Calm down. It's an extra o, no more, no less, saying it's been occuring for "centuries" isn't making me take your comment any more seriously either. Typos happen, like including an extra full stop after your last sentence.
When/If Trek Lit reaches 2387
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Calm down. It's an extra o, no more, no less, saying it's been occuring for "centuries" isn't making me take your comment any more seriously either. Typos happen, like including an extra full stop after your last sentence.
That's put there deliberately to create a buffer zone between the last line of text and the first line of my sig, so that they don't blend together and become an indefinable mush.
And you weren't supposed to take my comment seriously! It was a friggin' joke for crying out loud. *pulls hair out*
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And you weren't supposed to take my comment seriously! It was a friggin' joke for crying out loud. *pulls hair out*
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Yep. No more of Vulcan's Forge. No more Risa.
Heck, a writer destroyed the Borg. I think that is much more substantial than a planet!
You describe different mechanisms for settling planets--estates, familial networks--but these mechanisms don't necessarily preclude wide-spread colonization. (Does the Federation actually colonize everything possible? It would seem to me that if there was a shortage of habitable planets in Romulan space, it would be the Romulans who would be technologically ingenious and try to colonize what could be colonized.)
I have both those Romulan books. While the Romulans did have fewer habitable planets in their space, they still settled them extensively--at one point, when the Romulan Empire had a mere hundred worlds, three-quarters of them (73?) were colonies and the remainder conquered planets. The sourcebooks even described the Romulans as having a religious devotion to expansion, including colonization.
It's not so much a matter of wide-spread colonization being as human strategy so much as it being a successful strategy. The RSE, for all of its failures to conquer the galaxy, is a successful imperialist state, and the colonization of conquered territories by the conquering population at the core is the heart of successful imperialist strategies. Cardassia did it, too, and the Klingons likely did the same.
^Heck, it's right there in the name. You can't have a "star empire" that's only on one planet.
Then again, there were the Vorlons from B5 - they were called the Vorlon Empire, but for what reason? How imperial were they? The Centauri acted more like an empire than the Vorlons did, and the Centauri were a 'Republic'.
Maybe they just gave their empire that name to make enemies think they are more bad ass than they really are.
We have a Mr Universe but for all we know that guy is NOT the strongest guy in the universe.
A title doesn't HAVE to be accurate.
Wasn't the whole idea of the Romulan arc in the last season of Enterprise that the RSE was expanding toward Earth and her allies? I find it hard to believe that they would have expanded that much, and not spread their population out to other worlds within that territory.
And you can't have Slaves of the Carnelian Throne without slaves. Of course, being an alien race, their definition of slave is different than ours. In the same way we're using an human word, Empire, to define an alien government. Sadly, our TVs aren't equipped with universal translators so Rimulan is rendered using imprecise human terms.
There's no question that the Romulans have colonies. The question is how many compared to the other governments and what sort are they? If their region of space is primarily metal poor stars (metals in astronomy terms being any element other than hydrogen or helium) then most of their star systems may have nothing but gas giants and small moons buried in intense radiation belts. Habitable planets may be considered too rare to waste on the lower classes. Some of the lower ranking Romulans may be taken to these plantes to work on the farms or in the mines but they'd be more akin to slave labor as opposed to what we would call colonists. We know thay aren't opposed to using slave labor. Just look at the Remans. If the Vulcan's Noun novels are to be believed the Remans actually are Romulans, albeit mutated ones.
Then again, there were the Vorlons from B5 - they were called the Vorlon Empire, but for what reason? How imperial were they? The Centauri acted more like an empire than the Vorlons did, and the Centauri were a 'Republic'.
They even had an emperor - they were no republic, but it could be that the term carried a meaning distinct from monarchy like the continued use of the term after Augustine's usurpation of the republic as we understand it today. But in general I think names of states and systems were not quite exactly thought out on B5, and there were the occasional quadrant 15-esque nonsenses akin to TOS.
Then again, there were the Vorlons from B5 - they were called the Vorlon Empire, but for what reason? How imperial were they? The Centauri acted more like an empire than the Vorlons did, and the Centauri were a 'Republic'.
1. Were the Vorlons actually limited to only their homeworld?
2. The Vorlons could get away with calling themselves an empire because their technological base was so vastly superior to all of the other species, even the Minbari. If you can annihilate planets at will--the B5 sourcebook suggests that the Vorlon planet-killer could destroy planets like Jupiter--and have an otherwise vastly superior technology base, you can call yourself whatever you want.
Good point. But ...
1. According to the Star Charts that's been used to guide Trek literature writers, the Romulan Star Empire occupies a vast volume of space. It's very unlikely that such a vast volume of space would consist mostly of metal-poor stars, especially since the named stars inside the RSE do seem--on a quick glance, admittedly--to be about as metal-poor or metal-rich as stars outside the RSE.
2. There doesn't seem to be such a tight relationship between stellar metallicity and the likelihood of planets as you suggest--see this post and discussion[/URL] at Centauri Dreams[/URL]. Metal-poor stars are less likely to have planets than metal-rich ones, but even the poorest can have small rocky worlds.
3. Reasons for the Romulans--by any standard successful and reasonably pragmatic imperialists--to limit the spread of their population away from their homeworld to other suitable planets are lacking. Class prejudices are unconvincing: there are no real-world precedents for Earth imperial powers doing that (if anything, substantial evidence to the contrary) and no evidence of other Star Trek imperial powers doing that and no evidence that the Romulans themselves would do that. Besides, even if the lower classes were prevented from leaving the Romulan homeworld, what would prevent the upper classes from migrating to new worlds?
4. There's no incompatibility between the Romulans ruling over multiple subject species and the Romulans having large populations offworld. If anything, having large subject populations, whether Remans or non-Vulcanoid conquered species like the Kevratans, with already established economies and built-in niches for ruling-class migrants, can attract large populations. Two decades after apartheid's end, for instance, there are still substantially more whites in South Africa than there are people in New Zealand or Uruguay, two other Southern Hemisphere destinations of choice for immigrants from Europe.
5. In any case, Trek literature has identified multiple Romulan-ruled worlds as having substantial Romulan populations. The proportion of conquered planets with a Romulan settler minorities (or majorities?) to originally uninhabited planets that were colonized by Romulan settlers is mainly of sociological interest. (I'd expect the number of pure colony worlds to be higher, mainly because of all of the non-Romulan species that would have been preempted in their expansions.)
It's called the Regnancy of the Carnelian Throne. "Regnancy" is an uncommon synonym for sovereignty or reign.
It's the other way around. Our current findings suggest that giant planets are more likely to be found in systems with high metallicity, while the probability of smaller, Earth-type planets forming is independent of metallicity. So a region with primarily metal-poor stars would have few Jovians but plenty of terrestrial worlds.
Anyway, on a galactic scale of things, the Romulans' region of space is our region of space. We're only a few hundred light-years apart, within the same fairly small region of the central Orion Arm (and both within the Local Bubble), and there's no reason to expect any significant difference in stellar population.
Yeah, that's what I thought as well. I think JMS just ran out of names.
I mean, how convenient that all five major races in B5 had different terms for their governments - the Earth ALLIANCE, Minbari FEDERATION, Narn REGIME, Centauri REPUBLIC... the only one left for the Vorlons was EMPIRE, and he used it even though it didn't mean anything.
(If the Vorlons controlled any other worlds than their own, I don't remember it being mentioned.)
As for the Romulans, I'm fairly sure that their empire was indeed exactly that, i.e. we heard about other Romulan worlds fairly early on. There were the two main worlds, Romulus and Remus/Romii, that we saw right away in TOS. I think there were others mentioned in TNG and possibly DS9 as well.
I always wonder how the Klingons, Romulans, and Cardassians can really be serious adversaries to the UFP. The UFP should have a much bigger chunk of space with a larger population able to join the military, and more resources (presumably). Whereas with the other 3, they only have one species operating their ships (of course the Romulans use Remans as shock troopers) who come from one homeworld plus colonies.
Do these species really have the ability to rival the UFP? That is one thing I like about the Typhon pact, now there is a competitor state made of multiple species, worlds, and resources. With the exception of the Borg, I think it is the first power in the quadrant which can realisticly threaten the UFP.
Do these species really have the ability to rival the UFP? That is one thing I like about the Typhon pact, now there is a competitor state made of multiple species, worlds, and resources. With the exception of the Borg, I think it is the first power in the quadrant which can realisticly threaten the UFP.
There could be many races within the Klingon, Romulan, and Cardassian empires, but the aforementioned ones are the dominant ones. To some of them, it may seem that the Federation is (still) comprised mostly of Humans with sightings of Vulcans, Andorians, etc., being very rare depending on where you are, IMO.
In a universe with dilithium crystals and space borne jellyfish and all the other trappings of TV science fiction I would imagine that saying that the Romulans have fewer habitable planets than the Klingons or the Federation shouldn't be tripped up by using actual science. It's make believe so we can claim whatever we want about how life and planets evolved. Do you really want to start applying real life science to Star Trek? The whole thing would fall apart. How exciting would it be to have Kirk order the ship to Rigel and then, after a commercial break, we see the ship arrive with the sub-title 800 years later and commanded by his great, great, great, great (etc) grandson?
Keep the broad strokes relatively believable but don't turn Trek into Nova.
If you need a reason for why they have fewer habitable planets say that there's fewer terrestrial planets and it's a galactic mystery that's currently unsolved. Maybe a Doomsday Machine ate them all.
^So first you use science to justify your position about Star Trek, then when you're told that science actually doesn't support your desired conclusion, you say it's pointless to use science to justify a position about Star Trek. Ohhhh-kay.
This is circular logic. There's no need to justify the Romulans having fewer habitable planets if there's no reason to think they have fewer habitable planets in the first place.
Better with status quo than unnecessary destruction. I mean, it's the homeworlds of those species.
What will happen next? Will they blow up Earth too and turn Trek into some NuBSG doom and gloom?
