I'm not sure this would really follow.
I mean, in the real world, it can be postulated that once a civilization discovers how to do starflight (slower than light is fine), it will almost immediately start expanding at basically the maximum speed allowed by that interstellar drive. Within a few hundred thousand years, a single sublight civilization would have inhabited all suitable worlds in the galaxy. With warp drive, this should happen in a thousand years at most.
However, the Trek galaxy is different from the one postulated above, because it's filled with competing cultures. Vulcan attempts at expansion would probably have been brought to a grinding halt just a few hundred lightyears from home, as competitors would start intercepting Vulcan ships and annihilating Vulcan colonies.
The way to get far in the Trek universe is to use stealth. And the Borg seem to use that a lot - to the degree that most people haven't even heard of them, or perhaps live in the mistaken belief that they are a minor local nuisance.
So Vulcans may have launched probes and the odd crewed expedition to Delta, but those would be lone, long shots that would not amount to any sort of control or more than cursory knowledge of that quadrant.
To become a good galactic explorer, a civilization probably has to be very large and powerful, and technologically advanced, both in terms of its spacedrive and its weaponry. Vulcans in all likelihood didn't cut it, as even the combined Federation isn't really up there just yet.
Timo Saloniemi
I mean, in the real world, it can be postulated that once a civilization discovers how to do starflight (slower than light is fine), it will almost immediately start expanding at basically the maximum speed allowed by that interstellar drive. Within a few hundred thousand years, a single sublight civilization would have inhabited all suitable worlds in the galaxy. With warp drive, this should happen in a thousand years at most.
However, the Trek galaxy is different from the one postulated above, because it's filled with competing cultures. Vulcan attempts at expansion would probably have been brought to a grinding halt just a few hundred lightyears from home, as competitors would start intercepting Vulcan ships and annihilating Vulcan colonies.
The way to get far in the Trek universe is to use stealth. And the Borg seem to use that a lot - to the degree that most people haven't even heard of them, or perhaps live in the mistaken belief that they are a minor local nuisance.
So Vulcans may have launched probes and the odd crewed expedition to Delta, but those would be lone, long shots that would not amount to any sort of control or more than cursory knowledge of that quadrant.
To become a good galactic explorer, a civilization probably has to be very large and powerful, and technologically advanced, both in terms of its spacedrive and its weaponry. Vulcans in all likelihood didn't cut it, as even the combined Federation isn't really up there just yet.
Timo Saloniemi
