Romulan Cabbage Class Cruiser
- Thread starter XFozzboute
- Start date
the romulans may disagree.
But there's never been anything Romulan that looks anything like this.
they're not frozen in time, you know.
True, but if you look at the design lineages in Trek, what comes later is ALWAYS built on what came before.
The First Contact ships (Akira, Steamrunner, et. al.) were built on Starfeet designs that came before them, but they don't look much anything like a Constitution.
If you follow Masao's Romulan design lineage you can see the gradual progression from his Cabbage to the TOS Bird-of-Prey we're all familiar with.
http://www.starfleet-museum.org/romulan-cruisers.htm
http://www.starfleet-museum.org/postwar-romulans.htm
Think about how human air vehicles have evolved: from hot-air balloons, to dirigibles and blimps, to the Wright flyer, to the Fokker Triplane, to the B-29, to the SR-71, to the Saturn V, to Venture Star. That's in about 100 years.
But most of those were always bilaterally symmetrical from the start. The only one that wasn't is the hot air balloon, and that didn't really develop into any of the others.
I think the point here is that different design paths can lead to a variety of ideas that all get the job done to varying degrees. It's rather narrow minded to expect that an example of trilateral symmetry is totally unreasonable, as though such designs would have never occurred to people who (two centuries later) would have a preponderance of bilaterally symmetrical ships.
Earth ships had their variations too. Let's not forget the ring-ship Enterprise, which certainly is an outlier when compared to their other ships.
After all, the idea of design lineage is entirely a conceptual one. There is no actual lineage as you might think of one in an organic evolution sense.
The idea that bilateral must have risen from earlier, more primitive bilateral ships with no allowance for other conceptual models is kind of silly, really. Masao's designs enliven the Star Trek setting and make it more rich. And this build of it is top-notch.
--Alex
Earth ships had their variations too. Let's not forget the ring-ship Enterprise, which certainly is an outlier when compared to their other ships.
After all, the idea of design lineage is entirely a conceptual one. There is no actual lineage as you might think of one in an organic evolution sense.
The idea that bilateral must have risen from earlier, more primitive bilateral ships with no allowance for other conceptual models is kind of silly, really. Masao's designs enliven the Star Trek setting and make it more rich. And this build of it is top-notch.
--Alex
Spherical balloons with hanging baskets (radially symmetrical) developed into dirigible (steerable) cigar-shaped balloons (bilaterally symmetrical).
Tiberius, if you have somehow convinced yourself that a change from radial/trilateral symmetry to bilateral symmetry is impossible or inconceivable, I can't really help you much more.
Albertese is right. One thing i've tried to work into my ships is the idea that the evolution of biological or mechanical systems doesn't follow a predetermined path. If you look at the Burgess Shale, the introduction of the iron warship, the birth of flight, or the start of the jet age, you can see that lots of variations in body plan and configuration were tried. There was no way to predict which would finally win out. It's easy for us to look back and trace a more or less straight line of development, but that's not how things looked from the other direction.
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Besides, there could have been poltical/financial motivating factors. Like the Northrope "flying wing" (the bomber depicted in Pal's "War of the Worlds"). As I understand it, the design was viable. Take-off and landings were a bit tricky, but once airborne, it handled like a dream. But the project was scrapped and the aircraft dismantled due to contract overruns or whatnot (sorry, I don't know the details), and the design wasn't reexamined until the development of the stealth bomber.
This craft might be the Romulans' equivalent to the "flying wing". It worked, but members of the Romulan Senate had vested interests in other technologies and the design eventually dropped for something else that would help line the Senators' pockets.
Sincerely,
Bill
This craft might be the Romulans' equivalent to the "flying wing". It worked, but members of the Romulan Senate had vested interests in other technologies and the design eventually dropped for something else that would help line the Senators' pockets.
Sincerely,
Bill
But they are quite different craft. Balloons basically just go up and down. Any lateral movement is at the mercy of the wind. There is no front or back because of this. A dirigible has a definite front and back and travels under its own power.
No, not at all. I'm just saying that based on the fact that we've never seen any Romulan design that is trilaterally symmetrical and I don't think that they would intentionally create a trilaterally symmetrical design when they could make do just as easily with a bilateral one, given that they seem to prefer bilateral ones.
Look at the Cardassians. They like trilateral symmetry (look at DS9), but even they use bilateral symmetry forn their vessels.
Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad design, or that it's a bad render or anything like that. I'm just saying that I don't buy it as a Romulan design, especially with what we've seen in Enterprise.
^Tiberius, The Romulans had been going to the stars for nearly 2 thousand years by time of Picard. There is no reason to discount the idea of changing symmetry. They might have had a radical change in their warp drive centuries before Enterprise that led to this.
Also, since they had been warp capable for so long, it stands to reason that there are hordes of Romulan spacecraft that we never saw, including during the TNG era...
Also, since they had been warp capable for so long, it stands to reason that there are hordes of Romulan spacecraft that we never saw, including during the TNG era...
Enterprise?!? Don't get me started on Enterprise!!!
My design predates Enterprise by at least 5 years. I'm certainly not going to retcon my designs.
I have a few Fed ships with trilateral symmetry. I hope you don't get a look at those.
Everytime I see this thread my brain reads the subject line as "Romulan Cabbage Patch Cruiser" 
-LS
-LS
This is another thing that never sat right with me. How is it that the Roms could be 2000 years ahead of the Federation, and yet not greatly outclass them?
Technologies don't develop on a strict, linear time table and occasionally hit a wall or are never weaponized/industrialized. Steam power was known by the Greeks, but practical steam engines weren't developed until a couple of thousand years later. But even steam power had its limits. Steam-powered aircraft or spacecraft were never likely. There are plenty of other examples of technologies that were never fully exploited by their inventors (gunpowder) or that had insurmountable limitations (mechanical calculators).
Few cultures can sustain a constant level of technological development (or political power) for decades, much less millennia. This is why we're not speaking Latin and praying to Jupiter (if you are, I apologize). If you were to predict future American accomplishments based on what NASA did in the 1960s, you'd think we'd already be on Alpha Centauri instead of puttering around in LEO. Money, politics, wars, and other things get in the way.
If we ever develop fusion-powered spacecraft, we might fly around at light-speed for a couple of millennia without ever making a jump to supraluminal speeds. On the other hand, if a hostile, upstart alien race were lucky or smart enough to quickly develop antimatter-powered warp drive, we'd be screwed in no time.
