Day of The Dove,Who Really took the Colonists:

[DumbDumb2007]

The Borg took the Colonists. Captain Kirk mentioned that the 100 men, women and children of the Colony dissapeared without a trace. They and their equipment and habitats were all simply gone. Scooped right up.
Starfleet knew about the " unnamed Cybernetic Beings from the Future" by keeping both Zefram Cochrane's speech on file made at Princeton and Captain Archer's reoprt from 2252-2253 highly Top Secret. The incident in the Arctic Circle was beyond Hush-Hush.
While fighting among themselves because of the Alien. The Borg came and quickly took the Colony. The Klingons would also have had heard word about the Borg and also kept all information about the Borg Quiet.
Starfleet would have kept all knowledge about the Borg confidential through Section 31. Section 31 assigned the Enterprise to key missions.

 

[KeepOnTrekking]

The Federation claimed to have a colony there. So did the Klingons. I just always figured that the alien made it all up in their minds and there was no colony ever there. It was make believe like Chekov's brother.

 

[Plum]

What's with the section31 propaganda?!?!? There's no need to retcon this ep regarding the phantom colony (KeepOnTrekking is right, the colony never existed). (?)

Look man, try explaining Romulans having warp engines with simple impulse power. If you crack that nut, then you can try such far reaching, over many shows, retconning. Am I right?

Kidding...

 

[Jack Bauer]

There was no colony there. That idea was implanted into the crews minds by the swirling energy being.

 

[Professor Moriarty]

Plum said:
[T]ry explaining Romulans having warp engines with simple impulse power.

They didn't have warp engines. They had simple impulse that powered some other type of supraluminal drive system that didn't operate on Cochrane-style warp drive principles.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Plum said:
try explaining Romulans having warp engines with simple impulse power.

Scotty was talking about the Birds of Prey seen in Season One. Maybe they travelled out that far in a huge mothership that did have an analogue to the UFP's warp drive? And, of course, in Season Three they'd switched to Klingon ships.

 

[Peacemaker]

Bah, you're all wrong. They were Suliban pretending to be humans.

 

[erastus25]

Wow...with this Borg insight it suddenly all makes sense. The protagonists in the Way to Eden were actually all time traveling borg operatives. After the plan in 21st Century Montana was thwarted the Borg tried to destroy humanity again by sending the hippies to turn Kirk and the boys into stoned pacifists.

 

[Sisu]

erastus25 said:
Wow...with this Borg insight it suddenly all makes sense. The protagonists in the Way to Eden were actually all time traveling borg operatives. After the plan in 21st Century Montana was thwarted the Borg tried to destroy humanity again by sending the hippies to turn Kirk and the boys into stoned pacifists.

I feel like such a Herbert not realising this before.....

 

[Christopher]

Plum said:
Look man, try explaining Romulans having warp engines with simple impulse power. If you crack that nut, then you can try such far reaching, over many shows, retconning. Am I right?

That's easy. Kirk asked, "Can we engage them with a reasonable possibility of victory?" and Scotty replied, "No question. Their power is simple impulse." At that point, they weren't talking about pursuit, but engagement, i.e. actual combat -- which is usually done at sublight speeds. Scotty may have meant that the BoP's simple impulse drive wasn't as powerful or maneuverable as the Big E's more advanced impulse drive.

Anyway, "Balance of Terror" itself made it pretty explicit that the Bird of Prey was making interstellar journeys at a pace comparable to the E, so interpreting "their power is simple impulse" to mean "they have no warp drive at all" makes no sense.

 

[The Old Mixer]

I always took it to mean that they could only run on impulse while cloaked. Had they dropped the cloak, they could have tried to run home at warp, but the Enterprise could pursue them.

 

[Christopher]

^^No, I don't think that fits what we saw in the episode, since it was cloaked while traveling from outpost to outpost and then back toward the Neutral Zone. The map graphic certainly made it look as though it would've had to cover a number of light-years to achieve that. The only way it could've been at impulse is if we're supposed to believe that the whole of Romulan territory, the Neutral Zone, and the entire string of outposts are all within a single star system.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Could be they left the cloak up long enough to get away, then dropped it to jump.

 

[Christopher]

^^Again, I really don't think that's consistent with the lengthy pursuit that took up most of the last half of the episode. The E was chasing the Romulan ship and unable to detect it except on motion sensors that entire time. The logical conclusion is that it was cloaked while at warp.

Honestly, that one line of Scotty's has been blown ridiculously out of proportion. Everything else in the episode is consistent with the Romulans having warp drive, whether cloaked or uncloaked -- everything except one single sentence. Trying to take that sentence literally at the expense of the logic of the rest of the episode feels like a very small tail wagging a very large dog.

 

[sturmde]

Of course, don't forget too that TNG retconned this later by stating that Romulans use quantum singularities to drive their ships...

Perhaps they're warping space in ways not familiar to Federation science.

Need to also credit Professor Moriarty for mentioning this indirectly above... as I remember that episode of TNG having one of those Kris Kringle kiddie movie "Oh, so that's why" moments when they did that...

 

[gastrof]

The explanation is simple.

Scotty, not Spock, was a Romulan spy who wanted to give the Enterprise crew a false sense of security, so he lied about the Romulans having no warp drive.

The triangle scented penguins told me so.

 

[Nebusj]

Christopher said:
Honestly, that one line of Scotty's has been blown ridiculously out of proportion. Everything else in the episode is consistent with the Romulans having warp drive, whether cloaked or uncloaked -- everything except one single sentence. Trying to take that sentence literally at the expense of the logic of the rest of the episode feels like a very small tail wagging a very large dog.

Yes, absolutely. It's great to have exact lines of dialogue backing things up and giving us specific challenges to wriggle around through logical contortions, but the intent has to be that the Romulan ship is capable of roughly the same speeds the Enterprise in. As has often been pointed out, Kirk's question about whether they can outrun the Romulans is absolutely idiotic unless the Romulans can go significantly faster than the speed of light.

Reinforcing the intent-of-the-production argument, in ``The Deadly Years'' a fleet of Romulans is able to catch an Enterprise travelling at warp five (though the ship escapes at warp eight). There's no way they can be caught unless the Enterprise happens to run right into one of the Romulans' gun sights and they happen to blow out the Enterprise's warp engines with a first impossibly lucky shot. But that obviously doesn't happen as the Enterprise's warp drive is just fine.

 

[Timo]

Indeed, there seems to be a sharp division of fans to two camps here: those that accept that later events describe a slightly different universe with a slightly different meaning to the technobabble and, chuckling good-naturedly, reinterpret the earlier events to fit the mainstream; and those that choose to believe in the earlier events as opposed to the later ones, insisting that the observed incompatibility must be respected rather than resolved.

I can't help but feel that the first camp is "in universe", playing the make-believe to the fullest, and the second one is "looking from the outside", being more clinical about the universe while perhaps more appreciative of the show as a piece of art.

The Scotty-made-an-oopsie retcon here is IMHO particularly delightful when the writers do later tell us that Romulan ships have alien powerplants, not easily decipherable even by 24th century engineers. Not that the writers intended this when writing in the QS powerplant thing - but that makes it all even more enjoyable!

Christopher's idea about "engagement speeds" I haven't heard before, and it's a nice one as well. But indeed we're all talking about a single misspoken or misunderstood word here, not an important chain of conclusions. It's only the starved Trek community of the 1970s that came up with the expansive theory of the "impulse-speed Romulan species", along with other somewhat far-fetched extrapolations - reasonable back then, unnecessary now, and IMHO not really material for a real argument.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Christopher]

sturmde said:
Of course, don't forget too that TNG retconned this later by stating that Romulans use quantum singularities to drive their ships...

How is it a retcon? That story took place a century later. The Romulans could easily have adopted singularity drives sometime in the interim.

Nebusj said:
It's great to have exact lines of dialogue backing things up and giving us specific challenges to wriggle around through logical contortions, but the intent has to be that the Romulan ship is capable of roughly the same speeds the Enterprise in. As has often been pointed out, Kirk's question about whether they can outrun the Romulans is absolutely idiotic unless the Romulans can go significantly faster than the speed of light.

Well, as I said, Kirk wasn't asking if they could outrun the Romulans. He asked specifically if they could engage, i.e. fight, the Romulans with a reasonable chance of success.

Come to think of it, that suggests another interpretation. Scotty didn't say their propulsion was simple impulse, he said their power was. Maybe he meant that their weapons were powered only by their impulse reactors rather than their warp reactors. (Although that clashes a bit with TMP, where channeling phaser power through the warp drive was presented as a novelty.)

Reinforcing the intent-of-the-production argument, in ``The Deadly Years'' a fleet of Romulans is able to catch an Enterprise travelling at warp five (though the ship escapes at warp eight). There's no way they can be caught unless the Enterprise happens to run right into one of the Romulans' gun sights and they happen to blow out the Enterprise's warp engines with a first impossibly lucky shot.

Heck, the whole Romulan War could never have happened if the Romulans didn't have warp drive. The idea of a sublight power fighting a war against a warp-capable power is blatantly absurd and impossible. How can a power that needs years or decades to get between systems possibly fight a power that can do it in weeks? That's like pitting Hannibal's elephants against the US Air Force.

(Meanwhile, what was that massive Romulan fleet doing in the Neutral Zone during "The Deadly Years" anyway? The NZ is supposed to be off-limits to both powers. Commodore Stocker's so-called blunder may have exposed and scuttled a massive Romulan sneak attack on the Federation. He might've saved countless lives!)

 

[Lieut. Arex]

Christopher said:
Come to think of it, that suggests another interpretation. Scotty didn't say their propulsion was simple impulse, he said their power was.

This is how I see it. Fusion reactors driving both FTL and STL propulsion and powering the plasma weapon. Remember how much emphasis the Romulans place on their dwindling fuel reserves. The mission was to sneak across the Zone, smash a a few of the outposts as a test of their weapons and cloak against Star Fleet's current gear, then sneak home. The ship wasn't prepared for a long-term combat. That's not the best plan, but the cloak and devastating nature of the plasma weapon made them overconfident. When Kirk didn't oblige them by being destroyed by the plasma torpedo, it was over. Low on fuel, they didn't have the power to combat the Enterprise effectively or to escape.