Balance of Terror Observations

[Timo]

Why wouldn't the RNZ be inside the single star system? Why give the evil Romulans any extra space for free when isolating them from the rest of the galaxy?

And we surely want to minimize the distance between the Earth outposts in order to give them some sort of credibility as a means of cordoning off the Romulans. It directly follows that the distance between Romulus and Romii gets minimized as well.

A lot of stuff makes sense in a fantasy setting, given the very premise. Conversely, and consequently, "common sense" tends to be inapplicable, much less worth a heated defense...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Pauln6]

It could also be a space station .

 

[1001001]

It’s too big to be a space station...

 

[Pauln6]

It’s too big to be a space station...

So glad someone went there...

 

[johnnybear]

Descendants, not sons. They are sons of Mars.

Must be the Mandela effect again because I've always read it that they were the sons of Aeneus, but now like you've pointed out it says they're the sons of Mars! Now considering that Mars wasn't a real person as such that throws up more mystery as to who or what they were!
JB

 

[johnnybear]

I've always gathered that Romii or Rom II must be another planet within the Romulan Star Empire rather than another name for Remus! In TNG we learn that there are many planets located in that area of space and even in TOS we know Eden is also located there as well!
JB

 

[Christopher]

Must be the Mandela effect again because I've always read it that they were the sons of Aeneus, but now like you've pointed out it says they're the sons of Mars! Now considering that Mars wasn't a real person as such that throws up more mystery as to who or what they were!
JB

Romulus and Remus probably weren't real either, and neither was Aeneas. They're all figures from mythology. R&R are the mythical founders of Rome, and even if they were based on real people, the myths and symbolism surrounding them surely overwhelmed whatever historicity they had. And claiming Aeneas as their ancestor was probably just the Romans' way of claiming to be the descendants of Trojan civilization in order to elevate themselves.

 

[Noname Given]

All Kirk says in the opening Captain's Log is:

Captain's Log, stardate 1709.2. Patrolling outposts guarding the neutral zone between planets Romulus and Remus and the rest of the galaxy, received emergency call from outpost 4. The U.S.S. Enterprise is moving to investigate and assist.

It's only later that Authors (and the TNG writing staff) showed that Romulus and Remus orbited each other (implying that Remus was more of a moon of Romulus) - But Kirk did say: "...planets Romulus and Remus..." so they are two actual planets.

 

[johnnybear]

Only in history will we find truth! Another saying that means absolutely nothing due to the past being manipulated by people in power over the years!
JB

 

[johnnybear]

All Kirk says in the opening Captain's Log is:



It's only later that Authors (and the TNG writing staff) showed that Romulus and Remus orbited each other (implying that Remus was more of a moon of Romulus) - But Kirk did say: "...planets Romulus and Remus..." so they are two actual planets.

That map in Balance of Terror was beautiful wasn't it? But it's left us with as many questions about the Romulans than the writer Paul Schneider would have ever guessed back in 1966!!!
JB

 

[Christopher]

It's only later that Authors (and the TNG writing staff) showed that Romulus and Remus orbited each other (implying that Remus was more of a moon of Romulus)

Except that the defining trait of Romulus and Remus, aside from being the founders of Rome, is that they're identical twins. If a science fiction writer names two planets Romulus and Remus, the intent is most likely that they're a binary planet -- not a planet and moon, but twin worlds orbiting a common center of mass. While there are no such binary planets yet known to exist, they're theoretically possible and a common idea in science fiction. (Indeed, Isaac Asimov argued that Earth and the Moon are a binary planet, albeit one whose common center of mass is 1000 miles below Earth's surface. His argument was that, since the Moon is twice as strongly gravitationally attracted to the Sun as it is to Earth -- due to the Sun's much greater mass -- it therefore counts dynamically as an independent planet that simply happens to share its orbit around the Sun with Earth. Not many astrophysicists agree, though.)

The earliest mention I can find of Romulus and Remus being a binary planet is in the Star Trek Concordance by Bjo Trimble. Interestingly, the Concordance claims that Romii is the secondary component of a binary star system whose primary star, called Romulus, is orbited in turn by the binary planets Romulus and Remus. So in other words, the star Romulus is orbited by the twin planets Romulus and Remus, and is also orbited at a much greater distance by the star Romii. Although that would have to be a really wide binary star to be distinguishable on the scale of the map.

(Ooh -- maybe Romii is the star that went supernova in 2387. That would explain why Romulus was destroyed so soon after. Although if it were large enough to go supernova, it'd be the primary star, not the secondary one.)

 

[alchemist]

That map in Balance of Terror was beautiful wasn't it? But it's left us with as many questions about the Romulans than the writer Paul Schneider would have ever guessed back in 1966!!!
JB

The map was suggested by Stan Robertson at NBC. After reading Schneider's outline, he wrote the following to Gene Roddenberry in a memo dated May 4,1966:

We need a "map" of what's happening, where we are and where we're going. A possible way to do it is to figure out a legitimate question to Spock which does not seem to be "made for the occasion". For example, "give me a list of the stations which have not reported in yet". Then Spock finds information, sketches of stations and positions, etc. to flash on the library-computer screen which lays is out for the audience.

 

[Christopher]

Correction to my previous post: I've found the actual earliest reference to Romulus and Remus being twin planets, and I should've thought of it sooner. It's in James Blish's "Balance of Terror" adaptation from his very first Star Trek volume in 1967. "Neither Romulus nor Remus, twin planets whirling around a common center of mass in a Trojan relationship to a white-dwarf sun, could have proved attractive to any race that did not love hardships for their own sakes."

By the way, it turns out that Blish's "Balance of Terror" adaptation is also the first reference to 40 Eridani as Vulcan's home star. I'd formerly believed that Blish first proposed that a year later in his "Tomorrow is Yesterday" adaptation, but it's in his "Balance" adaptation, where he found it necessary to clarify for his SF-savvy readers that Spock's Vulcan was "not the imaginary Solar world of that name, but a planet of 40 Eridani." Blish refers to Spock's people as "Vulcanites." He also establishes that some Romulan bodies were found during the war and were known to be "of the hawklike Vulcanite type rather than the Earthly anthropoid" (which suggests that Blish was imagining something very different from what was actually onscreen), but apparently the bodies were distorted enough that they didn't know they were an exact match for Spock's people until Uhura (not Spock) gets a picture of the Romulans' bridge.

 

[Pauln6]

Correction to my previous post: I've found the actual earliest reference to Romulus and Remus being twin planets, and I should've thought of it sooner. It's in James Blish's "Balance of Terror" adaptation from his very first Star Trek volume in 1967. "Neither Romulus nor Remus, twin planets whirling around a common center of mass in a Trojan relationship to a white-dwarf sun, could have proved attractive to any race that did not love hardships for their own sakes."

By the way, it turns out that Blish's "Balance of Terror" adaptation is also the first reference to 40 Eridani as Vulcan's home star. I'd formerly believed that Blish first proposed that a year later in his "Tomorrow is Yesterday" adaptation, but it's in his "Balance" adaptation, where he found it necessary to clarify for his SF-savvy readers that Spock's Vulcan was "not the imaginary Solar world of that name, but a planet of 40 Eridani." Blish refers to Spock's people as "Vulcanites." He also establishes that some Romulan bodies were found during the war and were known to be "of the hawklike Vulcanite type rather than the Earthly anthropoid" (which suggests that Blish was imagining something very different from what was actually onscreen), but apparently the bodies were distorted enough that they didn't know they were an exact match for Spock's people until Uhura (not Spock) gets a picture of the Romulans' bridge.

Or he was a visionary and understood that an interstellar empire would be made of more than one species.

 

[Marsden]

It’s too big to be a space station...

We're going to need a bigger boat.

All Kirk says in the opening Captain's Log is:



It's only later that Authors (and the TNG writing staff) showed that Romulus and Remus orbited each other (implying that Remus was more of a moon of Romulus) - But Kirk did say: "...planets Romulus and Remus..." so they are two actual planets.

Unless Remus got demoted. Pluto was a planet when Star Trek was made , and now it's not.

 

[Maurice]

The map was suggested by Stan Robertson at NBC. After reading Schneider's outline, he wrote the following to Gene Roddenberry in a memo dated May 4,1966:

We need a "map" of what's happening, where we are and where we're going. A possible way to do it is to figure out a legitimate question to Spock which does not seem to be "made for the occasion". For example, "give me a list of the stations which have not reported in yet". Then Spock finds information, sketches of stations and positions, etc. to flash on the library-computer screen which lays is out for the audience.

I don't think I got that memo.

 

[johnnybear]

James Blish wrote the novels based on the actual shooting script! His Doomsday Machine is very different in many ways from what we got on the screen for example although some stories are nearly word for word the same!
JB

 

[Maurice]

Blish didn't always get the final shooting scripts, either.

 

[Christopher]

Blish didn't always get the final shooting scripts, either.

Also, in his early volumes, he made embellishments of his own that had nothing to do with the scripts. He introduced a number of concepts from his own original SF, basically treating Star Trek as if it were set in his own fictional universe or a version thereof. After all, at the time, Blish was a much bigger name in science fiction than Star Trek was. And it was common at the time for novelizations to be loose adaptations reinterpreted by their authors, rather than the slavish copies they're required to be today.

He also rewrote some of the episodes to be a bit more scientifically sensible, or at least clearer -- as in his clarification that Vulcan was around 40 Eridani instead of being the hypothetical Solar planet of that name. His "Naked Time" adaptation, for one example, came up with a more detailed, very plausible explanation for the episode's "water virus." And, of course, he trimmed the stories quite a bit to make them fit, leaving out subplots and simplifying the stories.

 

[johnnybear]

Weird to think he's been dead for over forty plus years!
JB