Weapons Used During the Wars:
How did the novels deal with the matter of atomic weapons?
They basically didn't mention much what the weapons were, though sometimes they did mention "old-style nuclear warheads." In addition, the Romulans did use disruptors and the
Enterprise NX-01 and
Columbia NX-02 did use phase canons and photonics torpedoes, but I do remember them mentioning at least once that the Enterprise did use nuclear warheads in the mix. I'd basically categorize the war as a bunch of sneak attacks by the Romulans and retaliations by UE.
The
NX-class ships, and other, more advanced, alien-allied vessels were mainly kept out of the war, because of the tele-capturing device used by the Romulans to take over their vessels. They used refit
Daedalus and
Intrepid-class vessels, which probably didn't allow prisoners. In addition, the other
NX-class ships were destroyed in their ship yards by the Romulans.
Columbia had it's warp system compromised (I don't remember exactly what or how) and it was caught in a temporal disturbance into the 24th Century in the
Destiny novels with Captain Riker, I believe...
Also, "fought, by our standards today, with primitive atomic weapons and in primitive space vessels" takes Herculean effort to read as anything else than "fought with atomic weapons more primitive than ours and in space vessels more primitive than ours". That is, Kirk and Spock must still be using atomic weapons, just like they are still using space vessels - theirs are just less primitive. It's merely left as an exercise to the reader to figure out which of Kirk and Spock's weapons are supposed to be atomic. All of them? Just the phasers? Just the photon torpedoes?
Yes, that is a good point, but for a lot of TOS fans, it is a hard pill to swallow. Like I pointed out, the Starfleet Museum website, which is pretty canon-verbatim, had UE ships using lasers and RSE using disruptors. I enjoyed the novels anyway.
And IIRC, there was no mention of atomic weapons in the novels.
IIRC? Also, I do take issue with the fact that they didn't use nuclear torpedoes.
Visual Ship to Ship Communcations:
visual communications is just that, visual communications. Sub space radio is all they had as far as both sides communicating.
Basically in the romulan war federation and romulan ships traded taunts and threats over a sub space ham radio. never seeing each other. just hearing each other.
Then in TOS when the romulan war ship with new plasma weapon destroys outposts... we finally see the moment for the first time that Starfleet sees romulans face to face over ship to ship visual communication.
Meaning that they never saw each other's physical bodies? Okay.
"No Quarter" Meaning:
you misconstrue no prisoners as meaning, either side had no facilities for that. In theory a shuttle bay can be used as a simple prison. But the problems come from how the war is supposed to have been fought.
Bare bones, shoot, kill, move to a new target. No one TOOK prisoners because they were to focused on a war of survival. Meaning, if a romulan ship blew a federation ship in half, they would simply leave it drifting in space to die a slow death. Or simply fire another spread of torpedoes and finish it off.
And us happy Starfleet folks did the same thing. You see a romulan war ship, you fill it with weapons fire until its a radioactive hulk with no life signs, or just soak torpedoes into it until it explodes.
...Quite comparable to thinking that "no quarter" would mean there was no space for prisoners. That's simply a failure to understand the English language, in which "no quarter" unambiguously is synonymous to "no mercy".
I'm pretty sure the "no quarter" thing was indeed meant to imply there was no space for prisoners, since the whole point was that no one had seen a Romulan in the flesh, and if they had captured Romulan prisoners they would have known what they looked like.
So no quarter means that they didn't want prisoners, or they didn't want prisoners,
Timo?? Sorry if you have to reiterate.
Sure, that's what it means in general, but in this specific case, Spock said "primitive space vessels which allowed no quarter." He doesn't say the crews allowed no quarter, he says the vessels allowed no quarter. That has to mean that showing mercy wasn't physically possible because there just wasn't room on the ships. Because the only other interpretation is that the ships were sentient and were just complete jerks.
^^^^ That makes sense.
Romulan Mine Field Cloaking Device Problem:
^ Also, the Romulan ship in "Minefield" keeps uncloaking and cloaking at random moments, so it seems obvious something is wrong with it. So the line from TOS is easily explainable: it took them that long to develop a cloak that works.
Invisibility in "BoT" is in conflict with precedent from TOS itself, for that matter. In "Charlie X", an adversary ship appears out of nowhere, essentially "choosing to suddenly become visible". Such behavior, by whichever means, should not surprise our heroes in the slightest, then - and never mind that lifeforms and objects other than starships quite regularly are invisible, until they are not, all across TOS.
But as made clear above, that's not much of an issue, as "TOS itself" did not strive to be particularly consistent internally - indeed, the spinoffs probably did much more work there, and had much more success, including with respect to TOS factoids.
What is frustrating here isn't minor technicalities, but the very concept that invisibility should surprise seasoned space adventurers. We could pretend that "BoT" comes before any other TOS episode featuring invisibility if we wanted, considering how irrelevant stardates, let alone airdates, are in-universe. But that invisibility still remains theoretical in the 2260s... Human or even Vulcan attempts at invisibility may have flopped, but both cultures should have had plenty of exposure to alien invisibility by that time. Which is what ENT enjoyably shows happening.
Then again, ENT also provides a sly excuse for Spock's ignorance in "BoT", establishing that Vulcans just plain refuse to believe in certain things regardless of whether they are observed to exist or not...
What powered the ship from "Charlie-X" to disappear?
BTW, I haven't read
The Good That Men Do to completion (it was a while ago in 2007 when I picked it up, I don't know exactly what happened to it
,) how did they tackle that the Romulans used a cloaking system before their very eyes? I knew that it had an anti-matter containment failure that caused it not to be practical.
One thing a lot of people have complained about was ENT using cloaking technology a century before BoT, wherein Spock said it was only a theoretical possibility. But there are a lot of such inconsistencies in the portrayal of cloaking in Trek -- for instance, Starfleet penetrates Klingon cloaking technology in TUC, but cloaks are still impenetrable in the TNG era. And in DS9's Mirror Universe, the Klingons have cloaks in "Crossover" but don't have them in "The Emperor's New Cloak." But I think this is easy to explain, since logically there'd be a constant arms race between stealth and detection. Each time a new cloaking tech was invented, it would eventually be penetrated by some new detection method and thus rendered useless, and then cloaking would be considered "impossible" again until someone invented a new type of cloak that could fool all known detection methods.
Sorry, TUC?
