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We are told the T'kon empire was impossibly huge, yet the supernova of their home system wiped them out. How bugged me. Putting aside the 'lazy writers' in favor of a in universe answer. The T'kon could have run their empire the way the Mongols did. When Gengis and company conquered an area, they killed the rulling class and replaced them with a handful of Mongols, the goverment is essentially unchanged, just the 'top of the totem pole' is altered. With the threat of a powerful military to keep the locals in line. The vast majority of the T'kon stayed at their home system. So when their sun supernova'd they weren't enough left to maintain the empire, the local's rose up and slaughtered them.

Any thoughts?

That seems most logical. It was huge from what we know, yet just one supernova killed it.

I thought the line was changed in the episode so that nothing was mentioned about it's size?

My take on it was always this: the infamous subspace wavefront.

We know that almost everything produces subspace effects in the Trek universe. The home system star of the T'Kon goes kaboom. It can't plausibly have been a natural supernova, since stars that are candidates for supernova explosions aren't supposed to live long enough, or be cool enough, to have planets around them that will be able to develop life.

Thus, here's my scenario: Enemies of the T'Kon use a lost technology like a protomatter device to make the T'Kon sun go kaboom. The supernova itself should, at light speed, sterilize countless cubic parsecs around it. Preceeding that deadly wavefront of hard radiation is a massive subspace wavefront that makes the one produced by the Klingon moon look like a party popper.

Any subspace device caught by the titanic wavefront simply explodes under a catastrophic overload. This should mean all T'Kon starships simply blow up, as should the artificial planets used by the T'Kon. Regular inhabited planets would likely suffer a similar fate as their subspace communications networks, power grids, transporters and replicators explode.

The wavefront jams subspace communications, can outrun conventional warp-driven vessels, and is followed by a sterilizing wave of hard radiation that will eventually kill any survivors attempting to rebuild.

Shadow wrote:I thought the line was changed in the episode so that nothing was mentioned about it's size?

Library data, apparently legends from other species, described their empire as a huge space federation with a population of trillions

Data's script line "it describes the Empire as impossibly huge and powerful" was changed into "it describes the empire as highly advanced and powerful, and capable of moving stars" (which made up the defensive outposts for the empire)

I never got the impression the TKon were particuarly expansive themselves, probably a few systems close together, but a lot of power from trading their obviously highly advanced technology with other species. When their main planet went bye bye the government and most of their economy and technological expertise probably went with it, and the few remaining systems died out, leaving the outposts they'd pulled into place and legends.