The Romulan War: the biggest 'problem' in Trek canon?

What they should of done is got Nimoy to say aload of new dialog when they were remastering the BOT episode...

 

The problem there is that his voice sounds distinctively different as an old man than it did back in the 60's.

 

That wouldn't help much. Finding a Reman body, humans would simply immediately go "Ah, so that's the face of our enemy, the Romulans!".

Finding a dozen corpses, all different, might make them hesitate. Which one of these is the real Romulan species? But even this would not really result in them thinking that they had never seen a Romulan.

Drone warfare is fine and well. And that there would be no corpse sightings and no agreement to exchange visuals is great at establishing that the Romulans took active measures to hide their identity. Who knows, they might even have succeeded. Or if they didn't, Starfleet helped them out so that the homefront would not realize the war was with Vulcans.

Timo Saloniemi

 

For this, the explanation may be simple. They used warp-drives, powered by impulse fusion reactors, not the matter/antimatter reaction.

Basically, there were always some confusion about impulse drives in Star Trek. They were clearly stated as capable of moving ship through the interstellar distances in still-reasonable time - i.e. they are FTL drives. Also they are capable of powering the ships systems at least temporarely. But they were also stated as being "simple fusion rockets".

The solution is - that the fusion drives are also capable to produce plasma stream, used in warp coils to bend time&space around the ship. I.e. the impulse drives could be used to power warp assembly and move at least on low warp speed without using matter/antimatter reaction.

This explained perfectly how the Romulans were able to fight the war on "simple impulse engines". They actually fought on "impulse-powered warp engines".

 

The problem is, that the gigaton nuke would have a weight around hundreds of tons.

They would be pretty tought birds in both logistic and tactical usage. Basically, they would be not torpedoes, but more like ramships.

The matter/antimatter reaction allow you to put gigaton-size warhead in only a few ton.

I.e. it basically makr no difference, what hit the ship - nuclear warhead, or photon torpedo of same charge. But the photon would be much more compact.

 

But we know nothing about how the Romulans fought the war. The ship Scotty commented on did not yet exist during the war, and her capabilities are not stated to be in line with what's known about the Romulan ships that did fight in the century-old war.

One of the great fandom misunderstandings of "Balance of Terror" is that the episode would suggest the Romulans were incapable of warp drive during the Romulan War. Nothing of the sort is stated, and nobody ever says outright that Romulans would lack warp drive in the 2260s timeframe - either in the sense of the Romulan civilization not knowing how to do warp (they do - their plasma clouds fly at extreme warp) or in the sense of the immediate Romulan adversaries in their simple impulse ship being unable to attain warp (they are claimed to be slow, but not warp-incapable explicitly).

As for impulse drives being FTL drives... Naah. This is never explicitly supported in TOS, and there's no reason to assume implicit support. Writer intent at the time was simply for warp to be fast and for impulse to be slow, but very soon after TOS this was refined to warp being FTL and impulse being STL, and we shouldn't postulate a contradiction or change between TOS and the rest of Trek when we don't have to.

For all we know, standard shuttles already weigh thousands of tons. After all, a 300m starship weighs nearly a million tons, meaning some components in there are really, really dense.

And this poses no problem, because Trek heroes have mastered gravity and inertia. Moving hundreds of tons around doesn't strain Kirk's index finger much if he clamps one of those antigrav handles to the load.

Indeed, it would be a nasty trick to build torpedoes weighing thousands of tons but flying as if they weighed ten pounds - and then shut down the anti-inertia gadget just before impact...

Timo Saloniemi

 

You misunderstood.

I mean that the impulse POWER - i.e. energy (plasma), produced by fusion reaction, could be used to power warp coils as well as the matter/antimatter plasma.

I.e. if our warp core is out, we could use fusion power from impulse engines to achieve low warp and limp toward civilization.

 

My thought on impulse is that there are two facets to it: the 'power generating' facet and the 'gravity drive' facet.

The 'power' aspect of the impulse system is that it is a fusion-reactor power system that operates in adjunct and as the primary backup to the main energizer. The latter is the anti-matter / dilithium channeling power system, commonly referred to as the 'warp engine' or 'warp drive.'

The 'drive' portion of the impulse system I've always thought to be a continuum twister like warp drive, just one that works on a slower-than light level. Sort of like the Alcubierre Drive that resembles warp drive, but on a sub-warp level.

That's why when the warp engines / mains are damaged, they always revert to impulse power first, then auxiliary power, and then batteries at the last. That's the power generating facet of the impulse system at work.

When the captain calls for "One half impulse" when giving maneuvering commands, he is ordering the ship to half of it's max capable 'impulse powered speed.' I don't have the specs right in front of me, but if we assumed that .25c is the maximum speed the ship moves under impulse drive, then 1/2 impulse would be .125c, and because impulse drive is an alcubierre / artificial gravity drive of some sort rather than a Newtonian 'fusion rocket,' the acceleration is smooth and it only takes a few seconds to achieve the desired speed.

When helm commands are being exercised by 'thrusters,' the ship is moving under strictly Newtonian rules through the use of some form of reaction jets. Ship's thrusters provide a tertiary backup for moving, although at infinitesimally small accelerations compared to impulse power. Good for maneuvering out of spacedock or making a fine correction to an orbit, or changing the attitude of the ship when impulse drive is down, but little else.

 

This couldn't be. Unless their hulls are pure neutronium. The average shuttle of TOS era is pretty small and mostly empty inside:


A hunderd tons, probably. Maybe around two hundreds. Definitedly not on thousand-ton scale.

 

Exactly my opinion!

Basically, there is no difference between fusion reactor and fusion rocket. Except in rocket you let the plasma go outside on relativistic velocity (and if you need thrust, you just add cold hydrogen to plasma).

 

The whole drive system discussion brings up another plot hole from First Contact as well: it stands to reason that impulse power and impulse drive would exist before Cochrane's warp drive experiment. Why on Earth, in that case, would you need a chem-rocket powered ICBM to achieve orbit for a warp drive test.

Oh, and how did those guys get back down to Montana? That was never addressed. ICBM's weren't originally made for soft landings.

 

IMHO they just used the landing capsule and parashuted down the old-fashioned way.


Seems that cabin is detacheable. So they probably just used the cabin as landing craft (heat shield, parachutes) and left the rest of ship on orbit.

 

Morevoer, we knew, that the nuclear thermal rockets existed: the DY-100 series (like "Botany Bay") was driven by fission engines.

Maybe Cochraine simply took the missile from some museum?

 

Oh, certainly. Or even better, Romulans might have used artificial quantum singularities as their high-output power system from the 22nd (or perhaps 13th!) century on. The technology would be utterly unrecognizable to Scotty, but would explain why the Romulan ship in fact flies at reasonably high speed and has more firepower than Kirk could ever dream of and operates an invisibility device Spock (mistakenly?) thinks must be an awful power hog. Of course just two out of those three at any given time, but still.

Not the hulls, but the warp coils. After all, the NCC-1701 in TOS is canonically impossibly massive ("nearly a million gross tons"), and so is the Voyager ("700,000 tons"). It would be quite odd for the shuttles not to follow suit, as they are supposedly built of the very same components as the big ships.

A chemical rocket? The ICBM outperformed current rocket technology at least tenfold: fantastic single-stage acceleration to escape velocity with a payload as big as said stage, all without breaking any glasses in the nearbly bar shack. That must have been Trek magic at work, and quite unlikely to be "chemical" in nature.

(Or "nuclear", considering.)

Not as far as any of the characters would have indicated. "Old type atomic power" is the phrasing used, but there was no discussion on the actual drive system. Certainly we saw no rocket nozzles on the ship. Nor any fuel tanks for that matter (Khan's sleeping shelves must have been in those containers as the pencil hull would be too small to accommodate the space implied by the set).

Timo Saloniemi

 

It's probable, but with that kind of powerplant the Romulan Empire would not lose the war) And they definitedly wouldn't need to buy ships from Klingons - more likely visa versa.

Occam's razor strongly suggested that the simplest explanation - i.e. that during the Earth-Romulan war Romulan ships used fusion-powered warp drive - are most likely) And in-universe it would be fine.

Components - yes. Thickness - no. It's like suggest that the pinnace onboard the 50000 ton battleship must be at least 500 ton in displacement, because she's composed of the same materials and used the same components.

One question: are you sure that "Phoenix" reached escape velocity on her ICBM booster?

Or he just propelled itself outside the atmosphere on ballistic trajectory and then activated the warp drive?

Basically because they never showed "Botany Bay" from rear.



On studio model, the exaust nossles of some sort are clearly visible. Let's not forget, it's a deep space ship, and her engines are suited for vacuum only, not atmosphere.

 

The fuel tanks were probably ejected after the acceleration. Look at the scheme:


There are plenty space for another two rows of containers, forward and rearward of the existent ring. The missing containers probably were fuel tanks, that were ejected after the fuel supply for acceleration was exausted.

Not at all. Look:


The hull of DY-100 is comparable in thickness with the disk hoop of "Enterprise"'s saucer. And due to the scheme -

http://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/constitution/constitution-10.jpg

- we knew, that the disk hoop is at least one full deck tall.

 

Why not? We don't really know it would be better than Federation-style dilithium/antimatter powerplants. Quite possibly it's inferior, but suited to Romulan needs either because they lack dilithium (deep mining at Remus, rather than AQS manufacture, might be the technologically demanding thing that only becomes possible in the TNG era) or find AQS power more compatible with cloaking (until the Feds learn of the telltale signature).

That's exactly what would happen if the pinnacle also had gun turrets.

Both ships and shuttles have engine nacelles, and those nacelles supposedly contain the most alien of the technologies aboard (after transporters). It makes little sense to attribute the extra mass of starships to things like hull or computers, so the warp coils sound like an attractive choice. And the shuttles have those, or then (as per some TNG graphics) impulse coils amounting to the same thing.

Absolutely sure. The imagery of the test rig separating from the booster shows a fantastically aggressive escape trajectory, with the rig already essentially halfway to the moon.

Also, we get no engine action (chemical flame or futuristic impulse glow) from the upper stage. So apparently it's freefall all the way to beyond the boundaries of Earth's grasp and the warp experiment.

True enough for TOS; TOS-R remedies that to a degree.

Those "nozzles" certainly rule out any sort of NTR ever devised...

Other types of rocket where atomic power accelerates propellant to Newtonian purposes are of course possible.

That'd be more plausible if we didn't have Rain Robinson's model and the "First Flight" photo for a DY-100 type craft taking off with the Khan Khontainer Khonfiguration.

(Also, rearward only is the likely scenario if we study the actual model. Heck, the sixteen containers aft of the "sail" could even rotate for gravity! That is, if there were a need. But since the Botany Bay already had another type of artificial gravity, the need probably wouldn't exist at any timepoint.)

Which is why it won't quite suffice for the wide deck implied by the set.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Because this would indicate technical level superior to Earth. Greatly superior. The production of antimatter is, for example, process, theoretically known even in XX century, and with dilithium (which is natural element) you could make this process cost-effective rather quickly. But we haven't got even a clue, how to create artifical quantum singularity.

Some of them have machineguns for anti-aircraft defense)

What, antimatter? With all respect, the mass of antihydrogen is exactly the same as the mass of hydrogen. And dilithium crystals never were shown as particulary heavy.

Not exactly. The size of Earth disk at this moment is not that small. The ICBM, launchedoptimal for altitude could reach more than 1000 km. Look here:


The size of Earth from "Phoenix" is corresponding with the altitude of about 500-750 km. Perfectly fit for heavy booster. And, the ship is clearly moving ballistically.

Please. Look at the aerospike engine nozzles:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...Linear_Aerospike_XRS-2200_Engine_PLW_edit.jpg

The exact design of DY-100 engines is unknown, of course, but they could be variations.

Ok, let's assume that this is dust fission engine, deal?

DY-100-type. They may have different configuration for different purposes. For example, it make sence not to haul the propellant from Earth, but to load it in space, from orbital (or Lunar) propellant depot.

Ok... Unless the configuration of ship is different, and the "floor" is actually the side wall of the "sail")

 

Hm, I made some recalculation, and I must agree with you: the fission fragment rocket for DY-100 is more possible. It could accelerate ship up to the 10% c or somewhat higher, and specific impulse is sufficient so only about a half of ship mass must be a fuel.

So, if "Botany Bay" was launched with two full container rings of propellant... it could exactly reach 10% of lighspeed. Of course, this means that by 2263 she would be no farther than 20 lightyears from Solar System, and her trajectory was probably well-known (on the other hands, World War III... Earth obviously have more important things to do than saving the data about trajectory of half-of-century old spaceraft with augments onboard).

 

The romulan war ENT books go by the theory.

Plus the fact the Romulans refused to surrender and therefore had no need for communication.

Couple that with use of Remains for ground troops.