rommies circa 2156

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Weeble
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rommies circa 2156

Postby Weeble » Wed May 14, 2014 11:58 pm

AS my story (Forks and Jupiter) meanders its way to wards the Rommie War, I am stuck in a wee bit of a conundrum. Real canon (TOS) speaks of the war as brutal (atomic weapons), against an unknown foe (never seen) and the Rommies not really having much of a technical advantage other than Cloaking. It is difficult to make that work with the way the b and b boys overplayed the Rommies during "Enterprise". I base much of my own feelings on what was correct on the look on Spock's face when the Romulan ship is revealed during "TOS - Balance of Terror". Remember that the Rommie ship could not go to warp or fire their weapon while cloaked, and this was in the future. I am still in canon in my stories as *the_abomination* never happened and so Terra Prime was the last episode. I would enjoy an exchange of ideas from any who would care to comment.

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Re: rommies circa 2156

Postby panyasan » Thu May 15, 2014 3:40 am

My own theory would be that in the beginning the Rommies had some technological advantages, but that Starfleet developed new ones which helped end the war.

Also that Rommies ship that TOS encounters, it seems to me that more than one thing is not functioning on that ship. Otherwise, if all the ships were like this one, the Romulan war had to be a piece of cake for Starfleet.
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Re: rommies circa 2156

Postby Weeble » Fri May 16, 2014 12:14 am

Panyasan,

I think the Rommie Ship- in-question had probably been stripped to bare minimums as i seem to recall their new weapon required oodles of power. But I like your idea of rough technological equivalence. I felt that the enterprise series way overplayed their hand. Thanks for the post; it will help.

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Re: rommies circa 2156

Postby Linda » Fri May 16, 2014 1:41 am

The way I have tried to get around TOS characters not knowing what the Romulans looked like or that they were related to Vulcans is that information about them was known to very few in Starfleet. The information was successfully repressed. That the war was fought with atomic weapons is harder to get around. Maybe atomic weapons were used but were not the only weapons? The Star Trek franchise has lasted so long that real technology and imagined technology has advanced so much since the 1960s. So it is probably okay to ignore canon sometimes to make your story work. There are so many inconsistencies in canon anyway.
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Re: rommies circa 2156

Postby putaro » Fri May 16, 2014 5:35 am

I think there's a major fork between the TOS history and the TNG/Enterprise history. "First Contact" essentially blew most of the unwritten/unspoken pre-Federation history out of the water.

In the TOS episode "Metamorphosis" Zefram Cochrane was referred to as the "discoverer" of the space warp. It's not the "Human" discoverer of the space warp, but the inventor pure and simple. That jives with a lot of the other background that is never explicitly spelled out but is fairly obvious. Here's some examples:

In "Balance of Terror" Spock refers to the first Romulan war as being fought "By our standards today, with primitive atomic weapons and in primitive space vessels" - which kind of puts the Romulans and the Humans at parity. Cloaking, for the Romulans, was unknown. According to Spock, all of the fighting was ship-to-ship. Which makes sense if it's a border war that never got close to the home worlds.

In TOS, not many Vulcans serve in Star Fleet. I think Spock was the only one we ever saw and the only others we heard about were on board USS Intrepid - an all Vulcan crew on a ship with an English name. Hmmmm....doesn't sound like the Vulcans are leaders, but more like they're clients of the Humans.

When we see the Klingons in TOS, they don't regard the Humans as being newcomers, or primitives, but pretty much equals.

So, to me, the unwritten/unspoken assumptions under TOS were that Humans were one of the first to get warp drive, that they probably went and found the Vulcans and that warp technology may have even been a Human invention that spread around.

"First Contact" completely blew all that out of the water. Now, the Vulcans are the elder race, Humans are the n00bs. Following on from that, Enterprise established that the Romulans are more technically advanced than even the Vulcans and the Klingon Empire was vast and old long before the Humans burst on the scene. Andorians, Tellarites, Orions, Ferrengi, just about everybody is way, way ahead of the Humans.

To me, Spock's synopsis of the Earth-Romulan war (along with many, many other things in TOS) fits with that unspoken canon above but First Contact and Enterprise do not. So, the question becomes, how do you reconcile the new, explicit canon with the old, explicit canon that was based on the unspoken canon?

Where I'm going with the Earth-Romulan war, is to take this Romulan penchant for secrecy and use it. For most of the war, no one on the Coalition side will even know that they're fighting the Romulans. Any real Romulans found will be dead and assumed to be rogue Vulcans which is going to stir up a lot of mistrust inside the Coalition. And, when the war breaks out into the open, it's going to be massive and there are going to be strikes that will really push many of the older races back from their positions of superiority. The battles, though, will be fought in space, or as strikes against planets with WMDs, not ground actions so there will be no face-to-face contacts. And the Romulans are not going to be happy campers at the end and will be left in a position of weakness but with enough strength to force the treaty with the Neutral Zone. A small group of people on the Coalition side will know the truth, but will hide it to keep the Coalition together because otherwise the Vulcans would probably get kicked out on their collective asses.

This is fun, now I want to go finish off a few chapters. Blah, I need to work instead :-(
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Re: rommies circa 2156

Postby Weeble » Sat May 17, 2014 1:30 am

Thanks to both Putaro and Linda.Gave me much to think about. Be back soon when I have thunk some...
RIP Tom, I will miss you, as will many others


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