posted
Well, if you happen to catch the newest ST: Magazine with Nemesis-themed articles, you'll find another Rick Sternbach technical article on Romulan Propulsion. I didn't actually grab the issue, just flipped through it at the book store, but:
He proposes that Romulan Warp Carriers were used to transport Birds-of-Prey during the early wars since resources for warp drive were limited.
He provides a detailed look at just exactly how the Romulan Warbird's quantum singularity drive works with nifty diagrams.
His CGI illustrator provides a very poor rendering of the TOS Bird-of-Prey compared to the one seen in ENT "Minefield."
Interesting. I saw that article while thumbing through the latest ish at Border's.
quote:He proposes that Romulan Warp Carriers were used to transport Birds-of-Prey during the early wars since resources for warp drive were limited.
Actually, this was something that was also proposed by Diane Carey in her novel "Final Frontier," which depicts the exploits of Robert April and the Enterprise before her official commissioning.
In that book, if memory serves, the BoP is dropped off by a larger warp carrier and is also picked up by one in the early part of the book. Unfortunatly, I don't have my copy handy to double check.
posted
Quite correct. "Final Frontier" describes humungous ships capable of carrying a dozen "Balance of Terror" lookalike craft under her wings. The craft are all impulse-powered, but each of them has unique capabilities, apparently mainly because the Star Empire is cash-starved and cannot refit all its craft to the same standards.
It's still unclear whether the "real" Romulans would need such things. "Minefield" as such doesn't yet prove warp capability to be common in the Star Empire of the 22nd century - the two ships seen could in fact have had impulse drive only, and warp resources back then could indeed have been "limited". Alternately, the "BoT" ship could have been warp-capable on her own. A lot more canon material is needed to settle this for good...
posted
Perhaps someone can refresh my memory? What is this Insurrection statement?
Registered: Jul 2000
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Cartman
just made by the Presbyterian Church
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posted
"On Earth, petroleum once turned petty thugs into world leaders, warp drive helped to form a bunch of Romulan thugs into an empire" or something to that effect.
Registered: Nov 1999
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posted
How limited could warp resources be in the Enterprise era? Human freighters have it, the Vulcans have a fair number of ships, as do the Klingons, and most of the species of the week seem to have it. In fact, every single little dinky Suliban cell-ship has a warp drive. Heck, even the escape pods of the crappy freighter in "Precious Cargo" have them.
I suppose you could propose that the Romulans have some sort of internal problem with resources, but then they have the resources to build an entire cloaked minefield?
This is all very odd.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
I think I remember that a lot of older novels and fan works presented the Romulan Star Empire as being in a resource poor region of space.
If they have no access to good supplies of dilithium then matter/anti-matter reactors are apparantly out of the question (never mind the physics...).
Maybe small and/or slow ships can be made warp capable with fusion power alone. Big ships can user singularity power plants. But maybe there's a minimum size of power plant that can be built around a singularity, or maybe singularity power plants are difficult to manufacture. So a large tender with a number of sub-light vessels made the mose sense to the Romulans.
Also explains the 24th C. Romulan habit of seemingly using only very small and very big ships...
-------------------- "My theories appal you, my heresies outrage you, I never answer letters and you don't like my tie." - The Doctor
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I found the article mentioning the upgrades to the Enterprise-E and how the Valdore and the Scorpion Class shuttle were designed much more interesting. To think how many new torp tubes were added in the strangest places.
Registered: May 1999
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quote: Heck, even the escape pods of the crappy freighter in "Precious Cargo" have them.
No they didn't. There was a whole scene dedicated to the pod falling out of the warp field of the freighter.
They made it all the way to a solar system and to one of the planets at sub-light speeds? Whoa. Either they were really lucky, or that episode was A LOT longer than I assumed.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
They were somewhere around 95 million kilometers from a planet as soon as they ejected. Just lucky, I guess. (The same luck that allows Enterprise, or any science fiction ship, to ever meet anything out in the vast emptiness of space.)
If you'd like, perhaps the freighter was flying close to a star system in order to mask their subspace signature.
Registered: Mar 1999
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