But his oath is to Star Fleet, as long as he wears that uniform, not the vulcan government, so withholding information from his captain would be the treason – not the revelation of some Vulcan embarrassment or why they would even keep that fact secret.
It's a conflict of interest where divulging the secret would potentially do the greater damage. What incentive does Spock have for coming clean? He's already telling Kirk to blast the enemy out of the sky. Hopefully this will happen before the face of the enemy is glimpsed.
But since Spock isn't in the Vulcan military or government, why would he have those state secrets?
It doesn't take much. Pon farr is a state secret - humans in general are utterly ignorant of all things Vulcan. But telling everybody that one practices perverse mating involving snuffing is one thing. Telling everybody the facts from which it becomes evident that Vulcans were killing humans in droves a century ago is another.
Not that I'm impressed at all with the notion this is even a state secret worth keeping.
But the fact would not remain unknown for a century if not active keeping. All we are left to wonder about is the How - the Why is alien and incomprehensible, just as with pon farr.
The very idea in space and at those distances during war you can easily discern hull markings is itself a bit of a joke.
Except in Trek, where visual range fighting is pretty much the norm (perhaps dictated by the nature of those death rays?).
And like not remembering some Vulcans took off, remembering the direction they went shouldn't be assumed.
It would be military information of immense strategic significance. Unless archives were deliberately sealed or destroyed
before the war (and preferably 300 years before, so that nobody would be alive to remember them personally), Vulcan in the 2150s should have been highly interested in dusting off that information and seeing whether there's a match.
Not that the Romulans would have told. But the Vulcans would have been interested in finding out. And I can see two scenarios here: Romulans already live offworld and just sever ties with Vulcan, or Romulans leave Vulcan in an armada of ships. In the first case, Vulcan should already know where Romulus is; in the second, it should be assumed Vulcans would also have at least some ships to do some shadowing.
And using subspace radio and the Romulans using the Vulcan language and lying about just accommodating them would keep their identity a secret.
Certainly - from ignorami. Not from Vulcans, though. Unless they specifically chose not to believe.
They may wish to hide that fact from Vulcan, but I don't know why Vulcan would want to hide that fact from the galaxy or the Federation, even assuming they knew it.
Since Vulcans fancy themselves the only logical critters in the UFP, they should expect a certain reaction from those other beasts when it is revealed Vulcans fought against Earth. It may not be a realistic expectation from other points of view, but only the Vulcan one would matter to them.
And again, where's the downside? The enemy remaining faceless would not have made Kirk's job more difficult in "BoT".
Being told they are Rumalin or Romulan doesn't tell them they are also Vulcan offshoots.
...Unless their name in Vulcan is "Romulan", as T'Pol states (and then clamshells). Where else would that bit of information come from but Vulcan knowledge of their own history?
T'Pol may already have said too much there. But luckily for her, this didn't ring any bells for non-Vulcans. There's little chance of it not ringing bells for Vulcans, though - "The Romulans Are Back" would be a fact known to the Vulcan military from that point on.
Did the military undergo such deep purges after ENT that this key fact was forgotten? Despite the purges having been
because of Romulans?
And being painted as a bird of Prey isn't such a conclusive link to a group called raptor's wings a couple thousand years ago.
Which is why there would be that 4.7% chance of these folks being somebody else. But "conclusive" is hardly relevant here. What the Vulcans would desperately need is hard evidence that these
aren't the Romulans. And they aren't getting that, because, well, they
are the Romulans.
Or did their group proudly sport the name Romulan 2 thousand years ago, too?
What other possibility is there? How would T'Pol otherwise know that Rumalin "ought" to be pronounced Romulan even when the Romulans pronounce it Rumalin?
Spock is full of tidbits of useless information, so vaguely knowing Vulcans were spacefaring and colonizing a couple millennia ago before they lost warp for a while isn't surprising. Not knowing what happened to those that left isn't a huge mystery, either. They probably failed and died.
Except they are suddenly making contact with all sorts of Archers. Surely "Romulans, long thought dead, in fact survive" would be a tidbit clinging to Spock's mind? Unless this was considered a state secret back in the 2150s already.
It's not a matter of failing to recognize a ship painted with a tweetybird in the 2260s. It's a matter of failing to understand what happened a century ago, or to come clean about it. Spock might not know who flies the enemy ship (indeed, with Romulans the answer might be surprising!), but he ought to know who the Romulans are.
...through rumors shared with the vulcan, they have gleaned their name, Romulan, and what they are like (aggressive, territorial), but the high command has never made direct contact with them.
But their name is not Romulan. It's Rumalin, as Sato clearly heard. Why do they have a special Vulcan name? Archer doesn't go correcting Duras "Your species is named Klingot, not Klingon". Why does T'Pol correct Sato?
How long have Vulcans been back in space, anyway?
We don't know if they ever really left. But it could be they've only been meddling with the neighborhood for a century or so (the minimum estimate from "Carbon Creek" and the like).
Implants would help, though Archer didn't have those, IIRC
Archer's bunch was the only one to use a handheld translator device as part of their routine gear. We're neutral on whether he had an implant for lesser translation needs. Heroes from Kirk on would really benefit, as they deal with people who decidedly lack translators of their own, and don't use handheld units of their own (or any hardware other than their uniforms) in the typical case.
But the native doesn't have a unit or implant, so a person can't talk to them - they have to talk to a UT, which in turn talks to the native (who may not even know of electronics, let alone a UT., and so should be impressed buy the UT and never believe the operators is just another run of the mill native like then.)
But if the UT is an implant, then the native sees nothing and merely hears her own language spoken. And we don't learn whether the translation really is any good, because
our ears get the English version (evidently, our TV sets have UTs of their own). For all we know, all the aliens get misheard because our UT fails us and just placates us with pleasant but incorrect English.
But the inactive diesels would be just like the Enterprise traveling on Impulse only and not using the warp drive
Except not - this is where I said the analogy breaks down. Scotty's conventional wisdom would be that diesels are always on, even when idled, and the lack of their noise would then be clear evidence of absence. (Indeed, shutting down the warp powerplant for impulse travel never happens AFAWK - see "Skin of Evil" where an actual shutdown basically darkens the whole ship and is considered highly exceptional and apparently requiring the services of a rare expert who is aware of his importance!)
Scotty is reading power signatures to determine "their power is X". If warp power is off, the mistake is understandable. If warp power is rerouted to the plasma mortar, this logic fails - the power signature should still be there, regardless of the application. But other setups are possible, too.
Spock said the cloak idea had a huge problem working, the energy costs were enormous, so maybe these boys figured out how to make it work. So it seems new thing then.
There's another problem right there - why is Spock speculating on a specific theoretical method of invisibility, with specific tactical shortcomings, when he has seen enemies pop out of nowhere before by means that apparently did not have these shortcomings?
Of course, if Spock is trying to obfuscate, then he may say "theoretical" without his lie-detector subroutine punishing him too severely, while fully well knowing that Romulans as per ENT are traditional users of invisibility devices and holo-camouflage and indeed do have the shortcomings he informs his captain about. Or at least did.
Ohhhhhhh. Multiple ships did that attack. A distinct possibility. And from one FTL carrier, another possibility. But it makes it harder to understand why they didn't come back if 2 out of 3 survived.
Also, the Commander's ship is described in superlative. Why is one of the Praetor's many ships better than the others?
One way to go would be to say multiple Praetors launched their own attacks, quite competitively as usual, and all had different political motivations, few of these involving war. The Mad Dog Praetor whose flagship the Commander had the misfortune to command was the one risking disaster - otherwise, it was just a general test run and a show of force, risking nothing much and ultimately demonstrating that the Romulans were back and the RNZ no longer held much practical meaning.
How far apart are those outposts, anyway? Not so far it was impractical to haul asteroids into position. Or is this a whole string of uninhabited stellar systems?
Might be the asteroids are "natural", the fortresses within relying on stealth and any act of towing therefore a danger to their safety. This goes well with the small-scale model that we probably should discard for other reasons. Certainly one outpost is ignorant of the fate of others in an engagement - possibly because stealth is paramount and there is no communications traffic, except at cleverly scheduled times.
The ignorance being due to distance is less likely, although this is one of the Trek episodes to feature the concept of commlag. But Romulans ought to be close to Earth in order to be a threat to a Starfleet preceding Kirk's by a century. We might wish to claim that comms around here are abnormally slow, perhaps because of natural circumstances, perhaps because the Romulans jam a lot (and shout propaganda over subspace loudspeakers and whatnot).
Even if they thought a carrier might be there on the other side of the RNZ, Kirk's orders wouldn't allow him to go look for it.
But if the distances on
this side of the RNZ are short enough not to require the carrier, then we're back to the small-scale model and wondering why Kirk doesn't use his immense speed advantage more effectively.
The old impulse engines weren't strong enough.
Kirk has new impulse engines. Does this make his ship STL?
The edge of the galaxy could be just leaving the main disc, that 2D plane, and not going to the outer perimeter. Or leaving the spiral arm.
In fact, the edge in Trek is a purple band at an unknown location. Which is very nice, because things like "main disk" or "spiral arm" should not have anything definable as an edge as such. Kirk should be asking "are we in or out?" for the better part of a month at high warp if just plain leaving the real-world galaxy.
But I'm not sure how many lightyears they are out.
Which is great. But this seems to be the local Antarctica: nothing absolutely theoretically impossible about somebody having been at the South Pole before Amundsen, by log canoe and two good feet, but in practice it's flat out impossible that anybody could have made it. (Without that helpful Kansas-to-Pole tornado express, that is.)
Delta Vega gives us an idea, though, since it's so far off the beaten path even ore ships only call once every 20 years.
Who built it and how? It's next door to where Kirk comes out of the purple thing. Couldn't its builders have snuck a peek out of the galaxy?
I'm envisioning Antarctica again, only high tech: Starfleet has built Delta Vega (and Alpha, Beta and Gamma Vega) as supply stashes and fuel depots for the gradual and measured push outside the galaxy, first using robotics and then risking a manned scouting mission before the actual exploration can begin. It would be impossible for the duty-bound builders to have attempted breaching the barrier, then. But its existence would probably be known (even if it cannot be seen from Earth today), and indeed Kirk expresses little surprise at
that.
Anything that sweeps the ship a half light year one direction can sweep it back, so it needn't have returned on its own power, but riding a barrier wave.
Never thought of that... Odd that Spock only mentions the outbound sweeping and then speaks of "heading" back, though.
I think it was implied, and the Enterprise didn't tackle that at impulse but at warp. I don't think the Valiant had warp.
But the tackling involved the magnetic storm, not the barrier.
200 years ago, 100 years before Archer, so about the time of Cochrane, I would think the Valiant couldn't be a warp capable vessel
Why not? Why wait much after Cochrane's flight? If Cochrane could bolt his warp engine to a piece of garage garbage, then bolting it to a proper spacecraft ought to be a breeze, and an achievement nobody would dare miss attempting.
Indeed, ENT shows them bolting warp to a big ship just a few years after Cochrane's flight. And this is not experimental a such - the use of the ship for colonization is. (Incidentally suggesting that interstellar colonization at STL never was a thing, and potentially leaving a STL
Valiant out of a credible job.)
but one like Botany Bay or the older STL stuff that takes years to get anywhere, but they still go.
This would be a matter of timing. Why immediately declare missing a ship that takes years to get anywhere (she was both launched and lost two centuries prior)? It's not as there could have been realtime knowledge of a disaster (the magnetic storm was news to them, and realtime subspace radio wasn't a thing back then anyway) - do they declare departed ships missing as a matter of routine, until otherwise proven?
What? A lone ship in a storm should have been witnessed?
It's the speed difference. If a rowboat today goes missing, a SAR jet could trivially cover the area where she could possibly be found. If a fellow jet goes missing, then without a flightplan the task of the SAR jet becomes nontrivial. If (for whatever reason) Earth Space Central decided the STL
Valiant was in distress, then the warpships of the time ought to have been quite capable of determining the exact circumstances of the loss. Unless the STL ship was already halfway across to Regulus or something - but you can't do that at STL.
I just feel the Valiant, whatever it was doing – maybe getting ore from Delta Vega, when it got close enough to the barrier to see it since it normally doesn't show up on longer ranged instrument, went to look. Any cat would.
So now the ship is capable of reaching the edge of the galaxy on her own, with performance to spare for curiosity? Kirk wouldn't consider her presence there impossible at all, then.
Without warp, it would be more difficult to crush the praetor's enemies, to see them driven before him, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Indeed. Or even to see the whites of their polar caps. You need FTL to get to another star system if you plan on a) raiding and escaping or b) maiming and getting logistical support for it. If the Romulans just trundled on STL with the intent of committing suicide at the destination, would that be "war"?
Running rings around them doesn't inflict damage to them.
But Kirk's task is primarily herding. If the Romulans stay on the UFP side, all is fine and well, and their guilt undisputed. Laying obstacles on their path and then spotting their attempts at maneuvers to dodge the obstacles would seem a tactically preferable approach.
Quite frankly, I'd be happier if all FTL ships had to fight at STL speeds in order to find, see, and hit one another. This seeing stuff, aiming at it, and hitting it at FTL speeds is mind boggling.
If ships can move at FTL, it takes just a tiny extra assumption to allow sensors to move at FTL, too. Beyond that, it's a matter of reaction times. And they have computers for that - not that they'd do lots of rapid-paced FTL firing anyway.
And pivoting at warp? What is that? Just at c you could spin the ship around millions of time in a tiny fraction of a second. I don't get it.
Or then choose to pivot at twenty degrees per second while moving forward at twenty lightyears per hour. Warp is your linear speed, pivoting comes on top of that. Although Scotty seemed to be saying that warp is maneuverability. But perhaps he meant warp power to the engines (inertia manipulation thingamabobs, whatnot) that do the turning?
Full power shields wouldn't be up all the time to save energy, but deflectors are a type of shield, I think, to keep the dust out traveling near light speed from hitting you. There's always some level of shielding up if you're moving.
Why not full power combat shields? When they do get raised, we never hear any comment on energy consumption. Indeed, the only thing consuming fuel seems to be impulse travel, in "Doomsday Machine". If shields did consume lots of power, we'd expect to hear "Keptin, ve cannot mainntainn shields much longer" or "Capt'n, me bairns cannae take it - ye have to give th' shields a wee rest!" a lot more often than the zero times we get.
Oh, you're a vicious bastard.
Thanks. And so are Romulans - perhaps here as well.
...The interesting question is, are Vulcans any better?
Timo Saloniemi
Yeah – the praetor and who he his, what he does, what he wants, and how he commands, all fit into this. Even Deceus might have been the grand nephew of the Empress, and everyone would want to be his friend, and friends of his kind mean power. And power is danger.[/QUOTE]
