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DrWho42

Did Romulans Have Warp Drive?

Did Romulans have Warp Drive back during the Earth-Romulan War [2160]?  

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  1. 1. Did Romulans have Warp Drive back during the Earth-Romulan War [2160]?

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<span style='font-size:16pt;line-height:100%'>What are your thoughts concerning Romulan propulsion of that time-period?

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post-812-1095566621.gif Edited by Kevin

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I think they could have had some rudimentary warp drive.

 

I read someplace once in some fan-fic or something that Romulus and Remus was once visited by a early human ship and it was captured and they reverse engineered it's warp drive.

 

Sounds like a pretty good explanation to me.

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According to Spock in TOS...Romulans did not have warp drive at the time of the Earth-Romulan War (2160)...which would have been understandable if you consider the sleeper class ships of that early time period(DY-100 thru DY-500) class sleeper ships....but after First Contact establishes Earth has warp drive with the flight of the Phenix...we need to just (let it go) and go with it...Spock made a mistake. But it's still hard to overlook the Romulans now having proton torpedos and cloaking devices and holo-emitters and Warp Drive...and I still haven't heard T'Pol admitt to Archer that the Romulans are a off-shoot of the Vulcan race. And according to Captain Kirk the peace treaty between Earth-Romulans was via sub-space radio and humans had never seen Romulans face to face. Lets see Coto work that into the next scripts! It's not a question of can it be done...it's a question of will he do it.....to preserve Star Trek Canon.

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I think that it's safe to say that they did have warp drive, Heck if they didn't have warp drive then they had to have some other form of FTL drive because
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of the most recent episode of ENT

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To my knowledge there are only three canonical references to the Romulan warp drive question.(during the Earth/Romulan war, and for those that still argue that they didn't have warp in "Balance of terror", during the early 2260's)

 

First, Spock's comments in "Balance of Terror"

 

Referring to the map on your monitor screen, you will note beyond the moving position of our vessel, a line of Earth outpost stations.

Constructed on asteroids, they monitor the neutral zone, established by treaty after the Earth/Romulan conflict of over a century ago.

As you may recall from your histories, this conflict was fought, by our standards today, with primitive atomic weapons and primitive space vessels, that allowed no quarter, no captives. Nor was there even ship-to-ship visual communications. So no human, Romulan, or ally, has seen the other.

Earth believes the Romulans to be war-like, cruel, traitorous, and only the Romulans know what they think of earth.

The treaty, sent by subspace radio, established this neutral zone, entry into which by either side would constitute an act of war.

The treaty has been unbroken since that time.

 

(please note that there is no mention of the "primitive vessels" being pre-warp.)

 

Second, again in the episode "Balance of Terror", Kirk and Scotty have this exchange.

 

Kirk: The question still remains: can we engage them with a reasonable possibility of victory?

Scotty: No question, their power is simple impulse.

Kirk:Meaning we can out run them.

 

(Note, he doesn't say they are pre-warp. He is only saying that THIS Romulan ship has only impulse power.)

How did the plasma weapon manage to keep the plasma stream from dispersing and for that matter traveling at WARP speed.

Could they have used their warp drive to create a subspace field to project the Plasma at warp. Could that be why the ship couldn't warp away?

 

The third reference came from the Admiral in S.T.:Insurrection.

"A century ago, warp drive transformed a group of Romulan thugs into an empire."

 

Considering what we have SEEN in S.T.:Enterprise and the source of this quote, I think we can just say in the heated exchange between the Admiral and Picard, the Admiral misspoke.

 

So I don't believe there is any basis for the idea that the Romulans were a pre-wap culture in the 2150's and certainly not by the 2260's.

(Or that the Earth/Romulan war was fought from 2156-60 and thus we can't have it shown on Enterprise, but that is another topic)

Edited by welfconfed

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There's no doubt that Romulans have warp capabilities. They're just inferior to Starfleet's. The Enterprise out-ran the ROmulan ship at a speed of warp 5.08 (I think it was .08, correct me if I'm wrong.)

 

The ship in Balance of Terror probably had to have it's warp core converted to provide the power for it's weapon.

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I was just thinking the romulans would have to had warp drive or their ships would still be leaving Vulcan. IMHO the romulans would have to had warp drive before leaving vulcan.

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Agreed. For then not to have some kind of warp capability makes no sense. It would make Earth very much the aggressors in the Earth/Romulan war in any case, given that it would have to take place very near Romulus.

 

I don't see that happening.

 

There's also the issue that a Romulan warp drive wouldn't be like a Starfleet one. Given that their power source is an artificial quantum singularity, and not a matter/antimatter reactor powered by dilithium (I'm useless with technical stuff but I think I have the right idea anyway) Maybe the fact that it was different lead to some kind of misunderstanding.

 

Or maybe the writers are just going to have a hard time explaining away the strangeness of this. ::shrugs::

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