Enterprise's involvement in the Earth-Romulan War

[Servo]

Ok, so we know that the Earth-Romulan War started in 2156 - two years after the events of Babel One/United/The Aenar - and continued until 2160, which is the year the events of TATV's holodeck recreation took place. So we can assume that the signing of the Federation charter happened after the war had ended. It would stand to reason that Enterprise played a huge part in the War, being the Flagship of Starfleet.

I've not really read many interviews with the powers that be, so I was wondering if the war would have featured on the show, had it continued past it its fourth season? It seems like they were kinda setting it up with the Romulan drone ship arc, and given the fact that we know the Andorians and Tellarites aided Earth in the war.

I always thought that the war would have been an interesting setting for a new Trek series, but given the period the war happened, would it be possible to do a series like that without Enterprise and its crew featuring somewhere? I suppose it could be based around another ship, with either Enterprise or the crew making the ocassional cameo appearance, or would they just have Enterprise as the "elephant in the room", similar to how we were supposed to accept that all DS9's major Dominion War conflicts took place with Picard's Enterprise seemingly absent from the field of battle, so as not to take the focus away from DS9's characters.

Anyway, I guess I'm just thinking out loud here, but I thought it would make for some interesting speculation.

Thoughts?

 

[Dukhat]

It might have been interesting; but, like the premise of ENT itself, it probably wouldn't have lived up to the expectations Trek fans would have had regarding this event.

And all I have to say is that I'm glad we got Star Trek '09 instead of the proposed Romulan War movie. Just the fact that Starfleet's most advanced vessel was at Risa the whole time is just too much to take. Seriously...Risa?

Also, there's no canon information stating that Andoria and Tellar specifically helped Earth in the war, although ENT heavily implies this.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The idea that the war lasted years is speculation from the obsolete Star Trek Chronology, based on the since-retconned line from "Balance of Terror" about Romulans not having warp drive. The aborted movie Star Trek: The Beginning reduced the Earth/Romulan war to an epic battle in Earth orbit lasting days (totally missed by the NX-01, vacationing at Risa at the time).

There are synopsis of planned Enterprise season five episodes floating about (Guinan, Borg Queen origin, Kzinti, a prequel to that TOS episode with the cloud city, etc.) and the only one mentioning Romulans was one where T'Pol meets her long-lost father - a Romulan spy. I don't think they planned on showing it during the series (kinda like the Telepath War in Babylon 5). IMO the Xindi conflict was far more interesting than a Romulan war would have been.

 

[Middleman]

It's pretty clear by now that the only way TPTB are going to let the Romulan War play out is in print and Enterprise plays a prominent role. First book was released about a year ago with the next one due next year. Supposedly it's a three book set.

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Beneath_the_Raptor%27s_Wing

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/In_Shariel's_Jaws

 

[Servo]

I was mostly going off the Memory Alpha article, and must have misinterpreted the Andorian and Tellarite involvement,

And Risa? WTF? The Human race is at war with the Romulans, and we're expected to believe that the pride of Starfleet wasn't recalled from shore leave to fight? Who wrote that crap?

 

[Mach5]

And Risa? WTF? The Human race is at war with the Romulans, and we're expected to believe that the pride of Starfleet wasn't recalled from shore leave to fight? Who wrote that crap?

Just forget about it. Paramount said "no", that should be enough for us.

 

[Servo]

Fair enough. Athough I would say that whoever wrote that should be banned from writing anything other than a shopping list ever again.

 

[Jax]

From what I read the Earth/Romulan War is a misleading title with the Romulan Wars a better one. It makes sense that the Coalition of planets was attacked by the Romulans who of course were paranoid by the potential of a UFP. I would of loved to see a ST ENT show, where the TCW was replaced with the events leading up to the war with the Federation the outcome at the end. The problem with B&B's ENT is that Humanity was building ships quick enough to incorporate it properly into the show. You wouled need a lot more NX ships and a fleet of smaller ships like the Intrepid but with warp 4 engines at the least. It would make sense The Vulcans/Andorians and Telleraties would be active in the war.

Whoever wrote that book mentioned clearly did not do there homework...

T'Pol is recalled to Vulcan, but she decides to formally resign her commission with the Vulcans and stay aboard Enterprise

She already did that and is a member of Starfleet.

Mayweather leaving and Hoshi considering leaving

WTF...totally out of character.

Vulcans will not assist Starfleet in the fight

I doubt this too, at the very least Vulcan would of posted a huge defence force at Earth and other colonies if the didn't want to go on the offensive.

Archer has become a Commodore

And yet come 2160 at the UFP launch, hes captain ?

Back on Vulcan, an explosion destroys the living katra of Surak

who wrote this?

 

[Phily B]

It always confused me how the Romulans allegdly didn't have warp drive during this war, how would such a war have been fought?

 

[Jack Bauer]

IIRC Braga said that due to that Romulan War movie proposal ENT was forbidden to do the war on the show. We would've seen things heat up but not much beyond that.

 

[F. King Daniel]

And Risa? WTF? The Human race is at war with the Romulans, and we're expected to believe that the pride of Starfleet wasn't recalled from shore leave to fight? Who wrote that crap?

Eric Jendresen. And it wasn't about Enterprise not being recalled, it was that they wouldn't reach Earth before the Romulans' primary attack force arrived, in two weeks time.

It had Shran in it! It can't be all bad

Just forget about it. Paramount said "no", that should be enough for us.

Actually Paramount said "yes" for a while, until there was a huge regime change and new people were put in charge of the company. It got further than simply being a rejected script.



I think there was a nod to ST: TB in STXI - George Kirk's father was named Tiberius, and in ST: TB, Tiberius Chase was supposedly gonna adopt the name "Kirk" at the end (the name "Chase" being associated with Otto Chase, Tiberius' famous Terra Prime-style isolationist father)

 

[F. King Daniel]

Double post.

 

[C.E. Evans]

It always confused me how the Romulans allegdly didn't have warp drive during this war, how would such a war have been fought?

With warp drive.

The line in "Balance of Terror" that the Romulan ship Kirk was chasing only had simple impulse power doesn't necessarily mean the Romulan ship didn't have faster-than-light capabilities, but that it didn't have a matter/antimatter reactor like the Enterprise did. A ship probably can reach lightspeed on impulse power--I tend to think Cochrane's first warp ship did that--but Federation starships use matter/antimatter instead and just reserve impulse power for sublight speeds, IMO.

 

[Leathco]

Maybe they didn't have warp drive in that particular model due to the fact that the warp system was incompatible with the cloaking prototype (or even the plasma torpedo prototype). Maybe the rest of the ships in the fleet that weren't a technological testbed had warp capability.

 

[Mach5]

Fair enough. Athough I would say that whoever wrote that should be banned from writing anything other than a shopping list ever again.

A guy called Eric Jendressen wrote it. He happens to be the Emmy award winning writer/producer of Steven Spielberg's "Band of brothers."

The main man behind the project (Rick Berman), however, will thankfully never again come anywhere near Star Trek.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Maybe they didn't have warp drive in that particular model due to the fact that the warp system was incompatible with the cloaking prototype (or even the plasma torpedo prototype). Maybe the rest of the ships in the fleet that weren't a technological testbed had warp capability.

The only problem with that is that it then asks the question how did the Romulan ship manage to move so quickly along the Neutral Zone without a FTL drive? It also attacked and destroyed three Earth outposts in fairly quick order that had be located a good distance from one another...

 

[Timo]

Fundamentally, what the "Balance of Terror" ship was capable or incapable of should not have any bearing on how the Romulan War was fought. After all, that war was not fought with that ship.

For example, in WWII, top-of-the-line German subs could do 17 knots surfaced. This in no way helps us figure out that top-of-the-line German torpedo boats in another war, twenty years earlier, were perfectly capable of thirty knots - or that top-of-the-line German aircraft from that older war were capable of a hundred knots or more.

Obviously, Romulans in "Balance of Terror" had warp technology down pat, as their weapons could easily chase a modern Starfleet starship at the latter's maximum warp. Whether their ship was capable of that or not (and our heroes thought not, but they could have been grossly mistaken) is relatively uninteresting.

Amazingly enough, what we "know" of the war in terms of onscreen stuff is still limited to what was told in "Balance of Terror". TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY or ENT, let alone the movies, didn't really offer any additional clues; the closest we got was a single mention of a "Battle of Cheron" as the concluding event of that war in 2160, but not in dialogue, merely in a computer readout that wasn't necessarily legible.

So the only thing we know for sure is that the war took place about a century before "Balance of Terror", involved Earthlings and Romulans (Spock said as much), did not involve practical invisibility devices (Spock considered such things theoretical until the episode), did not reveal the identity of the Romulans to the Earthling public (Spock said that this had not happened before the episode), and did not involve quarter (aka mercy), captives (supposedly live ones) or visual communications (even though these probably were technologically possible at the time).

The rest remains speculation. Spock mentions "allies" but not in the context of the war, merely in the context of the continuing Earthling failure to see a Romulan or vice versa. Spock mentions "primitive atomic weapons", but doesn't specify whether the modern heroes use nonatomic or advanced atomic ones. Spock mentions a treaty that established the Neutral Zone, but doesn't associate it directly with the war. And so forth.

The writers of current ENT-related fiction thus have basically free hands. They could claim that ENT already showed the Romulan War, in the episodes "Babel One", "United" and "The Aenar". Or they could claim the war took place long before ENT. In both cases, only later history writing would recognize the war for what it was. They could also depict a later war that ended by 2160 (if they wanted to respect that computer screen from "In a Mirror, Darkly") or a war that started in 2171 and ended in 2180 (if they decided the computer screen was from a parallel universe or didn't count as evidence). All of these choices would minimize the contribution of our ENT heroes and their starship in said war, though, so obviously they would not be preferred. What the writers are currently doing is quite acceptable, if a bit predictable...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Leathco]

The only problem with that is that it then asks the question how did the Romulan ship manage to move so quickly along the Neutral Zone without a FTL drive? It also attacked and destroyed three Earth outposts in fairly quick order that had be located a good distance from one another...

Hmm.....perhaps it used something similar to a current space shuttles booster rockets to escape Earths gravity. An external warp pulse, with a warp field sustainer similar to what was described for how a Photon torpedo operates, except used on the ship instead? (yes I'm grasping at straws, I'm not good at Trek Tech but I enjoy the conversations.)

 

[Timo]

To be sure, we never quite witnessed Scotty's prediction come true: our heroes didn't run rings around their enemy, not even when explicitly moving at warp three or better.

For all we know, the Romulans were at FTL speeds even when doing their cloaked run towards home. Except when they were flying through that comet's tail, of course, because otherwise that would have happened a tad too quickly... Which makes it a bit mysterious why they'd slow down right there if they maintained higher speed otherwise. Such a speed change should have defeated the entire purpose of the comet-tail-fly-through maneuver.

I guess our best bet remains that the Romulans had a decent warp drive on their ship, except when they were firing their plasma weapon or flying cloaked. Since Scotty only observed their ship at such moments, it's no wonder he was so completely mistaken about the ship's true propulsive capabilities.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[C.E. Evans]

The only problem with that is that it then asks the question how did the Romulan ship manage to move so quickly along the Neutral Zone without a FTL drive? It also attacked and destroyed three Earth outposts in fairly quick order that had be located a good distance from one another...

Hmm.....perhaps it used something similar to a current space shuttles booster rockets to escape Earths gravity. An external warp pulse, with a warp field sustainer similar to what was described for how a Photon torpedo operates, except used on the ship instead? (yes I'm grasping at straws, I'm not good at Trek Tech but I enjoy the conversations.)

But it's not that bad a concept at all though...I could see how something like that might work.