Why is Earth not a subjugated colony of the Klingon Empire?

[Timo]

They were too busy fighting the Kzinti!!

Those pussies? Fandom has long been aware that the true enemy were the Kinshaya...

The idea that the 2150s were radically more primitive than the 2260s is a pretty convoluted one, really. Earth might have been climbing out of the crib, yeah - but it would be a truly unbelievable coincidence that every other civilization out there would be at the same level of technological incompetence at the time. Later on, yeah, when Earth and its foes and allies would get synched by a rat race. But not when Earth was a non-player. Even if Earth might have had trouble reaching Qo'noS, the Klingons shouldn't have had trouble reaching Earth, so that's not a particularly workable excuse for the non-conquest. And it removes the need to argue that the Klingons were far away, too, because that won't be a sufficient excuse, either.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Maurice]

...Ditto JJ's Vulcan, which now is just a few minutes away by warp speed.

But that's not what the film shows.

• The fleet and then the Enterprise go to warp
• McCoy, dressed as a cadet, takes Kirk into sickbay. Hypo. Kirk passes out
• Cut to the bridge, Chekov starts briefing the crew on the mission
• In sickbay, Kirk awakens and hears Chekov. McCoy is now dressed in a UNIFORM, not cadet gear.

Now, either McCoy is a quick-change artist or there's more time passing here than one might think. In fact, once Kirk passes out, we have no idea how much time has passed when we go up to the bridge, and then back to sickbay during Chekov's speech. It could be just enough time for McCoy to change, it could be an hour. It could be hours.

 

[F. King Daniel]

In STV, the centre of the galaxy is twenty minutes away. In "Broken Bow" the NX crew travel to RIGEL before they go to Kronos. In "Where No Man Has Gone Before", Kirk's crew are at the galactic rim. DS9 put Earth, Romulus, Cardassia and the rest of the Alpha Quadrant a short runabout ride away from the station. TOS even has Spock say the odd line about time/distance at warp which was INSANELY fast.

It's Voyager that made warp speed slow, for plot reasons and seemingly to comply with speed charts from technical manuals which were incompatible with canon to begin with.

 

[Timo]

A bit of exaggeration there: ST5 speaks of hours of travel, and only towards the center. ENT specifically deals with a Rigel that is not Beta Orionis. And the TOS pilot might have been preceded by months of tedious travel...

Also, no runabout ever explicitly traversed the Earth/DS9 distance, or the Romulus/DS9 one. Cardassia just happened to be the next-door system to Bajor.

All the shows from TOS to VOY to ENT have followed the practice where it takes from hours to days to travel from random star system A to random star system B at starship speeds. It's just that one or two TOS episodes mention the actual distance between A and B as being hundreds of lightyears, which creates outliers for the curve. A transit from Earth to Vulcan in minutes would be an outlier, too, but the movie allows for hours which is okay as such.

(Granted, ST:TMP suggested that ships of the era would take four days to cross the distance, but that may have been only true of the fatigued and untested NCC-1701-refit; Scotty's reference to four days may have been a lament rather than a boast.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

In "That Which Survives", it's stated that 11.33 hours at warp 8.4 would cover 990.7 light-years. In dialogue involving Spock. That would make Star Trek: Voyager's return to Earth a 35-day journey, not the 70-year one stated repeatedly during that show.

 

[Deks]

I would surmise that Earth was Vulcan's 'pet project'.
They were monitoring us either way and we know from canon reference they were keeping the Klingons at bay in order to prevent an invasion because one of their BoP's was taken over by Augments.
By that example, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine that the Vulcans could have kept Klingons out of our backyard.

And since the Vulcans were on par (or more developed) than Klingons, once humanity went into deep space, by the 2150's they were already close in tech development to other players... mostly thanks to the Vulcan influence and exposure of their tech to us.
But it wasn't until the Federation was founded that they decided to share their ENTIRE wealth of info with us.

 

[Rom's Sehlat]

But it wasn't until the Federation was founded that they decided to share their ENTIRE wealth of info with us.

Not their ENTIRE info... something about the Vulcan birds and bees that they like to keep to themselves.

 

[F. King Daniel]

^I dunno, T'Pol was pretty open about it as were the Vulcans in "Fusion". I think Spock just had a complex about sex.

 

[Timo]

Or then it's the small but significant difference between men and women on Vulcan...

In "That Which Survives", it's stated that 11.33 hours at warp 8.4 would cover 990.7 light-years. In dialogue involving Spock.

It's one of the worst outliers, yes. So perhaps we should nitpick it more carefully than any other?

The distance of 990.7 ly is not actually stated in connection with the speed and the ETA at that speed. It is stated a bit earlier on, making it possible that some of that distance had already been covered.

Of course, the only intervening scene there is one of our stranded heroes having at most half an hour of activity. And there isn't much activity after the scene ends but before the ETA is given, because we know this activity consists of making a memorial for D'Amato, and our heroes set to work at the end of the scene and complete the work soon after the ETA scene.

There might be activity before the surface scene but after the Rahda-and-Spock-discuss-distance scene, of course. Perhaps our castaways spent a few days assessing the available resources before accepting that they had nothing; that sounds like the human thing to do, really.

If the two shipboard scenes are separated by days, then the speed corresponding to warp 8.4 is reduced by about one order of magnitude. And if we remember that Scotty promised to give more than warp eight, we can speculate that he gave warp ten for the early part of that multi-day journey, and the ship was only forced to slow down to warp 8.4 just prior to the second scene.

That is, certainly this scene involves a speed change, otherwise the speed would not be discussed there - but we don't know if they accelerated to warp 8.4 or slowed down to that. The latter is eminently possible and helps reduce the speed of warp 8.4 all the way down to VOY-compatible numbers if necessary. It just requires us to think that the ship did warp 10 or so earlier on, and that our surface heroes survived without local food or water for a number of days (which should certainly be possible with the help of McCoy's little black bag).

Timo Saloniemi

 

[F. King Daniel]

Timo: No.

No no no no.

 

[Anwar]

But it wasn't until the Federation was founded that they decided to share their ENTIRE wealth of info with us.

Not their ENTIRE info... something about the Vulcan birds and bees that they like to keep to themselves.

Actually, it was McCoy NOT knowing that didn't make any sense.

 

[Nerys Myk]

McCoy skipped Vulcan Physiology, Biology and Anatomy. He thought it was like math and he would never have to use it once he was out of school.

 

[Deks]

Well, early Voyager seasons indicated that Vulcans are quite private in terms of their mating practices and that while the medical database does contain basic information on how often it occurs and what's it called (because the Doctor was aware of it), the actual specifics on how Vulcans deal with the 'condition' were not disclosed (until 'Fever' episode).

 

[Anwar]

Awfully dumb of them, for such a logical species.

 

[Colonel Midnight]

Why would the Klingons even want to put up with us?

They probably took one look and said, "Forget it! Too much dang trouble. Not worth the disruptor power." (or some such Klingon Shakespearean phrase )

Cheers,
-CM-

 

[Deimos Anomaly]

If they wanted to, they could have attacked earth already. Klingons are fearsome warrior and telling them to pissed off is not going to do. In fact, it would probably provoke them to attack.

Klingons need to die a good warrior death which means they have to use all their skills and weaponry available to either kill the enemies or die a glorious death in battle. Humans have always been technological backward compared to them before the 23 century, and furthermore, humans are physically incapable of taking on a any Klingons. What kind of glorious death could they achieve by fighting a primitive and weak cultures like earth? That's not how Klingons think. And, there was nothing of value to them on earth.

If a glorious ground battle is what they wanted Earth would be perfect. Early 21st century Earth for example has no space military at all, but has large armies excelling in ground warfare, in fact they should do much better in a pure ground engagement than any ground force ever portrayed in ST. So if they rabidly wanted glorious ground action taking over earth would be just the ticket.

Incidentally the fact that ST ground forces appear highly inferior to real armies today may be an indication of the pointlessness of highly specialised, powerful ground forces in a future where orbital bombardment is easy and devastating. Sure a few squads of present day USMC could have held that chokepoint on AR-558 laughably easily against the Jem Hadar assault as shown, or if they were on Ajilon Prime that colony would never have been threatened... but most ST ground combat is unlikely to end up like that. Large specialised armies moving about on the ground with lots of specialised war equipment are going to be bait for orbiting starships pounding them with phaser fire or torpedoes from orbit. The heavier torpedoes at their max yield are more powerful than Tsar Bombas too.

Lack of a glorious battle couldn't be the reason for not invading earth.