posted
If that is the exact quote from BoT and if this was after a fight?? Then Scotty could have been giving a damage assesment... meaning that they're FTL drives were off line and they were on impulse only...
------------------ "I threw bitter tears at the ocean But all that came back was the tide..." 'I Will Not Forget You' Sarah McLachlan
posted
To be exact, the Nimitz and Enterprise carriers have steam turbines, too. The steam is just generated by fission reactions. What typical warships have is either gasoline-burning turbines (essentially, jet engines) or diesel engines, or then an "and/or" combination of these. If you see a ship with huge ventilation structures (like the Spruances or Ticonderogas), then the ship is probably turbine-powered; smaller chimneys probably signify diesel power, and lack of smoke is a good hint that there's a nuclear reactor onboard. Different propulsion systems and combinations have different pros and cons (cruise performance, top speed, noise)...
Even if Scotty was giving a "damage report" on the Romulans, his analysis must be considered suspect, since the Romulans continued to evade the Enterprise even when the latter moved at warp speeds in a more or less straight course. Perhaps Scotty was simply mistaken, because the Romulans had shut down their warp drive and cooled it down? Then again, nobody chided him for his mistake when the Romulans began acting as if they were capable of warp (that is, evading the warping E). Did everybody from the outset ignore Scotty's rantings? Or did Scotty's phrase actually mean that the ship had an impulse-type powerplant for her warp drive (and didn't bother to mention that the Romulans had a warp drive since every idiot aboard would know that just by looking at her warp nacelles and from the fact that she was THERE)?
Canon is that the Romulans split from the Vulcans before either developed Warp Drive because the Romulans don't have it later. Make of that what you will.
What we know for sure is that the Vulcans had it before us. The Klingons I've heard a few versions on. At least one says they got it from one of our ships that they captured. The Romulans had a way to project ships at warp, but a self contained warp drive was what they traded Cloak to the klingons for.
The Bajorans apparently did not have Warp Dive when the Cardassians conquered them. However, they had built ships that travelled FTL due to an anomoly in their system that could carry a ship at FTL speeds to Cardassia. The Cardassians have probably not had Warp quite as long as Earth, because their empire is a little small and their tech is slightly behind ours.
No clue when the Ferengi got it, but they sold it to the Pakleds.
------------------ You're a Starfleet Officer. "Weird" is part of the job.
posted
Uh, canon *doesn't* say anywhere that there was a period when the Romulans did not have warp drive. So judging by canon references only, Romulans have had warp since Big Bang.
Canon only says that there was one ship in one episode of which Scotty claimed that "her power is impulse only", which according to Kirk meant "we can outrun them".
So Romulans could have had warp during their secession from Vulcans in three ways:
1) They always had it, and the ship in "BoT" was warp-capable despite what Scotty said
2) They always had it, but this single ship did not require / could not handle simultaneously with the cloak a warp drive and thus was not equipped with it
3) They had it during secession, and then lost it in wars, natural disasters or out of sheer neglect and decay during their version of the Dark Ages
Or then they could have developed warp at any point between secession and "Tin Man" - which AFAIK is the first episode where Romulan warp capability is canonically demonstrated - prior to that, we could have stated that the bird-patterned TOS ships, the Klingon-lend-lease cruisers and the big TNG Warbirds were all impulse-only vessels, and wouldn't have contradicted canon! In no earlier episode were warp factors stated for the Romulan ships, nor VFX shown for warp drive. Oh, one could infer something from the travel times mentioned, but then again, perhaps the distances traveled were simply really short?
posted
The only problem with that is that really short would be really short, since full Impulse seems to be 1/4 speed of light (possibly for Feds only, but since the races never outrun each other at Impulse, I'm guessing it must apply to all of them.)
Even if we grant Full Impulse as being at (or just under) the speed of light, how many stars are less than one light year from each other? If the Romulans were travelling everywhere at Impulse, there would have been fights over who got to play solitaire.
And perhaps the Rommies were using their quantumn singularity drive in the original BoP, and the primitive old cardboard Enterprise's sensors weren't high-tech enough to notice.
And no-one corrected Scotty because Spock didn't want to admit he made a mistake, and Kirk wouldn't tell his arse from his elbow anyway.
------------------ "If every vampire who said he was at the Crucifixion was actually there it would've been like Woodstock. I was at Woodstock. I fed off a flower person and I spent six hours watching my hand move." - Spike, BtVS
posted
The speed of light is 299,792 km/s. c is the same thing, only expressed in proper SI units => c = 2.99792*(10^8) m/s = 299,792,000 m/s.
------------------ Remember December '59 The howling wind and the driving rain, Remember the gallant men who drowned On the lifeboat, Mona was her name.
posted
So full impulse is 0.25c. Or c=0.25. What the correct way to write it?
And would anyone want to guess as to how big the "Romulan Star empire" would be if it was only capable of 0.25c?
------------------ "If every vampire who said he was at the Crucifixion was actually there it would've been like Woodstock. I was at Woodstock. I fed off a flower person and I spent six hours watching my hand move." - Spike, BtVS
quote:4/ Someone dropped the Bird of Prey model, and they needed a replacement. Fortunatly, they'd just spent a lot of money building this funky/ugly new design, and this was a prefect opportunity to use is.
I'd vote for 4, personally.
And You'd be right. Actually, this was the first version of the explanation I heard. Later, I read an interview with DC Fontana where she explained that they all hated the way the Romulan model looked, but couldn't afford to make another one.
------------------ You're a Starfleet Officer. "Weird" is part of the job.
posted
I agree that the Romulans must have had warp drive to be across the neutral zone. I agree that the Romulans probably had warp drive before they left Vulcan. However, we have to deal with things like the Encyclopedia entry for the Romulan Bird of Prey that says "Propulsion was simple impulse." The Star Trek RPG, authorised by Paramount, stated that the Romulans did not have a self contained Warp Drive at that time, but instead catipulted ships at warp. This was, I'm told, due to Paramount's insistance that the TOS Romulans lacked warp.
Now, we can just say that Paramount is a bunch of idiots, and that the Okudas made mistakes in the Encyclopedia, but that basicly means we're saying there are no canon sources for data beyond the episodes themselves, and I doubt we really want to go there. SO: There is no definative answer. deal with it.
------------------ You're a Starfleet Officer. "Weird" is part of the job.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
