Canon TOS/TMP Starships-of-the-line

[Timo]

The UFP has been around for a couple of hundred years; Earth hasn't been starfaring for much longer than that. The Romulans have supposedly been around for two thousand years or so, though. How come they face such a staggeringly lower number of world-ending challenges?

We don't know how long the Klingons have been operating a starfaring empire; old Kahless already spoke of going to a distant star, but perhaps just figuratively? They, too, are older players than the Federation, though, even if only by a century or two. And how come anybody outside the UFP is standing, allied into a star empire or not? The universe has had millions or billions of years to do nasty things to them.

It almost seems like the UFP is a disaster magnet rather than just a player especially qualified to deal with disasters. Perhaps the two do go hand in hand? But only the DDM in TOS was encountered in distant space by curiosity-killed-the-cat-careless long range explorers; the Space Amoeba, NOMAD, V'Ger, the antimatter cloud that made One of Our Planets go Missing, etc. all came to the UFP, not waiting for its explorers to come out and find them.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[137th Gebirg]

The UFP has been around for a couple of hundred years; Earth hasn't been starfaring for much longer than that. The Romulans have supposedly been around for two thousand years or so, though. How come they face such a staggeringly lower number of world-ending challenges?

The Romulans seem to be quite xenophobic by nature in all the years we've seen me on screen, preferring to hide in the shadows, within their own borders, and following the precept "to be unknowable is to be unconquerable", expanding out only when resource acquisitions and/or overpopulation demand it. Much like the Tholians, who likely also don't experience such challenges, they generally only react when provoked. As a result, since they don't explore the galaxy around them as much as Starfleet, they simply wouldn't be as open to exposure to such catastrophic incidents. It boils down to a matter of statistical probabilities. One could even say the Federation goes out looking for trouble, whereas the Romulans are pure isolationist. Arguably, in some respects, a safer way to live.

 

[Avro Arrow]

And how come anybody outside the UFP is standing, allied into a star empire or not? The universe has had millions or billions of years to do nasty things to them.

We have a biased sample. We see the Klingon and the Romulan Empires still existing because they have so far beat the statistical odds. (Well, until 2387 for the RSE.) We don't actually see in the show all the other interstellar empires that got wiped out by DDMs, giant amoebas, and the like, because, well, they no longer exist. And in the grand scheme of things, these two examples are very young. Where are the Trek equivalent of the "First Ones" in B5? (The Vedala would probably qualify... and they seem to live a nomadic existence. Homeworld wiped out sometime in the past?)

We know that some interstellar empires have been wiped out by natural disaster... just ask the Tkon.

 

[Ithekro]

Or the large events happen to outer planets of those Empires. The plaent vanishes or the population is all killed. Someone eventually investigates, finds nothing of worth and declares it a mystery or pins it on a rival empire or faction within the empire and thing go on if nothing happened.

A Doomsday Machine cruised through Klingon space takes out a half dozen star systems and a few ships. Then it leaves Klingon space. A which point the Klingons stop caring.

 

[Ronald Held]

The Federation may be different. Driven by the human need to explore the UFP may be an anomaly compared to other empires?

 

[blssdwlf]

And how come anybody outside the UFP is standing, allied into a star empire or not? The universe has had millions or billions of years to do nasty things to them.

Where are the Trek equivalent of the "First Ones" in B5? (The Vedala would probably qualify... and they seem to live a nomadic existence. Homeworld wiped out sometime in the past?)

We know that some interstellar empires have been wiped out by natural disaster... just ask the Tkon.

In TOS, the "First Ones" or even "Ancients" (SG1) would be something like the Organians, Metrons, and Trelane's race.

Or the large events happen to outer planets of those Empires. The plaent vanishes or the population is all killed. Someone eventually investigates, finds nothing of worth and declares it a mystery or pins it on a rival empire or faction within the empire and thing go on if nothing happened.

A Doomsday Machine cruised through Klingon space takes out a half dozen star systems and a few ships. Then it leaves Klingon space. A which point the Klingons stop caring.

There are a couple of galaxy-ending threats during TOS' time: the giant space amoeba that was about to multiply, the "Alternative Factor" antimatter-matter incident. Could the Klingons or Romulans or Gorns have handled it better? (To some extent maybe - since the Romulans seem to have not been too bothered by the Borg when the Federation had a lot of trouble.)

 

[Wingsley]

In TOS, the long-vanished civilization that seeded worlds was The Preservers. ("The Paradise Syndrome"). There was also the billion-year-old race seen in TNG's "The Chase", as well as the T'Kon Empire. No indication if any of these are related.

 

[Timo]

In TOS, the long-vanished civilization that seeded worlds was The Preservers. ("The Paradise Syndrome").

Nothing suggests they would have vanished, let alone long ago. Their only known achievement is the abducting of some native North Americans a couple of hundred years ago; Spock says that accounts for a "number" of humanoid civilizations in the Milky Way, but probably only those one-village wonders our heroes so often meet... "Seeding" is a strange choice of words for Spock when what's happening is "transplantation" that has yet to demonstrate the ability to properly take root.

the giant space amoeba that was about to multiply

Yet that very fact suggests it wouldn't have been a big deal at all. After all, if it can multiply, it obviously already has, and the galaxy is no worse off for it. There's an entire population of those things out there, and for some reason it's mostly harmless, only very occasionally eating a star system somebody would care about.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[BK613]

^Or some random single-celled organism, frozen in some interstellar flotsam, came in contact with the galactic barrier and was enhanced accordingly.

 

[Timo]

The Space Amoeba appears to be a problem the Klingons, Romulans or Cardassians would probably deal with just as easily: you need to apply brute force and high explosives at targets of interest (that is, not just the usual homogeneous goo) in the center of the thing, which is an intuitively obvious approach anyway. Klingons might need three or more ships where Starfleet succeeded with two, but they'd get there in the end.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[137th Gebirg]

Eh...nothing a single detached A/M magnetic bottle on a time-delay shutdown wouldn't take care of after being beamed inside the membrane. Zip away at high warp after dropping off the payload and splat!

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Somehow, though, both the evil empires have survived this far. Do they exist in volumes of space that Space Amoebae and Doomsday Machines avoid? Or are these empires simply so much more compact than the easygoing, carelessly expanding UFP that they hit fewer snags out of sheer statistic necessity?

It's probably the latter, plus the Klingons have admitted at various times that their empire wasn't exactly thriving even BEFORE the Praxis incident. Mara, for example, mentions poverty being a problem in "Day of the Dove" and this is implied in "Errand of Mercy" where the origin of the war appears to be little more than a land dispute: the Klingons are trying to annex worlds the Federation has claimed, and seem to desperately NEED them.

The implication being, the Klingon Empire isn't as effective a problem solver as the Federation and is trying to compensate for its inefficiency by gathering more resources more quickly. Their efforts are constantly thwarted by their inability to deal with the occasional space monster and/or negative space wedgie, so they are operating constantly in the red.

There's also the fact that the Romulans virtually disappeared for 60 years and then re-emerged kilometer-long starships that were easily on par with Starfleet's best explorers. If something like the Whale Probe incident had happened on Romulus and they had been unable to deal with it in a timely fashion, it would have taken them about sixty years just to rebuild while at the same time putting out fires all over their space to keep the locals from rebelling.

 

[Timo]

Great points - I had completely forgotten about the poverty references in "Day of the Dove". I guess the evil empires just get lucky in that their space monster setbacks don't cost them their homeworlds, merely their expansion plans.

(Perhaps the Klingons are carefully keeping the location and identity of the homeworld secret, indeed only referring to it as "the Homeworld" in most TNG still, so that no enemy rummaging through captured colonial records can get a pointer?)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Great points - I had completely forgotten about the poverty references in "Day of the Dove". I guess the evil empires just get lucky in that their space monster setbacks don't cost them their homeworlds, merely their expansion plans.

(Perhaps the Klingons are carefully keeping the location and identity of the homeworld secret, indeed only referring to it as "the Homeworld" in most TNG still, so that no enemy rummaging through captured colonial records can get a pointer?)

Timo Saloniemi

Small point: the UNSC is well known for doing exactly this in the Haloverse. The infamous "cole protocol" requires their ships to completely erase their navigational computers and put their AIs into safe mode if capture appears unavoidable.

 

[Timo]

Naturally, Trek makes its own assumptions about such things. There are warp trails to follow, under certain conditions; traffic patterns can be monitored at a distance; they can do the CSI thing and decide that the ore in the holds of IKS Nostromo can only have come from this particular planet in this star system; and every ship has one crewman esoteric enough to keep written records, books and the like.

But yeah, a bit of paranoia with shipboard information management would help. Yet how about outer colonies that get scooped up by the Borg or raided by the Breen? It would be pretty damn difficult to run an ore shipping operation or a mail delivery network if the schedules and route maps got erased every second month in a moment of strategically necessary panic...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Naturally, Trek makes its own assumptions about such things. There are warp trails to follow, under certain conditions; traffic patterns can be monitored at a distance; they can do the CSI thing and decide that the ore in the holds of IKS Nostromo can only have come from this particular planet in this star system; and every ship has one crewman esoteric enough to keep written records, books and the like.

But yeah, a bit of paranoia with shipboard information management would help. Yet how about outer colonies that get scooped up by the Borg or raided by the Breen? It would be pretty damn difficult to run an ore shipping operation or a mail delivery network if the schedules and route maps got erased every second month in a moment of strategically necessary panic...

Timo Saloniemi

in the Haloverse, this turned out not to be a problem due to the fact that the humans were never able to defeat the Covenant in ship to ship combat, so the Cole Protocol was really more of a "Things to do before you die" policy.

We already know the Romulans must have had some similar kind of policy during the Earth-Romulan War, which is the only possible explanation for humans not knowing what Romulans looked like a hundred years later: they were never able to capture one alive, or even intact. One theory is that the Romulans learned that particular trick from the Klingons (from whom they also borrowed or stole their basic starship design philosophy), and the Klingons have standing orders, in the event of immanent defeat, not to leave anything behind that might contain useful intelligence for their attackers.

 

[Timo]

We don't really know what the Romulan War was like, though. Possibly it did not involve any planetside fighting? Scooping up bodies from the wreckage of ships would be something you did on your own peril, because of booby traps and further enemy ships laying in wait behind their invisibility screens...

...Which have been conveniently forgotten a hundred years later. Perhaps Romulan faces were forgotten the same way - by actively hunting down and amnesiazing anybody who had found out that Romulans were in fact Vulcans and might spread discord when none could be afforded?

Just having scuttling charges and refusing any calls from the enemy would go a long way in preventing him from seeing your face, dead or alive. Especially if the Romulan War was a limited conflict involving relatively brief fighting and few people.

Do Klingons like to scuttle, hide and obfuscate? TOS suggests no such policy. Yet the "Cole Protocol" approach would only work if the Klingons were paranoid about everybody, including the Federation, and not just about a select set of enemies. ENT makes the matters worse by showing how openly the Klingons allow Earthlings to their space and indeed to their very homeworld.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ronald Held]

Romulan ships could have self destructed before any Earth vessel could board it. For ground combat dead Romulans could be disrupted or any human who views one is killed. Maybe in a hundred years only a few people in the Federation(outside of Vulcan) know?

 

[ozzfloyd]

But what motivation would the Romulans have had for keeping their shared ancestry with the Vulcans a secret? I understand why the Federation might want to keep that under wraps, but I don't see the Romulans going to any great lengths to not reveal their appearance.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

Well, we're discussing the idea that Klingons are not good at dealing with unconventional threats (which they're not) and trying to understand how a galactic empire can survive under those conditions. It occurs to me that alien threats learning the location of their homeworld and/or colonies is actually the sort of conventional military threat the Klingons would be best equipped to handle; the Romulans, on the other hand, prefer secrecy because sneakiness is their SOP.

As for the Klingons, it's already clear that they are able to SURVIVE, but that doesn't mean they're rolling in prosperity either. They are doing well enough that they can colonize multiple worlds and maintain order, but even in the 24th century there is social unrest and rebellion in at least one of their colonies, and Kronos is far from the egalitarian paradise that Earth purports to be.

We already have reason to believe the Romulans occasionally get hit by these "space storm" disasters every now and then. The Klingons got a relatively low-grade one in the Praxis explosion, and certainly there were others. These seem to be infrequent and isolated enough that the Empire can still survive the aftermath, but only the Federation seems to be able to come through those disasters relatively undamaged.