans acheived faster-than-light travel through the equivalent of a few dozen people working in a garage? I mean, that was a great premise... for Joe Dante's Explorers. Less so here.

It was probably left-over military technology. (In fact there are signs on some of the equipment down in the missile silo that say "U.S. Air Force".) I'm guessing that Cochrane and/or some of the people he worked with were former military.

 

[Myasishchev]

*Is anyone else bothered by First Contact's suggestion that humans acheived faster-than-light travel through the equivalent of a few dozen people working in a garage? I mean, that was a great premise... for Joe Dante's Explorers. Less so here.

It was probably left-over military technology. (In fact there are signs on some of the equipment down in the missile silo that say "U.S. Air Force".) I'm guessing that Cochrane and/or some of the people he worked with were former military.

I mean, I want to read it as a former USAF/NASA super-science program that was interrupted by the war with almost all of the design and construction complete, with Cochrane and Lily at that point mainly lobbying the Montana or United States government(s) for nuclear material, whether that means either fissionables and/or deuterium, tritium, and/or helium-3. (Or to build a giant particle accelerator swallowing enough electrical power to light the world for years, if one unreasonably insists the Phoenix ran on antimatter. )

Alternatively, and far less preferably, I suppose the Borg intervention and the Enterprise engineering team's assistance could make a Novikov closed timelike curve a possibility. While this sucks for a whole host of reasons, I do admit it would amusingly deflate humanity's ego in relation to the dumber, slower peoples of the galaxy (Vulcans, Andorians, Klingons, etc)--that is, the revelation that the only reason humanity attained warp tech so quickly or even at all is because people from the future gave it to them.

 

[F. King Daniel]

In one of the novels ("The Sundered"), Cochrane and Lily were working for the government on a huge project just before the war started. They were almost ready for launch (Phoenix was their plan B, after losing a whole L-5 colony in orbit during a warp engine test) before the bombs dropped. After the war they didn't have much else to do, so they just carried on .

I think TV Star Trek's made it pretty clear that the First Contact interference was "supposed" to happen, since it's been brought up in Enterprise and Voyager. Maybe the old novel "Federation" is what was 'supposed' to happen with Cochrane in an earlier timeline.

 

[Finn]

^except Soval said Vulcans had to rebuild their world for a thosand years while commenting on how Humans did it in less than a century. It implied they lost a lot of technological development.

I'm not sure what you're contradicting. That they didn't have warp travel until later? I don't see why that's at all necessary or even useful, because of the terrible problems it brings up--principally, the Romulans being an unknown force in the 2100s and only slightly more known in the 2200s. A thousand years might be what it took to get back to the same economic levels, sure, because of the loss of population from war and exodus and the homogenization of their society afterwards, but giving the Vulcans warp around the time of Jesus presents major issues.

All we can say for certain is that, while Surak was alive, they had technology greater than or equal to Earth's in the 1940s and 1950s--enough to produce A-bombs.

But heck, Soval might have only meant that humans are the only goofballs in the galaxy who would expend significant resources* pursuing a crazy, theoretical FTL program while millions starved to death, and before the craters were even cold.

*Is anyone else bothered by First Contact's suggestion that humans acheived faster-than-light travel through the equivalent of a few dozen people working in a garage? I mean, that was a great premise... for Joe Dante's Explorers. Less so here.

I was responding to certain comments that seemed to say that it was difficult to imagine Vulcans being warp capable for three thousand years and appearing to be the way they were by the time Human were warp capable. Vulcans may not be in hurry to develop as well. This reflects how Vulcans seemed to be unfamiliar of races who seemed to inhabit worlds within 200 light years of Earth despite being warp capable for so long.


By the way, I don't think Soval meant that about Earth, since I think Cochrane was working on his own, with the work he had done before the war, instead of for the government as you appeared to imply above. the facilities may be left over from before the war.

 

[Anwar]

But the Vulcan has to have had some kind of FTL tech in the past, otherwise the P'Jem Monastery wouldn't exist.

I think they had it, lost it, then spent 1000 years rebuilding the society under Surakian views which may have stymied their interstellar growth until a few centuries before they met Earth.

After all, the Andorian had warp tech for like 500 years by the time we met them in ENT.

 

[ConRefit79]

But the Vulcan has to have had some kind of FTL tech in the past, otherwise the P'Jem Monastery wouldn't exist.

I think they had it, lost it, then spent 1000 years rebuilding the society under Surakian views which may have stymied their interstellar growth until a few centuries before they met Earth.

After all, the Andorian had warp tech for like 500 years by the time we met them in ENT.

Don't forget, Vulcan's have long life spans. The novel, Strangers from the sky", obviously not canon, said Vulcan's traveled sub light. But 3K yrs ago, maybe that is all they had. And remember, Vulcan's of the 22nd century were not very interested in exploring the galaxy.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

But the Vulcan has to have had some kind of FTL tech in the past, otherwise the P'Jem Monastery wouldn't exist.

Unless P'Jem was actually built by another race, subsquently abandoned, then the Vulcans moved in and occupied it.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Why couldn't P'Jem have been reached by a sublight ship with crew in stasis a la Khan on the Botany Bay? It's not like the Vulcans there ever planned on going back to Vulcan again.

 

[Myasishchev]

By the way, I don't think Soval meant that about Earth, since I think Cochrane was working on his own, with the work he had done before the war, instead of for the government as you appeared to imply above. the facilities may be left over from before the war.

Maybe, but regardless of facilities, personally I don't really see a fully functional, human-habitable FTL spacecraft being acheived by the Mythbusters or by the technicians at my local Jiffy Lube in their spare time.

 

[Nerys Myk]

I assume Cochrane's team was not reruited from the local Jiffy Lube. But I'm sure Grant and Tory would kill to join.

 

[Finn]

By the way, I don't think Soval meant that about Earth, since I think Cochrane was working on his own, with the work he had done before the war, instead of for the government as you appeared to imply above. the facilities may be left over from before the war.

Maybe, but regardless of facilities, personally I don't really see a fully functional, human-habitable FTL spacecraft being acheived by the Mythbusters or by the technicians at my local Jiffy Lube in their spare time.

That's not a good reasoning. We don't know anything about Cochrane's background before April 2063. For all we know, he was a graduate school working on warp theory at an ivy league school when the war started.

 

[T'Girl]

^except Soval said Vulcans had to rebuild their world for a thosand years while commenting on how Humans did it in less than a century. It implied they lost a lot of technological development.

A thousand years might be what it took to get back to the same economic levels, sure, because of the loss of population from war and exodus and the homogenization of their society afterwards, but giving the Vulcans warp around the time of Jesus presents major issues.

I believe Soval said fifteen hundred years for Vulcans to recover and "return to the stars." It only took Humans one hundred years. I believe the implication is that Humans and Vulcans were recovering from approximately the same level of destruction. If Vulcan experiance fifteen time the devastation, then there would be no amazement on Sovel's part as to the speed of Human recovery. In the same scene Sovel admitted the this was one of the main reasons that Vulcan were basically scared of Humans.

Romulans leaving in sub-light ship does solve one glaring problem, if the Romulans themselves were a warp-capaible, industrialized, growing interstellar Empire from a few centuries after the time they colonized Romulus, how in the hell did the coalition ever battle them to the point of a treaty?

I don't really see a fully functional, human-habitable FTL spacecraft being acheived by the Mythbusters

Cochrane made it clear that he expected a finacial payoff as a result of his warp flight. Meaning two (or more) possibilities. One, he owned the warp drive concept and intended to sell it or sell it's use. Or two, Cochrane was employed by an individual or (more likely) a aerospace company, syndicate, multinational investment group, or something like that, to whom Cochrane was scientist/engineer. If Cochrane made the project work, there would be a giant bonus check.

Kind of like if Einstein and Oppenheimer were the same person, the Manhattan project was private and the atom bomb was the warp drive.

 

[Timo]

Let's not forget that the odds are, only the FTL engine was "high tech" about the Phoenix, by the standards of the 21st century Earth of Star Trek. That is, before the war, Cochrane's other car probably was a spacecraft, and his holographic wife always nagged about taking the leftover nanotech to Mr.Fusion before leaving to work on his gravity belt.

The Earth of Star Trek had highly advanced spaceflight in the 1990s, as seen in "Space Seed", including aspects such as gravity manipulation and suspended animation and interstellar propulsion. This highly advanced spaceflight was already considered antiquated by the 2020s, as stated in "Space Seed". It would be really odd if a relatively obscure technology company (or a driven private inventor) wouldn't have access to manned spaceflight technology in the 2050s, then - about as odd as if a reasonably wealthy tech school of today (or a pair of Mythbusters) would have to struggle to obtain a general aviation aircraft as a teaching aid.

Also, Cochrane's FTL tech probably wouldn't come out of the left field. If those who built a ship for Khan to steal had already mastered the manipulation of gravity, then warp fields would probably already be a known theoretical quantity, only waiting for their first practical application like Dirac's stuff did, and half a century would be spent with some scientists thinking "an interesting, self-consistent construct - I wonder if I could come up with something as elegant", some engineers thinking "if I only had an infinitely long rod of solid helium" and some writers thinking "way cool, perhaps in an alternate universe...?".

As for the Vulcan question, I don't think we can argue that 3,000 years of starflight should have more visible consequences for the Vulcan culture, and that the lack of those disproves the Vulcan discovery of warp at the time of the Earth discovery of the pulley. There's too much precedent of cultures that achieve next to nothing visible despite spending hundreds of millennia mucking about in interstellar space. Perhaps it's a matter of there being such fierce competition out there that bit players don't make much headway. Or there being too many well-meaning busybodies like Organians or Feds who hem in all would-be Galactic Empires until they prove their maturity or something.

P'Jem could be an ancient alien structure the Vulcans confiscated for their own rituals twenty-two years before "The Andorian Incident", yes. Or P'Jem could be a 3,000 yr old Vulcan temple moved to that location from Vulcan 147 years before "The Andorian Incident". Both of these explanations can be made to fit the facts. But we already have to accept that Vulcan suffered tech setbacks 2,000 years ago, and that Romulans traveled across interstellar distances about that much ago if not earlier. So the idea of P'Jem being built on location by Vulcans of some sort would appear to be the simplest one, and best fitting the spirit of the episode. It doesn't matter much whether Vulcan starflight is 2,000 or 3,000 years old - both ideas present us with the same problems we have to face anyway. If we want to, we can argue that Vulcans had FTL drive because STL interstellar drive gives that to any culture as near-immediate spinoff. Or if we want to, we can say that Vulcans only had STL because they are technologically ultraconservative, and their R&D was hobbled by internal fighting before becoming hobbled by Surakian thinking, so having STL 3,000 years ago didn't give them FTL 2,000 years ago.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Myasishchev]

By the way, I don't think Soval meant that about Earth, since I think Cochrane was working on his own, with the work he had done before the war, instead of for the government as you appeared to imply above. the facilities may be left over from before the war.

Maybe, but regardless of facilities, personally I don't really see a fully functional, human-habitable FTL spacecraft being acheived by the Mythbusters or by the technicians at my local Jiffy Lube in their spare time.

That's not a good reasoning. We don't know anything about Cochrane's background before April 2063. For all we know, he was a graduate school working on warp theory at an ivy league school when the war started.

It's not good reasoning to expect that something as complicated and energy-intensive as a warp drive could be accomplished without billions of dollars worth of investment; nor is it good reasoning to assume that building a FTL spaceship presents roughly the same engineering and physical challenges as building the Wright Flyer.

We might mathematically know how to warp space right now, it just requires retarded amounts of energy (and, iirc, forms of matter that may or may not exist). In any event, the brilliance of Cochrane of getting this energy threshold down to a reasonable level is not in question. But, to use an analogy, you don't get from the essentially mathematical proposition of the critical mass to a working example of an atomic bomb without a pretty fairly involved Step 2.

Although by no means exhaustive, just looking at possible power sources for the Phoenix already undermines the notion that it might be cheap enough to be particularly feasible for some guys in a garage to undertake it. And we can readily infer that warp is very power intensive, because it is almost always antimatter which drives it.

But, since significant antimatter fuel refined from a terrestrial source is virtually impossible, let's say that it's powered by inertial confinement fusion instead. You would need deuterium, tritium, helium-3, or something like that. The first can only be harvested in significant amounts by a relatively large industrial concern. The second and third would require nuclear reactors, which of course are not cheap pieces of hardware.

All of these problems are minimized to acceptable levels if Cochrane finished 99% of the work before World War III, with mere finagly little engineering details to do. I can also accept that he might never have tested it, and given the utter lack of replacement materials (and the higher rate of suicide for alcoholics ), decided to do a manned mission instead of an automated test run.

But if you dudes want to interpret the film with the same suspension of disbelief one would bring to any given Fantastic Four comic, that's cool too, I guess.

Or if we want to, we can say that Vulcans only had STL because they are technologically ultraconservative, and their R&D was hobbled by internal fighting before becoming hobbled by Surakian thinking, so having STL 3,000 years ago didn't give them FTL 2,000 years ago.

I like this one.

Romulans leaving in sub-light ship does solve one glaring problem, if the Romulans themselves were a warp-capaible, industrialized, growing interstellar Empire from a few centuries after the time they colonized Romulus, how in the hell did the coalition ever battle them to the point of a treaty?

Or why they didn't bomb us back to the stone age when we were barely out of it. Sure, M-class planets are kind of cheap, but Earth is nice and humans make excellent slaves/casserole.