What a fucking dumb map. The USF has territory all the way around the Romulan Empire?
The European Union surrounds Switzerland, and the Swiss didn't even lose a major war to the EU.
Besides, it doesn't completely surround it. There's a corridor of territory extending "east"--the RNZ has a hole, which is sensible, since bottling without crippling or destroying an expansionist, antagonistic sovereign would be foolhardly.
GalaxyClass1701 said:
The main thing that I never understood was the physical difference between Romulans and Vulcans mainly the brow ridge? Was this self inficted by the Romulans because it doesn't seem like enough time for such a big evalution.
I'll be the first to agree that it's really lame, but I like to think of the Romulan ridges (and the Remans' total skeletal disfigurement) as a result of moving from a world with significantly more UV radiation reaching the surface than Romulus, and in the absence of dietary supplements or sunlamps Romulans tend to wind up with vitamin deficiencies that make their skeletons look stupid.
Tuvok would be totally screwed.
It's also possible to just totally ignore it as a persistent VFX error, since no one ever mentions it, and, as of Star Trek 11, they're gone.
Timo said:
One might say they chose a planet that resembled Vulcan... There are indications that Vulcan might have a twin planet, similar to Remus (since it visibly has big spherical objects on the sky but supposedly has no moon), and it's possible that such a setup would be found advantageous by the Romulan emigrants. Indeed, today many believe that only twin planets can bear life as we know it (and that Earth is a borderline case on that because we have a suitably large Moon helping us out)! The early Romulans may have been thinking on similar lines.
Remus isn't a twin planet. It's tidally locked with its sun, not Romulus. Romulus does presumably have a moon, or is something else's moon, however, for the reason you've noted.
I do rather like the idea, too, of taking Spock's "Vulcan has no moon" comment as comically literal, and interpreting Vulcan itself as the "moon" in essentially a double-planet system with the barycenter actually in the twin, making Vulcan its moon. In this regard, I don't know why they went to the trouble of changing the TMP background, when the line that bothers the grognards is actually probably even cleverer with a bit of imagination.
All that said, I can get on board the notion that Earth might be generally too cold and uninviting, or possibly atmospherically incorrect in some way (too much oxygen, not enough H2S, too much ozone, whatever). Alternatively, it's certainly not impossible that the original Romulans were a smaller group than generally assumed, and really had no desire to deal with enslaving or exterminating a sapient population, no matter how primitive, that outnumbered theirs by orders of magnitude. If we assume early 21st-century technology levels for the Rommies, even a group of 50,000 armed with firearms, aircraft, and nukes might have a difficult time with the, what, 400 million or so humans of the early A's D, some of whom live in strong, centralized, technologically-savvy civilizations themselves...
On the other hand, Romulus looks just like Earth, at least when you compared the two planets to Arraki--er, Vulcan.
Also, I doubt their mapping skills.
Why? We're close to imaging terrestrial planets with sufficient resolution to determine atmospheric composition, and finding at least potentially habitable worlds--a civilization that has thermonuclear and (however primitive) interstellar transportation could be reasonably presumed to have such capabilities, or the ability to develop such capabilities in short order when it would be useful--like, when you want to move a few thousand to a few billion people to a new planet. Besides, the capital involved in developing technology to investigate nearby terrestrial planets is going to be much less than the capital involved in building an ark ship to go there. And if they have FTL capabilities, we'd expect them to have at least the technology we'll have in a few years.
What evidence do we have that they knew where they were going? Supposedly, they wandered from planet to planet, leaving behind e.g. the Debrune, Calder, Yadalla or Dessica ruins...
The fact that Vulcans didn't overrun the Alpha Quadrant strongly militates relenetlessly against the Vulcans possessing FTL in the time of Surak. Even if FTL Vulcans wouldn't take over the AQ, FTL Romulans presumably would. Offshoots of Vulcan/Romulan culture on other planets would only
necessarily indicate that Vulcans or Romulans went there and established enclaves--it's never been established, and can indeed be argued to be much less likely, that the group of exiles/explorers/colonists, which we ordinarily identify as "Romulans" are one monolithic group that left all at once, and were united in going to one particular planet.
And if they did have STL-only technology, the idea that they would go somewhere it took decades or centuries to get to without knowing what was there is bonkers. A blind trip to an alien star system is almost bound to be a death sentence, even in Star Trek terms. I suppose it's conceivable, if they were capable of refuelling H-2 or He-3 from known gas giants (unless they couldn't map those either, and archaic Vulcans are actually stupider than present-day humans), but how many people would sign up to wander around aimlessly with no known destination? This isn't Sinai, it's space.
(That said, the same question may be leveled squarely at the Augments.)
What comments? Vulcans were founding interstellar monasteries a thousand years before the supposed schism. Doesn't sound like a sublight job to me. And if Vulcans had that capability, it doesn't make much sense for the Romulan emigrants to lack it. If they left at sublight, Vulcan warpships would no doubt have kept track.
It's been a while since I've seen that episode, but if possible, I'd like to interpret the P'Jem monastery's "founding" to be that of the specific order, which may be arbitrarily ancient, and not of the small colony the physical monastery sits on. If this isn't reasonable, then I interpret
Enterprise to be a holodeck program rife with historical inaccuracies.
