Did the Vulcans always know the truth about the Romulans?

There was a storyline in Marvel's "Star Trek: Early Voyages" comic wherein Pike and co. encountered the descendants of a long-lost colony of Vulcans who had kept the savage and emotionally volatile ways for the last 2,000 years, as well as psionic weapons that had long been banned on Vulcan. IIRC, this whole ordeal led to Spock delving further into Vulcan logic, perhaps thereby offering some background into the different characterization between the grinning, shouting Spock of "The Cage" and the more stoic Spock of the series proper.

Kor

 

Well...

Spoiler

As of the seasan finale of SNW, we know that Captain Pike became aware of it seven years before "Balance of Terror." Whether he shared that knowledge with Starfleet or Spock (and if not, why not) is, I suspect, liable to remain unanswered.

The way you connect the bits of info from those various quotes is, to be sure, one possible explanation. Just for the sake of argument, though, one might posit a simpler version:

• that Vulcan's "violent colonizing period" was (like Earth's) restricted to the home planet
• that Vulcan only had a single rise to high tech levels, which corresponded roughly with Surak's era, c. Earth's 4th century
  
• that this led to the (narrow) avoidance of planetary nuclear war, and thus the Reformation/Time of Awakening/Sundering/pick-your-term...
• ...at which point the home planet devoted itself to Surak's teachings, while multiple groups of Vulcans who chose otherwise left for other worlds (whether FTL or not, IDK)
• that some of these offshoots remained known to Vulcan, and possibly even stayed in touch
• ...while one group thought lost eventually wound up settling on Romulus.

IOW, a lost interstellar empire is an interesting hypothesis, but not a necessary one. Thoughts?

 

So I always thought for a hypothetical Romulan War animated series there would be some people that found out and there were contrivances for them being killed off before they could reveal it, or were kept prisoner on Romulus, or had memory wiped, or pick whatever reason you want. But I also think there would be people who found out and for one reason or another kept that information secret, some because of serving the greater good, and others to use it as leverage. I think using the drone ships kept away close contact between the forces, but I think it would have been good if they did have ground battles, and in my fake series why wouldn't you, and the Remans were the dudes sent into battle, and any Romulans ground forces just ripped off the Chigs from "Space: Above and Beyond" and had suits that just disintegrated their bodies. I never thought the fact they don't find out what the Romulans look like until TOS was a crutch. I think it's a unique limitation and I think there's a lot of ways to work around it and still be true to the main idea.

 

Earth's "violent colonizing period" was not necessarily restricted to colonizing on Earth during TOS. Only later Star Trek productions give the impression that Earth's interstellar expansion was mostly peaceful.

Several 4th season episodes of Enterprise show that the reforms of Surak happened in abut the 4th century AD, as you state. "Gambit" established that the Debrune, a Romulan offshoot society, had interstelar travel and left ruins in several different star systems about the 4th century AD.

So how could the Romulans have left Vulcan at about the same time as a culture based on Romulan culture was already spread out over several star systems far from Vulcan.

By the way, the first contact with the Debrune must have been after "Balance of Terror" and the Federation would have learned a lot from the Debrune about Romulan history prior to the Debrune split from the Romulans. Thus the Debrune worlds should have been rather far from EArth and from Vulcan 16 light years from Earth.

 

Really? I recall references to the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies, so we can infer that inside the solar system, among humans, Earth had some colonies that later established independence. (That could even have been pre-warp.) But I don't recall any suggestions that pre-Federation Earth engaged in imperialistic behavior in any other star system, or even that it had the capacity to do so. Refresh my memory?...

A century is a long time... especially if we stipulate that the "Vulcan diaspora" did in fact involve FTL capability, as this seems to require. It's long enough for the Romulans to leave Vulcan, find and settle a new home planet, and send out other "offshoot" expeditions that established their own outposts and their own sense of identity. Sure, a slightly longer timespan might be more plausible, but fitting all that into the 4th century isn't logically precluded.