Romulans and the Cloak

[Omega_Glory]

I haven't seen all the episodes of Enterprise, but I was wondering if the crew actually met/saw the Romulans during the series. I didn't see an episode like that. Did the Romulans have a cloaking device? If so, did the Enterprise have to deal with it? Did the Roms have a early version of the plasma torpedo?

What episodes had the Romulans in them. They are running the show on SciFi now and I would like to catch a Rom episode.

Thanks.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Did the Romulans have a cloaking device? If so, did the Enterprise have to deal with it? Did the Roms have a early version of the plasma torpedo?

Spoiler: Romulans on Enterprise

Yes, they had cloaking, which I don't have a problem with, and yes, Enterprise had to deal with it - after a fashion. But they also had warp drive, which bugs the sh*t out of me.

We didn't see the torpedo.

Episodes: "Minefield" - standalone, "Babel One", "United", "The Aenar" - three parter

 

[SFRabid]

I haven't seen all the episodes of Enterprise, but I was wondering if the crew actually met/saw the Romulans during the series. ...

You just hit upon what I think is one of the worst gaffs in Star Trek. The TOS episode in which it is established that there was a long war with the Rumulans, but a Romulan had never been seen by human. Even Spock did not know what a Romulan looks like. How do you fight a big war, even in space, and never see the other side? How do you negotiate a treaty? How do you blow up a ship and not try to find a crew member floating in space just to see what you are dealing with?

Enterprise never went against that part of Trek's canon, but I wish they had dealt with the war and tossed out the part about never seeing a Romulan until TOS time. That may be the biggest reason that the Xindi arc was not The Romulan arc.

 

[Anwar]

Did the Romulans have a cloaking device? If so, did the Enterprise have to deal with it? Did the Roms have a early version of the plasma torpedo?

Spoiler: Romulans on Enterprise

Yes, they had cloaking, which I don't have a problem with, and yes, Enterprise had to deal with it - after a fashion. But they also had warp drive, which bugs the sh*t out of me.

We didn't see the torpedo.

Episodes: "Minefield" - standalone, "Babel One", "United", "The Aenar" - three parter

There's nothing wrong about the Romulans having warp, in fact nothing ever said they didn't. That line in "BoT" about them only having Impulse simply meant their engine power was less than the Ent's, not that they didn't have warp at all. Back when that episode was written they hadn't decided that Impulse Power meant sublight.

 

[Karnbeln]

Plus, Scotty said, "Its power is simple impulse", not "It only has impulse engines". He could simply be talking about their power grid or power generator, since impulse is an actual physical concept, not just a technobabble term. Other evidence, even the ability for it to get outside the neutral zone to several Federation outposts in a short amount of time, suggests they must have an FTL drive, actually.

They have impulse power instead of a dilithium based M/AM reaction power, not impulse instead of warp. The bird of prey didn't have the power capabilities to reach a warp factor faster than the Enterprise, is all.

 

[USS Triumphant]

My disappointment regarding warp is not based on BoT, it's based on the inconsistency with The Romulan Way, Spock's World, and the other Diane Duane novels. And yes, I know - they aren't canon, so I have no right to expect that, but it would have been nice.

 

[Karnbeln]

I see. I haven't read those yet, but I intend to. If they're as good as everyone says, I can see why you'd want them considered in continuity.

 

[Anwar]

My disappointment regarding warp is not based on BoT, it's based on the inconsistency with The Romulan Way, Spock's World, and the other Diane Duane novels. And yes, I know - they aren't canon, so I have no right to expect that, but it would have been nice.

If those novels imply that the Romulans didn't have FTL, then it's the novels that don't make sense.

 

[Timo]

Those novels say that Romulans performed their original exodus some 2,000 years before TOS by using primitive FTL, then forgot all about spaceflight and other planets and stuff because they had such swell time backstabbing each other on their new homeworld(s). They do go on to suggest that Romulans captured and reverse-engineered human warp vessels, at a timepoint that in modern reckoning would precede ENT by a couple of decades; they don't state outright that Romulans wouldn't have been able to build native warpships without the benefit of this reverse-engineering.

"Balance of Terror" presented some weird concepts all right. But Star Trek is a scifi show - weird should be expected there! The idea of a war where nobody sees the enemy (and survives to tell the tale) is an intriguing one, and scifi is always in need of intriguing ideas. We have seen dull, "conventional" space war galore elsewhere in Star Trek and in other shows. Surely we could use a little bit of variation here, and accept the Romulan War as an exotic scifi concept where some surprising things indeed happen?

Regarding invisibility devices, ENT does show the Romulans in possession of those in the 2150s. But that's sort of irrelevant, because ENT already showed other aliens with invisibility trickery (Suliban personal cloaks) in its pilot episode, and went on to show a starship-hiding cloak just a few episodes later. That already invalidates the idea that Kirk wouldn't have known that invisibility was possible and practical.

That IMHO is the bigger shortcoming of "Balance of Terror". Not the strange war where the opponents didn't meet in person (which is both fine scifi and a realistic prospect for an interstellar war!), nor the difference in propulsion methods between the two combatants (that, too, is very realistic), but the idea that Kirk wouldn't have met any invisible aliens before that day. He's a frigging starship captain! How could he be ignorant of invisibility, which every self-respecting advanced alien is likely to have in any self-respecting scifi universe? Invisibility is always important in warfare anyway, and it massively stretches credibility that Starfleet wouldn't have experimented on it or encountered it during those centuries of starfaring, alien contact and space warfare that preceded "Balance of Terror".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Anwar]

Just rationalize it in that they had encountered tech similar to cloaking before, but never one as effective or efficient as the one the Romulans used.

As for "war where neither side sees the other", the best take on that was "Space: Above and Beyond" and even there they met eventually. The idea of never ever seeing each other, or even getting some kind of biological remains to study (there had to have been fighting planetside) is ridiculous after a while.

 

[USS Triumphant]

They do go on to suggest that Romulans captured and reverse-engineered human warp vessels, at a timepoint that in modern reckoning would precede ENT by a couple of decades

You think it was that early? I guess that's possible. I remember the passage as saying that they detected one survey ship, and by the time the next one came around, they had built non-warp-capable fighters to meet it and capture it. And when the next ship came, they were ready to meet them with warp capability that they had reverse-engineered from the captured ship, and the war kicked off. I took that to mean within a year or so, but I guess it could have been more like 20 years. Seems like an awful long time to go without sending someone to see what happened to the other ship, though. But I guess the fleet didn't have that many ships, either.

And I might be remembering wrong. It happens more often than I would like.

 

[Timo]

I'm saying more like Diane Duane's Romulan War kicked off in the 2130s rather than the 2150s... Although I'm also suggesting that news traveled slower back then. In TOS, Starfleet could afford to send a search mission after a ship had been missing for half a year; back then, the interval could have been longer.

OTOH, Duane's timeline has Sarek already born and old enough to advise Earth on the war in the capacity of Ambassador, which is in clear conflict with TOS (where it's stated the war was a century ago and Sarek's age is established to be a century, too). Perhaps that was some other guy with the same name, though.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Omega_Glory]

Thanks for the information. I'm going to see if I can catch those episodes.

I read in another thread where someone reasoned that the cloak was covered up by section 31 and not general info. But still, the Enterprise was patroling the Romulan border in BOT so one would think that they would get whatever info they needed regarding threats to Federation security or the Enterprise.

The Plasma torpedo was definitely new given the effect it had on Federation armor and the asteroids the stations were on. Everyone was surprised at both the damage caused and I think the fact it moved at high warp speed.

Regarding the books, I used to read all the Trek novels I could get my hands on back in the '80s. They got to the point where Pocket Books was publishing just about any crappy story that came about. Sometime aroung '84/'85 I just quit reading them except for maybe once a year. Now I rarely read a Trek book.....there's too many non-Trek sci fi books that are much better.

 

[pookha]

something that could go along with that since it appeared to be one time incident,
that the cloak may have unstable (remember the ships are constantly cloaking and decloaking) and that if word got out that an invisible ship existed it could play havoc with the cargo ships ect.
i could see why a decision was made to lay low that one incident.

but what is interesing about balance of terror despite the cloak enterprise pretty easily was able to track the romulan ship.

a good part of the episode is enterprise tracking her while trying to hide the fact they could.

they might have trouble with an exact targeting shot by they knew were the ship was going and when it changed course.

possibly fearing that day would come as a percaution the ships were equiped with equipment based on the earlier encounter so they could track the ship.

 

[Omega_Glory]

The only tracking the Enterprise could get in BOT was a vague reading of motion. They had to spread their fire out hoping to get a hit, rather than shooting at a specific target. Tracking was pretty poor really. It would be akin to standing off 400 yards from a large tract of woods (many acres); hearing a sound from that area; and firing multiple rifle shots blindly at the general area of the sound. As I said, pretty poor tracking for combat.

And both Kirk and Spock were surprised, genuinely surprised at the cloaking device.....not what you would expect if the technology was known to exist in the Romulan space navy.

Maybe Enterprise should be considered an alternate timeline.....or Starfleet really is a lame organization. Sometimes its really hard to reconcile what these "writers" do.

 

[Reanok]

There's alot of unanswered questions as to how long it took the Romulans to develop the cloaked mines like in Minefield and the cloaked ships. I've always been curious about the history of the Romulans and there are so many mysteries about this time period .I wish it had been explored and revealed more about their military and technology.

 

[Praetor]

I would have preferred cloaking devices had been left out of ENT. We can retcon them away, but they shouldn't have been there to start with, IMO. Nothing about 'Balance of Terror's implications about the Earth-Romulan War really bothered me, and indeed seemed rather realistic. If Romulans always self-destruct when they fail, no wonder Romulan corpses were few and far between for analysis 100 years prior.

The warp drive issue is a separate one. I think it's clear that the TOS BoP had warp drive since it had nacelles that closely resembled those of the Enterprise - particularly when coupled with the deleted lines regarding the BoP being a product of espionage. Scotty's line either referenced the ship only having impulse fusion reactors, having an exotic power source beyond that he couldn't detect (i.e. quantum singularity) or perhaps even that the warp drive was deactivated to run power into the cloak and therefore undetectable.

I am, however, also okay with ENT-era Romulans having warp drive.

 

[Omega_Glory]

I always thought they had warp drive, but the cloak and the torpedo were both previously unkown to Federation ships partroling the area. I had no problems with the previous war either.

 

[pookha]

The only tracking the Enterprise could get in BOT was a vague reading of motion. They had to spread their fire out hoping to get a hit, rather than shooting at a specific target. Tracking was pretty poor really. It would be akin to standing off 400 yards from a large tract of woods (many acres); hearing a sound from that area; and firing multiple rifle shots blindly at the general area of the sound. As I said, pretty poor tracking for combat.

And both Kirk and Spock were surprised, genuinely surprised at the cloaking device.....not what you would expect if the technology was known to exist in the Romulan space navy.

Maybe Enterprise should be considered an alternate timeline.....or Starfleet really is a lame organization. Sometimes its really hard to reconcile what these "writers" do.

stuff that may have been officially secreted away in some back place might not be known to all line officers unfortunately...

but while yes they had issues with targeting they pretty much knew exactly every move that ship was making..

SPOCK: I have a blip on the motion sensor. Could be the intruder.


SPOCK: Blip has changed its heading. And in a very leisurely manoeuvre. They may not be aware of us.


SPOCK: His heading is now one eleven mark fourteen. The exact heading a Romulan would take, Jim, for the Neutral Zone and home.


KIRK: Negative. You and Mister Sulu will match its course and speed with the object on our sensors exactly, move for move. If he has sensors, I want him to think we're a reflection, an echo

SULU: They're turning, sir. We're staying with them.
SPOCK: Steady on one eleven mark fourteen. Back on their original course, Captain, toward the Neutral Zone.

they wouldnt have been able to pull of being the "reflection" if they hadnt been able to track their every move exactly.

 

[Praetorian]

Yes, showing ships with cloaking devices in Enterprise was certanly a major blunder.
If they wanted to still have stealth ships, for Romulans or otherwise, they could have referenced the technology the pirates used in TNG's "Gambit". That ship didn't cloak, it simply was hard to track. Like an actual stealth aircraft...