Balance of Terror continuity

[pookha]

we know they had ship to ship communications.. the treaty was done with subspace radio.. even though a later episode of tos sorta contradicts this..


really a lot of tos wasnt pinned down yet in the early episodes.
the trek universe was rapidly evolving during tos and has issues all through it.

some thoughts..
the romulans had to ftl travel the issue that scotty bought up was the power source.
it may be they just didnt understand the full true nature of it.
but not only would the romulans need ftl to rule over a vast
empire they wouldnt been able to get to the different outposts so fast without ftl.

spocks issue with invisibility was the power drain.
indeed after minefield we never do see an invisible cloaked ship.
during minefield they indeed seemed to be have issues with the cloak.
remember the ships seemed to cloak and decloak with out rhyme or reason.
if the romulans in minefield where testing the system and couldnt get it to work helps explain why they went to the holographic system.
which of course was useful to sow distrust.

but it makes sense if news of an invisible cloak would have been deep secreted.. can you imagine the impact on the civilian fleets if word got out.
and since a cloaked ship never was seen again less chance of the knowledge getting further out.

i do have issues with the whole never seen a romulan.
bodies get sucked out into space during battles.
so either they did use drone ships or bodies were seen but due to politics a decision was made to keep this information secret.

and there is no reason visual communication didnt exist between ships.
the way it works in enterprises time is that you cant get visual on the other ship unless they allow you to.ie turn on their visual along with audio communications.
unlike in tos where you can track back a communication signal and see into their bridge without their knowing about it.
and sorry the nx is pretty damn primitive as compared to the tos enterpise.
something that got establised in the mirror episodes..
the other ships were puny nothings compared against the defiant.
and that was with a crew who were just starting to learn how to operate her.

 

[Timo]

the romulans had to ftl travel the issue that scotty bought up was the power source.

When Scotty made his claim, the Romulans hadn't yet demonstrated the ability to move their ship or weapon FTL. In theory, the fact that multiple outposts had been attacked within a short timespan could have been due to there being multiple Romulan ships. In theory, then, Scotty might really have thought that Romulans were incapable of FTL as a species, not having figured out the secret of warp drive yet.

The facts equally well fit the idea that Scotty would know of general Romulan FTL capabilities, though. He would have all the more reason to inform his captain that this particular Romulan ship in his opinion lacked FTL, then. He would be mistaken about that, but even hero characters can make mistakes.

The third possibility is that Scotty thought the ship was FTL but that she still had "simple impulse power", a bit of obscure technobabble meaning that the Romulans were slower than the heroes even at FTL - and that Scotty was correct about it all along.

We may pick from the three interpretations. And the first one makes all the heroes look like idiots when we in retrospect know that Romulans had warp in 2150 already. The second one makes Scotty look bad (although we can't blame him if he didn't recognize a quantum singularity reactor for a warp core). The third one leaves everybody smelling of roses, and thus might be the preferable one.

spocks issue with invisibility was the power drain.

Spock may have been right or wrong. After this episode, cloaking is never claimed to consume much power, and indeed we see a power-starved starship effortlessly maintain cloak in ST4, and a cloaking device independently remain invisible without any external power source in "Emperor's New Cloak".

indeed after minefield we never do see an invisible cloaked ship.

Which is good proof for their existence.

remember the ships seemed to cloak and decloak with out rhyme or reason.
if the romulans in minefield where testing the system and couldnt get it to work helps explain why they went to the holographic system.

A very good point. OTOH, the cloaks on their mines seemed to work just fine...

bodies get sucked out into space during battles.

And for some reason, those are never recovered. I mean, a transporter could easily grab an ejected body, after which Starfleet medical wonders could save that hapless ejection victim, or bring him or her back from dead - but for some reason, this is never attempted either during a battle (where shields might hamper transporting) or after a battle.

Perhaps the "primitive" ships of the 22nd century were incapable of locating the cooled-down bodies? Or then the ships were just as good with that as the 24th century ones (and even NX-01 sensors seemed pretty good), but any battle the Romulans won would end up with the Romulans erasing all the evidence, with the help of the selfsame sensors - and the Feds simply didn't win enough battles.

That's the weakest point of the "BoT" backstory, really. But it would be interesting to see a corpseless war!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[issreliant]

Thanks to ripples in the timestream made by neros ship, ENT is now the prequel to the new movies. so canon is saved!!!!!!!

 

[BillJ]

He made a poor call in making invisibility such an exotic thing in the Trek universe, a universe that would expand to involve hundreds of hours of space adventure and all sorts of wonders much greater than invisible starships - but otherwise, he probably envisioned something pretty much like ENT, something the watchers of TOS would immediately recognize.

Timo Saloniemi

I imagine Paul Schneider was interested in telling a good story and didn't care about the spin-offs.

If the spin-offs wanted to use elements of his story, then it's their job to make the elements fit Balance of Terror not vice-versa. Or they could have just left the Romulans alone.

 

[Anwar]

TOS itself began the changes when they made the Romulans a bigger power. BoT said that they were a one-system quarantined species, but then later on they kept treating the Romulans like some big threat and gave them an Empire. If TOS could make changes then it's unfair for the other shows not to make some too.

 

[Ryan8bit]

BoT said that they were a one-system quarantined species, but then later on they kept treating the Romulans like some big threat and gave them an Empire.

Dialog may have implied that, but the maps they showed on the screen seemed to show otherwise.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Non-canon though it may be, ENT novels have explained "Minefield" as having the cloaking device of the time be a very new, untested piece of technology. The Romulan ship shown in that episode, the Praetor Pontilus, ultimately couldn't handle its power requirements and self destructed after only a short time of use. (Very small objects, such as the cloaked mines, would work, because they took much less power.) That's why the ship kept cloaking and decloaking at seemingly random moments - the cloaking device was already starting to malfunction.

For what that's worth, of course. I find it a valid explanation.

 

[Anwar]

BoT said that they were a one-system quarantined species, but then later on they kept treating the Romulans like some big threat and gave them an Empire.

Dialog may have implied that, but the maps they showed on the screen seemed to show otherwise.

So the episode ITSELF couldn't even make up its mind...

 

[BillJ]

TOS itself began the changes when they made the Romulans a bigger power. BoT said that they were a one-system quarantined species, but then later on they kept treating the Romulans like some big threat and gave them an Empire. If TOS could make changes then it's unfair for the other shows not to make some too.

Balance of Terror never defined the size or strength of Romulan Empire.

http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x14/balanceofterror025.jpg

The graphic from the episode describes it as the 'Romulan Star Empire'.

 

[BillJ]

BoT said that they were a one-system quarantined species, but then later on they kept treating the Romulans like some big threat and gave them an Empire.

Dialog may have implied that, but the maps they showed on the screen seemed to show otherwise.

So the episode ITSELF couldn't even make up its mind...

Dialog did not imply anything of the sort.

You're telling me a single system planned on taking on a Federation with dozen of member worlds and the resources that they could provide?

 

[Anwar]

Kirk said that the Neutral Zone was supposed to be keep Romulus and Remus separated from the rest of the Galaxy, as in it was meant to be a one-system quarantine like the Kzinti in Larry Niven's books.

But the maps show that there are several stars on their side of the NZ and it is called an Empire.

 

[Timo]

The graphic from "BoT" might show "several stars", or then none. All we see are white dots that might or might not lie within the envelope of the Neutral Zone; all Trek graphics of this sort feature "background stars" that lie far behind the region of interest...

The places labeled as ROMULUS and ROMII might be star systems, or then planets within a system centered on a star that lies somewhere in the middle of the curve of the RNZ section we see. As matters currently stand, the former would be the better idea; all through TOS, we might have believed in the latter instead.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The Federation as such did not exist when "Balance Of Terror" was written.

 

[Anwar]

Well, back in TOS the idea of the Federation was that it was a human-run group that allowed the aliens it encountered to join in as weaker partners instead of outright conquering them the way the Klingons did. That is was basically a benign Terran Empire.

They even called it the "Earth Federation" at one point.

 

[CaptJamesScott]

What I always found annoying was the introduction of Ferengi in ENT

 

[BillJ]

They even called it the "Earth Federation" at one point.

Do you remember the episode?

 

[Anwar]

I think it was "Friday's Child", the one with the Capellans and the pregnant woman McCoy had to tend to.

 

[T'Girl]

KIRK: The Earth Federation offers one other thing, Akaar. Our laws. And the highest of all our laws states that your world is yours and will always remain yours.

I suppose that the Earth Federation and the UFP might be two different organizations existing side by side. Bit of a stretch, but unless you're going to retcon entire paragraphs of dialog out of existence because a group of writers "changed their minds" you do have to reconcile what the character actually said somehow.

 

[PsychoPere]

^ Reconciling that isn't too difficult. Since the UFP government is based on Earth, some planets (such as Capella IV) may occasionally refer to the UFP as the "Earth Federation" instead. In the best interests of diplomacy, Kirk used the same phrasing rather than correcting Akaar, which the teer may conceivably have viewed as condescension.

 

[Anwar]

Still, that name and most everything else seen in TOS does fit the implication that the Federation was a benign Terran Empire with all the other aliens as weak partners instead of a true multi-species cooperative.