No doubt they will have manufacturing facilities throughout their empire just like the Federation, the loss of one facility no matter how large would not be a big deal in regards to ship building capacity, plus if any Federation or Empire was stupid enough to put all their eggs in one basket it would make it too tempting a target for their enemies. The majority of the Romulan (Tal Shiar) ships looked to be pretty small except for Oh's and that didn't look all that big either. Must admit you can get a lot more tactical mileage out of 10 smaller ships than you will out of 1 really big one as they can be in more places at once, built faster and if they are modular they can be outfitted according to need, the trick is to have both available in the right numbers. I think the real limiting factor is having enough capable officers and trained crews, that is the real bottleneck especially after a major war, once a class has been designed and a prototype has been put through its paces even large ships can be built in months, maybe even weeks for smaller escorts with automation but crew training takes years.
You know how most of Starfleet is never around Earth when the planet is threatened. It must have been a similar scenario for Romulus. Most of the Star Empire's military resources were deployed outside the range of the supernova.
I don't think resources would be an issue either but losing the synths would definitely slow construction. They could make up the shortfall with holograms though, Rios certainly has.
You mean they don't have massive, whole ready-made ship replicators spitting out a dozen Curiosity class ships per minute?
If they had those, the argument still runs, the Federation wouldn't need starships. Whether they'd still want 'em anyway is another topic...
Exactly. The ships in "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part II" were comparable in size to the Romulan scout ship from TNG -- they're obviously able to sterilize a planet (which is frankly not a difficult task when you have space-based energy weapons), but that doesn't mean they're actually all that tough compared to a D'deridex-class warbird. Having a lot of smaller ships is not necessarily as impressive as having a smaller number of much tougher ships. The fact the Tal Shiar had a lot of ships the size of a Boeing 747 is just not a meaningful indicator of how powerful the Romulan Free State military fleet is post-supernova. Also, we should bear in mind that per Michael Chabon's Instagram posts, it is possible that there are multiple post-supernova Romulan states, each with remnants of the old Star Empire's military fleet.
Multiple successor-states coexisting with various degrees of amity/hostility as yet unclear was my understanding re: Chabon's comments on Instagram...?
Since Chabon isn't going to be the showrunner next season, we really have no idea what the state of things will be. The new guy may want to change anything Chabon might have mentioned offscreen.
Well, Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, but anything after TOS, TMP and the first two seasons of TNG, he had nothing to do with.
And many of the aspects of TOS came from collaboration and not just GR. Much is given to Nimoy, DC Fontana and Gene Coon, amongst others.
That is entirely possible! That's why I cited Chabon's Instagram posts instead of claiming it as the definitive state of Romulan society post-supernova.
Chabon may not be in the showrunner anymore, but he's still in the writers room and wrote the first two episodes.
The Romulan fleet was at risa for Romulan spring break. The tie in novel 'Romulan lampoon's vacation III: bikini beach party' explores this in detail.