Flare Sci-Fi Forums: Romulan Warp Drive

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Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :

If the Romulans didn't have "warp drive" in the 2260's then are we supposed to believe that they got those 3 battlecruisers in "The Enterprise Incident" with out warp drive?

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"I threw bitter tears at the ocean
But all that came back was the tide..." 'I Will Not Forget You' Sarah McLachlan

Posted by Starbuck (Member # 153) on :

Simple - they used a plot device

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Posted by Ritten (Member # 417) on :

Row, row, row your battlecruiser gently through the stars.....

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I see a red door and I want it painted black

Posted by Nim (Member # 205) on :

Sure, I could picture Mark Lenard whipping the slaves on his rome-ulan galley!

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Posted by Matrix (Member # 376) on :

Try this: Those Romulan cruisers are actually Klingon cruisers! Oh oh!

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Predict the unpredictable, but how do you unpredict the unpredictable?

Posted by Captain Stark (Member # 70) on :

The Klingon ships that the Romulans were using had Klingon warp drives. I am currious if they were using standard Klingon Matter/Anti-Matter powersources or if they were converted over to Romulan Quantum Singularity powersources.

IMHO I find it very difficult to believe that the Romulans without warp drive capability could have fought a war with a warp drive capable forces of Earth. The Neutral Zone is a HUGE expanse to cross over with no warp drive at all. It would have been too easy to out manuver the Earth Fleet durring the war with superiour speeds.

I believe the Federation outposts would have detected the BoP in Balance of Terror before it reached the other side. They couldn't have kept the cloaking device up the years it took to cross over with no warp drive (the Romulans kept talking about fuel consumption when the cloak was turned on).

My theory. Earth (and eventually the Federation) were completly unaware of the quantum singularity power sources used by the Romulans until after the events in Balance of Terror. Thus the line Scotty drops about no warp power in BoT could be because they couldn't detect a standard M/AM powercore. If you look closely at the Romulan BoP it has nacels that could be used for Warp Drive.

I wonder if some of these items would be cleared up in Series V which is seriously looking to be the Birth of the Federation idea.

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-=/\=-
Captain Stark
http://beam.to/readyroom

"The man on the top walks a lonely path. The chain of command is often a noose." Dr. Leonard McCoy --Obsession, Stardate: 3619.2

Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

There's no evidence that the Romulans had no warp drive in the 2260's, and plenty to suggest they did. Scotty's line in "Balance of Terror" was that they only had "impulse power". "Power", not "drive". Presumably, then, the Romulans had rather inefficient warp drives that ran off fusion reactors, but they had warp drives nonetheless.

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"What he did to that walrus gentle-man was inexcusable."
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Posted by Gaseous Anomaly (Member # 114) on :

Yeah, but the Earth-Romulan War was conducted BEFORE the Neutral Zone was drawn up. I think it's formation was a part of the Treaty Of Algernon.

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Remember the gallant men who drowned
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Posted by Captain Stark (Member # 70) on :

Gas: That is true, but we must consider that the Neutral Zone was where the majority of the war was fought. When the borders were defined I believe that they would not be too close to Earth or Romulus leaving a bit of breathing room between the planets and the borders. I believe we are still talking a huge distance to try to cross or even get to with no warp drive.

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-=/\=-
Captain Stark
http://beam.to/readyroom

"The man on the top walks a lonely path. The chain of command is often a noose." Dr. Leonard McCoy --Obsession, Stardate: 3619.2

Posted by Vacuum robot lady from Spaceballs (Member # 239) on :

Does Warp mean FTL?

Or is Warp a type of Faster Than Light travel? Like the Quantum Singularity drive-things of the Romulans, or the Conduits of the Borg.

Just because the Romulans "Didn't have Warp Drive", does that mean they couldn't have a different FTL system, one not classified as "Warp Drive"?

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Posted by TSN (Member # 31) on :

Well, yes. But they did seem to have warp nacelles (or something that looked remarkably like them). And, although we see non-warp systems that allow travel much faster than most warp, we haven't really seen anything but warp that goes at the usual warp speeds. But you still could be right, theoretically.

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"What he did to that walrus gentle-man was inexcusable."
-T. Herman Zweibel on "Mr. Woodrow Wood-pecker", The Onion, 7-Nov-2000

Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :

It all boils down to the stupid Picard comment about Romulans getting warp drive 100 years ago... Or would this work out to about the time of "The Enterprise Incident"?

Andrew

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"I threw bitter tears at the ocean
But all that came back was the tide..." 'I Will Not Forget You' Sarah McLachlan

Posted by colin (Member # 217) on :

Admiral Dougherty made the comment that Romulans didn't have warp drive in "Insurrection".

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Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :

Actually, didn't Dougherty make two separate comments (or was one of these made by Picard)?

There was one line about the Romulans having been rather harmless before their aquiring of warp drive transformed them into interstellar thugs. I don't remember which character says that. I seem to remember the Romulans were compared to Arabs (probably intended by the writers to mean Saddam H. specifically here, never mind if he's Arab or not) being transformed by the discovery of oil, but was that only in the novelization?

Then, after this first comment, there was another bit of dialogue where Dougherty says "we can handle the Son'a", to which Picard responds "somebody probably said that about the Romulans a hundred years ago".

So the process of the acquisition of warp drive by the Romulans is not carefully defined. There is nothing explicit about humans giving it to them. Nor is there anything explicit about them getting it 100 years ago.

If anything, I'd take this to mean that the Romulans got warp drive MORE than 100 yrs ago, and this Mr Somebody then made the foolish statement of "even though they already have warp, we can still handle them". But the reference about "handling them" might also be unrelated to warp drive altogether.

Timo Saloniemi

Posted by Bernd (Member # 6) on :

I think "warp" is in fact synonymous to "FTL" because the term has been used for any kind of FTL in Star Trek.

However, I don't believe that the Romulans acquired warp drive as late as during their alliance with the Klingons. If Dougherty's comment was really meant in a way that they have warp drive for only 100 years, it wouldn't make much sense. What should have changed 100 years ago we don't know of? It was pretty clear that the Romulans were a technologically equal enemy in BoT and probably already during the Romulan War.

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Posted by Timo (Member # 245) on :

Indeed, it seems likely (although perhaps this wasn't the intention of the writers) that Picard was only referring to the fact that the Romulans had been a no-threat from the RW to "BoT", and then a century ago in "BoT" again became a new threat. Then somebody read Kirk's report on "BoT" and said "Oh, we can handle them", meaning "they cannot escape their NZ now any more than they could before - cloaks or no cloaks, warp or no warp, Vulcan blood or no Vulcan blood; nothing has changed".

However, since by the movie era the Romulans are clearly "out of their shell", with ambassadors and agents all over the galaxy, this Somebody was wrong.
Alternately, Somebody meant "let them come out, they won't bother us since we are stronger". Possibly the buddy-buddy relations with the Romulan ambassador in ST6 were part of this "we are handling them, they are domesticated now" thing. And when the Romulans later went bad and did whatever they did at Tomed, it became evident that Somebody *wasn't* "handling them" after all.

This doesn't address the "warp made them thugs" issue, though. Here, they simply became thugs when let out of their RNZ. Whether this was due to warp, or cloak, or politics, is not specified. To account for the "warp made them thugs" part, one could say that they did gain warp around "BoT". Or then one could say they gained warp in the RW era, and this war was the reason they were considered thugs.

Dunno. Probably I'm reading too much into this dialogue. IMHO it doesn't explicitly tell us anything about the timeline of Romulan warp, and a variety of interpretations are possible.

Timo Saloniemi