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Originally posted by Wraith:
I can't remember exactly what the planet looked like but how about a kinetic strike? Loads of dust and crap spewed into the atmosphere would have totally screwed up the ecosystem, kinda like an asteroid strike.

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Originally posted by Aban Rune:
As I recall, the planet look like a sandy gravel pit. No vegitation. Near zero visibility. The surface (at least the part we saw) seemed to be sandy and rather wet rather than dusty and desert like.

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Yeah, but I figured that all of the vegetation could've just died out after the strike, but not directly because of temperature change (which is what caused all of the mass extinctions on Earth). In a "normal" asteroid strike, *something* would've survived and adapted.... not to mention the entire planet would've become very uncomfortable in extreme cold.

I guess what I'm wondering now is, would an incredibly massive blast of ionized plasma (like a bunch of the Romulan plasma cannons, or something similar) have caused the atmospheric disruptions and storms that we saw?

An uninformed analogy might be the effects of solar flares that we see here on Earth -- knocking out the power, disrupting communications, and causing the Aurora Borealis, for example. Would something on a much greater scale cause the planet-wide storms in "The Enemy," even 200 years later?

Failing that, what other technological means (read: weapons) might be used?
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
GC also had that nasty EM field problem that screwed Geordi so hard.
Possibly GC had it's Van Allen belt ripped up by stray nuclear weapons fire (beams, not bombs) and that's why it sucks so hard to be stranded there but it probably was'nt a class M garden spot to begin with.

It's also possible that one side or the other was terraforming GC when war broke out and abandoned it as part of the peae treaty.
 

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Posted by Reverend (Member # 335) on :
 
One small suggestion from a dramatic point of view; Why not make GC a Romulan outpost instead of an Earth one? That way you can have the Romulans blast their own planet to keep it from being occupied by Earth forces and denying them a foot hold in their territory and it'd reinforce why the Romulans were never seen face to face, because it became a purely space based war.

That behavior would be consistant with what we've seen of the Romulans, they did after all slaughter their own invasion force in (TNG "Unification").
 

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Posted by Peregrinus (Member # 504) on :
 
Tough call. Yes, that's consistent with TNG Romulans, but not the earlier TOS Romulans. They seem to have gotten sneaky and deceitful sometime after 2290. No, I'm not saying the cloaking device isn't sneaky, just that -- as portrayed -- the Romulans used to be the honorable adversaries and the Klingons were the lying, sneering, backstabbing @$$holes. Pity that changed. I didn't mind the Klingons getting more depth. I just wish it hadn't been at the expense of what I think was the coolest TOS race...

Hm...

I sense a thread coming on. Look over in General Trek.

--Jonah
 

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Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
 
Kris: Actually, Masao did at some point allude to the Romulans wiping out some of their own planets for defensive purposes. And I've already been considering the same thing -- thanks for confirming I'm not totally out there!

As for their actions being inconsistent with TOS Romulans... well, I would *totally* disagree with that assessment. I submit that the Romulan Commander from "Balance of Terror" was an unusual individual, not representative of the norm in Romulan society. After all, if the Romulan government decided to launch such a sneak attack in the first place, that doesn't indicate many "honorable" intentions, to my way of thinking. The only other time we saw the Romulans in TOS, in "The Enterprise Incident," may not apply because that Commander was obviously incredibly naive and ineffective.

We've seen a few honorable Romulans in TNG's time, too -- "The Defector," for example, and "Unification." So I think that there's much less of a drastic change than one might think.
 

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Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
 
Perhaps terraforming equipment can render a planet uninhabitable. The Romulans may have just left it slightly habitable to use it as a strike base.

I think that there are two types of Romulans: Honorable and Decietful. Perhaps the Honorable ones (ridgeless?) lost power after 2290 and were overcome by the ridged ones.
 

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Posted by Cartmaniac (Member # 256) on :
 
"I didn't mind the Klingons getting more depth."

What depth?
 

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Posted by CaptainMike20X6 (Member # 709) on :
 
in TOS their swords were much less imaginative. and back then, there was no Klingon bible camp.
 

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Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
 
and no language.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
and no horseshoe crab on their head.
 

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Posted by David Templar (Member # 580) on :
 
How about having the humans as the ones who fried the planet? Wouldn't exactly put it past them, being only semi-enlightened during that period of time. Or hey, if you set it in the ENT universe, you can have those nasty, illogical Vulcans do it.
 

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Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
 
It'd be better if the Romulans did that. You know honor and all that.
 

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Posted by Woodside Kid (Member # 699) on :
 
Given the level of technology during the Romulan War period, would either side have enough firepower to permanently screw up an entire planetary ecosystem? To give a rough example, the comet or asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous Period had, by some estimates, an explosive force of more than one hundred million megatons, and yet the after effects obviously didn't last long enough to kill off everything (after all, we're here, right?), let alone a couple of centuries. If that much of a wallop couldn't do the trick, what kind of a man-made catastrophe could? One single event wouldn't be enough, I think; you'd have to have some sort of destabilizing program operating for decades at least to do the job.
 

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Posted by Harry (Member # 265) on :
 
But perhaps Galarndon Core was a less stable planet, and never really recovered from the destruction.
 

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Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
 
Weapons not powerful enough? What about that plasma weapon the Romulans used? Send a few bolts of that down at various points on the surface and you'll probably achieve the very same effect. In Masao's Museum timeline, the Romulans had an earlier version of their plasma cannon that was sublight and only had limited effectiveness in ship-to-ship combat (since the targets were mobile and the weapon unguided), but firing at a space station or planetary target seems like a pretty good possibility to me.

At this point, I'm not even necessarily thinking of the explosive power directly. Would simply pumping lots of plasma into the planet's atmosphere with these cannons be enough to cause lots of damage to the ecosystem?
 

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Posted by Cartmaniac (Member # 256) on :
 
"To give a rough example, the comet or asteroid strike at the end of the Cretaceous Period had, by some estimates, an explosive force of more than one hundred million megatons, and yet the after effects obviously didn't last long enough to kill off everything (after all, we're here, right?), let alone a couple of centuries."

Uhm... the after effects wiped out thirty-three percent of all life on Earth. The impact fucked up the planet's biosystem for tens of thousands of years, and if that asteroid had been a kilometer or so larger, nothing would have survived (except maybe a few prokaryotes).
 

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Posted by Sol System (Member # 30) on :
 
I've just taken a look a three different sources which each give three different numbers for the total amount of species wiped out at the end of the Cretaceous, which is odd. Well, wait, some of them seem to be counting by genera. But, anyway, I think the figure is a bit higher, anywhere between 50% and 75%. This site even claims 85%.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
A Romulan "warp carrier" chock full o' antimatter could have impacted the planet's magnetic pole at near relativistic speeds (hurtling out of control).
That would certainly have screwed the pooch.

GC could also be extremely old or extremely young as a planet with a erratic orbit and most of it's water existing only as vapor in the air.
A proto-planet if you will.
 

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Posted by Wraith (Member # 779) on :
 
So basically we have:

1)Breatheable atmosphere- doesn't seem to indicate an unstable planet. Also indicates that at least plant life was probably present at some point.

2)Comfortable temperature- again, argues against unstable planet.

3)No obvious signs of life.

How about some kind of biological agent, coupled with either plasma attacks or purposeful misuse of terraforming equipment for the skies?

that should explain everything without the problems of the Romulans having to use their (then quite primitive) plasma weapons to kill everything on the planet.
 

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Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
 
Or mabye the bio-filter on the transporter malfunctioned and the biosphere was wiped out by simple e coli bacteria.

As to unstable planets: this is Trek.
We've seen cloaked planets, planets that shift into subspace, "rogue planets", planetoids, asteroids and hollowed out asteroid spaceships all with breathable atmosphere. (and many with funky pastel skies and giant styrofoam boulders).
I think anything's possible given Trek's history.
 

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Posted by MinutiaeMan (Member # 444) on :
 
Hmm... biological agent sounds like a pretty interesting possibility, particularly if GC was occupied by the Romulans and then abandoned.

But is it necessary to assume that the Romulans wanted to sterilize the planet right away? They could've used a plasma strike to wipe out the immediate colony, but the aftereffects of the strike would wipe out the ecosystem over the succeeding months and years, until everything was dead.
 

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Posted by Wraith (Member # 779) on :
 

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But is it necessary to assume that the Romulans wanted to sterilize the planet right away?

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No, not really. But (you knew that was coming), imagine how impressive it would seem to the UE people when they reached the planet that their enemy, these mysterious Romulans that no one's ever seen, can wipe out the entire ecosystem of a planet in a matter of weeks or months (assuming the process would not be begun until UE forces were in close proximity to the system and had intel reports on the planets). It would seem fairly terrifying to me.

Incidentally I had an idea a while back for an incident in the Romulan wars that could kinda link into this. I seem to remember in the chronology at some point (I think in the entry for the DS9 episode 'Homefront') it states that it is implyed that a state of emergancy was declared on Earth during the Romulan wars. Now I know that in the SF Museum timelline the Romulan space forces don't get too near Earth but what if there was an outbrake of a new disease of varient of a disease on Earth or Mars? If there had been reports of bioweapons being used elsewhere this could be enough for a state of emergancy to be declared. The real origin of the disease could be listed as unexplained. Just an idea .
 

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Posted by djewell (Member # 1111) on :
 
Seems logical to me. But one would have to wonder what it is that can elude Federation Tech. The crews never take into account that there might be a dangerous disease on planets they make first contact with. It seems to suggest to me that they have some sort of technology, be it a bio agent or other tech that allows them to kill all harmful organisms.

But then again, that was the 22nd century.
 

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