"Romulan Military Prowess" Topic

It seems to me that in Star Trek (original TV series) the Romulans were always on the weaker side. Sure, they had cloaking devices, but they wound up installing them on ships they bought from the Klingons (yes, I know the series production reason for this.) Their own technology went towards "secret super weapon" which is more mad scientist-vibe than giving a feeling of military parity with their neighbours.

What do y'all think?

That's the impression I got for sure: They were weaker than the Klingons and probably weaker than a fully mobilized Federation.

I'm not Trekxpert though :)

Dianne Duane had fun with this in the Waybackwhens. Read My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way. Then stop.

But yeah. As good as either Federation or Klingons, ship for ship and man for man--but not the same size polity as the UFP or the Klingon Empire.

Yea, I agree, though those Klingon D-7s seem to be as good, if not better than the originals, once you add cloaking to them as well

The early warbird in TOS was a pretty backward design, compared to more modern vessels, but quite powerful.

Basically, a WWII U-Boat (Romulans) vs. an Allied Destroyer/Cruiser for the Feds.

Well, in TOS, the Romulans literally only controlled two planets compared to the Federation and Klingon Empires which controlled hundreds or thousands. In TNG, somehow the Romulans seen to have a lot more territory under their control, but are still much smaller than their neighbors.

Not only 2 star systems. Take a look ata ROmulan Star Empire from Balance of Terror.

link

But still they were weaker.

Well, they do state in 'Balance of Terror' that the neutral zone 'separates the planets Romulus and Remus from the rest of the galaxy'. And their ships only have impulse power, so their empire can't be very large and even if they claim a few dozen star systems, there might not be any additional habitable planets.

Thank you for the all the great replies!

@ScottWashburn: The Bird Of Prey only had impulse power because it was too small for warp drive and most of the power went to powering their mad science super cannon and cloaking device. However, if they had not yet discovered warp drive, how did they manage their exodus from Vulcan?

The Starfleet Museum has a pretty good rationale for Romulan technogical development and the first Romulan war.

In a nutshell- Scotty misspoke. Romulans did, in fact, have warp drive but it was nuclear powered like impulse engines rather than by anti-matter.

If you accept this retcon, it makes for an interesting take on the war, and why the romulans had to stoop to buying ships from the klingons.

Shame on me for not contributing to this discussion sooner.

As many of you know, I am working on a series of rulebooks that are intended to cover the entirety of Star Trek history, for the purpose of starship wargaming. The Original Series era is the first cab off the rank, and the Romulan War is likely to be the second.

I've put a lot of thought into my interpretation of the Romulans, and here's some of my observations:

Firstly, we know that the Romulans are but a shadow of their former glorious selves by the time of 'Balance of Terror'. Why? Simply because they didn't simply lose their war against Earth and her allies between 2156 and 2160 – they were thrashed.

Following their defeat, the Romulan Empire was reduced to a handful of systems (perhaps only 2?) and restricted from expansion coreward by a far more powerful Starfleet, supporting a cordon of military outposts, standing like watchtowers around a prison.

The one concession the Romulans could wring from their victorious opponents was that their coreworlds were not occupied. (A kindness the Federation may have later regretted.)

During the Enterprise era, we see that the Romulans are building advanced, highly capable warships, probably to a quality far higher than the efforts of Earth shipwrights. Ship-for-ship, Romulan designs could beat anything Earth's Starfleet could put in the field.

But, as the Germans discovered in WW2, quantity has a quality of its own.

When war finally broke out, after Romulan attempts to sabotage the 'Coalition of Planets' failed, their initial gains were staggering. The Romulan fleet pushed Humanity to the brink, in spite of the sacrifices of Starfleet, and their Andorian and Tellarite allies.

Vulcan, of course, did assist in the war. But, still reeling from the recent cultural tsunami that was the recovery of Surak's Katra, their contribution was limited to humanitarian and scientific aid. No Vulcan ship actively participated in the war against Romulus.

(That there was some kind of Romulan subterfuge to keep Vulcan out of the war now seems likely, but that alone cannot explain the planet-wide pacifism that now guided the actions of all Vulcans. )

Although the Romulan fleet pushed all the way through to Earth itself, it was fighting a losing battle. As lines of communication grew untenably long and thin, Starfleet's superior numbers began to tell. Raids against Romulan convoys and supply depots left battlegroups without ordinance or fuel.

Compounding the difficulty was the nature of Romulan faster-that-light technology. Romulan vessels relied on 'Jump' FTL technology. This had the advantage of requiring only simpler, safer fusion reactors as a power source, but unlike a ship with warp drive, a 'jumping' vessel cannot communicate or use sensors while underway.

Romulan development of matter / antimatter reactors (essential for warp technology) was hampered by a misguided enthusiasm for a more sophisticated quantum singularity reactor, but such a reactor would not become a reality for more that two centuries.

Once Starfleet understood this disadvantage, it was exploited to the full; systems would be left with a small, understrength force to defend them, which would be set upon by a jumped-in Romulan fleet. But then, the real Starfleet force would be called in by the 'bait', trapping the Romulans with superior numbers.

As the losses of their finest ships piled up, the Romulans turned to simpler, less sophisticated technologies and ship building techniques, desperate to match the industrial might of the coalition. As they did so, their ships became more primitive, less capable, and in the end, worthless.

This is where we see the 'wonder weapon' mentality of the Romulan military begin. Their high command spent the last months of the war trying to perfect cloaking devices, plasma weapons, and singularity reactors, diverting vitally needed resources from the front lines in the arrogant belief that superior Romulan intellect would deliver victory from the jaws of defeat.

It didn't.

But their legacy was a profound shift in Starfleet's thinking about ship design. In the future, rather than rely on numerous, lesser-quality vessels, Starfleet would emulate the Romulans by producing smaller numbers of ships built to the highest standards. It proved a winning formula during the war with the Klingon Empire a century later, but only by the slimmest of margins.

In the meantime, the Romulans, reduced to a handful of worlds, became the also-ran power of the Alpha / Beta Quadrants. Unsurprisingly, in such a precarious position, even Romulan arrogance and pride had to take a back seat to practicality, leading to the alliance with the Klingon Empire.

Working to the principle that 'my enemy's enemy is my friend', the Romulans accepted the Klingon's offer of a mutual protection treaty in 2205. This was expanded to a technological exchange treaty in 2267, leading to the Romulans gaining a number of Klingon vessels and warp systems, while the Klingons obtained early cloaking devices and plasma weapons.

This allowed the Romulans to expand their empire rimward, carefully choosing systems unlikely to attract the attentions of the Federation until it was too late for Starfleet to do anything about it.

At the same time, Romulan ship builders benefited from the exchange treaty, leading to new designs that could match Starfleet's capabilities, such as the Gallant Wing class cruiser.

However, even these advances could not offset the Federation's great technological and industrial advantages. Romulan foreign policy was still reliant on espionage and manipulation, leaving the fleet as a poor cousin to the intelligence service – the Tal Shiar.

This state of affairs would continue until the early 2300's, when the Romulans felt sufficiently strong enough to shake off the bonds imposed by their alliance with the Klingons. (They were likely spurred to action by the warming of relations between the Klingons and the UFP.)

War with the Klingons followed, which again, the Romulans lost. But at least this was not as severe a defeat as the war with Earth, and the Romulans, after a period of isolation, returned to the galactic stage in a big way by the 2360's.

********************

Phew!

Of course this is only IMT (In My Trek – thank you Will for that phrase!) and your interpretation may differ however you desire. But I have thought (much too) long and hard about this dilemma of Star Trek's portrayal of the Romulans, and this is my resolution for the sometimes conflicting information.

It is also why the Romulans don't feature much in volume 1 of KotSB! but will dominate volume 2. I thought people might like to see my thinking as to why. :)

- Martin

I always assumed the exodus from Vulcan, having taken place so long ago that almost no records of it remain (on Vulcan), that it was done in sub-light colony ships. No reason that could not have happened.

Of course this is only IMT (In My Trek – thank you Will for that phrase!) and your interpretation may differ however you desire.

You are welcome, I think I borrowed that phrase from another Trek site so I can't take credit. :)

My overall take on the Romulans is pretty close to the material from the Starfleet Museum site, and similar to MacrossMartin's take:

The Romulans DO have warp drive by TOS, but they rely on older power technology (Fusion) that by the 2260's were only used for Impulse Drives and back-up power on Federation ships. Scotty said 'Impulse Power' so he wasn't wrong but it does not mean the Warbird had no FTL capability (though it was likely slower). Part of the reason why the Romulans still used such old power sources were that that Romulans spent their time investigating Quantum Singularities as a power source rather than Antimatter reactors; the Quantum reactors proved much more complex than anticipated (though they working by the 2360's, as seen in the TNG Warbird) and even after a century the Romulans still were relying on 'primitive' nuclear reactors.

After the incident shown in Balance of Terror the Romulans realized that they were falling irretrievably behind the Federation. When the Klingons offered to sell still-modern D7 cruisers the Romulans leap at the chance, some of the ships they refit with cloaking devices and put into service, others are carefully taken apart and their technology is applied to Romulan shipbuilding efforts.

It's also possible that the TOS-era Cloaking Device was not effective at FTL speeds, but I don't think that's been shown in other sources.

-Will

I think that was alluded to, as being an energy hog, at least on the original Bird of Prey.

Of course, not sure how 3 x Romulan D-7s could sneak up on the Enterprise in space and surround it, without having FTL capabilities while cloaked.

IIRC, their attack runs on the Enterprise, after she cloaked were at sublight speeds, but the Ent. then warped away at the end of the episode, while cloaked, I think.

Cloaking devices certainly work at FTL velocities, the issue is one of when they achieve that capability.

It certainly appears that the original BoP could only cloak at sublight speed, so I suspect the issue was one of available power; hook a cloak with a sufficiently large capacitor to an antimatter reactor, and you have a tactical advantage that now functions on the strategic level, as we see in the TNG era.

But I feel it is appropriate to emphasise the cultural arrogance and xenophobia of the Romulans; they must surely have been aware of the size and power of Federation starships such as the Enterprise, and yet they squandered a massive tactical surprise by sending a single, undersized, underpowered vessel into Federation space.

Did they only possess the resources to build a single Bird of Prey? Or did a century of licking wounds dull the lessons of the war with Earth, leading to the blindly arrogant opinion that just one ship would be enough to destroy the cordon of Federation Outposts – AND any response to their destruction?

A line from 'Balance of Terror' suggests the former to be the case:

DECIUS: We are beaten. Can it be true? The Praetor's finest and proudest flagship beaten!

- implying this one Bird of Prey is indeed the best the shipyards of Romulus can do.

How the mighty have fallen.

Sorry MacrossMartin, I don't buy it. There is no bitterness in the Federation toward Romulans for many men loss to them in a supposed war. In fact they are mostly unknown to the Fed in TOS. Surprise, surprise the have cloaking technology. Not springing it on the Fed like a secret weapon in a great battle, but using it in border raids. Most likely it is alien technology they found. They have to buy monkey copies of older Klingon ships. Why the Klingons haven;t stolen the technology is a question only the writers could answer.