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.
Which is why I love most fanon designs: as long as they don't cause any contradictions, they can really fill a lot of gaps, and add a lot to the universe as we know Star Trek to be.
^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...
Oh definitely. There is a lot of potential design material here for designs from before 2150, to perhaps as far back as 2000 or 3000 years back (though the later would probably deal more with very primitive spacecraft, not unlike what we have now, to the very first manned interstellar craft). I wouldn't say that there are anywhere as many potential unseen Romulan designs for the TNG-era, since there are many semi-canon and fanon designs that fill this role. There probably is a lot of room for designs for after the Romulan War and before TOS era, because I can only think of the Capsize and Cricket classes as filling these roles.
^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...
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?
Because the Vulcans have no doubt been around for around the same amount of time, would have achieved a similar level of technology, and when the Vulcans helped to found the Federation, they would have also shared all of their technology with the Federation. If anything, due to the diversity of minds in the Federation, there might have been a greater infusion of ideas, so the Federation might be even more advanced overall, than the Romulan Star Empire.
It may go back farther even then that: in the TOS episode "Return to Tomorrow" it's suggested that Vulcan was itself a 600,000 year old colony from Sargon's Planet. Though in that case I'm sure the technology was long forgotten and then rediscovered in Surak's time.
It's also been suggested that the Romulans left Vulcan in ships that were very primitive indeed by the standards of our shows and that the convoy of them fell into an unstable wormhole that happened to deposit them at Romulus where they landed and settled. Though maybe this was ruled our by something in Enterprise which I missed. I honestly didn't watch a whole lot of that show.
Well, I think I watched most of the series, and to my knowledge, there is nothing that would contradict this.
--Alex
Plus catastrophes like rogue asteroid strikes, large scale groundquakes, plagues, etc. could have set them back a few hundred years.
Sincerely,
Bill
Not just asteroids, but comets as well, would very much be a bitch to any society if they were unable to prevent collisions, and if the asteroid or comet were big enough, they would be lucky to survive, let alone have enough of their technology survive so they didn't have to rebuild their society all the way back up.
If you mean earthquakes on the scale depicted in the film 2012, then yes, that would be very devastating, but there would probably be areas that were immune to devastation, so long as there isn't anything else accompanying the devastating earthquakes.
Super-volcanoes, like Yellowstone or Krakatoa could easily be a set back, especially if their major city(s) were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place. Not only could cities get covered in suffocating ash, if they aren't annihilated, but if the super-volcano were coastal locates, then that would send a tsunami that would swamp any coasts in it's path. And other than setting the caldera off really early to reduce the amount of debris shot out, and not having any settlements close enough to be affected, there would be no way of preventing a super volcano from going off. Unfortunately, I fear that the latter is the scenario that we are facing with Yellowstone.
I suppose if you were really advanced enough, you could try siphoning off the pressure and heat, so there isn't enough build-up to reach that critical point were you have an eruption, and maybe you could even turn this pressure and heat into a usable form of energy. Or, again, if you are VERY advanced, you could erect a forcefield around the caldera, which would absorb the entire eruption, magma, soot, dust, debris, and all. Though come to think of it, you would also need to do something about the kinetic energy produced by the eruption, since I don't think we would want all of it to rush back down into the ground.
Plagues could definitely be devastating, and civilization could collapse, so even though there would be technology left over to act as templates, so they don't lose anything, technologically, there would be a stall.
