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A bit of Star Trek lore that has bugged me.

In the Star Trek universe, humanity futzed about the Solar System in the early 20th century, sent out a few interstellar STL ships and then developed Warp Drive in 2063. The Klingons developed Warp Drive sometime around the 1950s or so according to Quark. The Cardassian Union was formed about the same time as the Franco Prussian war, though this in of itself shows when they worked out Warp Drive. In contrast the Vulcans have had warp travel for much longer. The Monastery of P'jem was built around 850 BCE, so they had to have some form of interstellar travel since then. Mind you the Vulcans never stuck me as expansionist on the whole (they nearly go extinct in the Kelvinverse when their homeworld gets destroyed), especially after Surak. However, there was a faction of them that was.



These militarist guys got booted off Vulcan around 370 CE, then flew hundreds of Light Years to Romulus on some starship and began building up a new civilization with all this technology and plotted their eventual reconquest of vulcan and conquest of the galaxy. Here's the thing. The Romulans have done just that. If we say they had a starting population of 40,000 or so and had an average population growth rate of 0.02 they'd soon have have a population of over a billion people. With that and warp drive they'd basically steamroll any group of iron age feudalists they came across. They got the tech, the ideology and the will. Frankly Earth, Chronos and Cardassia should have ended up as Romulan Colonies by the 1500s century or so instead of the Star Empire playing second fiddle to the Empire of Bat'leth Weilding Morons and the Upstarts who are seventeen centuries behind the times.

What do you have to say about that?

Zor

Could be alot of reasons. In fighting could have prevented them from expanding. Once they left Vulcan their tech could have regressed considerably thanks to not having access to their tech base. Dialogue in Star Trek Insurrection by Admiral Stretchyface indicated that the Romulans changed from a group of thugs to an Empire with the development of the warp drive suggesting that they discovered (or possibly rediscovered) the warp drive after they separated from the Vulcans.

The Vulcans could have kept their expansion in check. According to Voyager's Death Wish Quinn ignited a hundred year war between the Romulans and Vulcans. While the date is never given, could be anytime between the Romulans becoming a distinct culture and the 21st century when Quinn was imprisoned, it shows the the Vulcans were still around and willing to dance with the Romulans.

Could have been some previously unseen enemy that stopped their expansion or possibly a race like the Hur'q who invaded the Klingon homeworld in the 14th century.

Plus remember the Romulans were notoriously isolationist, even when they operated against others it was through subterfuge and the veil of secrecy. It could have been they didn't want to expand, that they had no interest in conquering Earth or any other planet, they only started fighting against them when they became a threat.

we know that by 2150s both Vulcans and humans were past romulans in in technology since it's implied that vulcans had and outright stated that humans have a AM/M warpcores while, romulans are stuck with "simple impulse power" what ever that means and romulans didn't get AM/M reactors until 2260s so it's possible and I suspect even likely that romulans were stuck in sort of a technological limbo for a while so they didn't advance as much as they "should" have.

It's possible that after the initial leader(s) of the exodus died out proto-romulans have massive internal struggles and were more akin to klingons in vulcan form then romulans as we know them now until romulan culture as we know it was formed to channel the passions of the romulan people in more constructive form rather the allowing those passions to be expressed without restrictions.

EDIT:we should remember that when you have rebel forces that only 1 thing in common those tend to splinter once they've "won" since their differences now come at forefront as enemy that unified them is no longer an issue and far as we know only thing that made a vulcan someone who "marched under the raptor's banner" is that they opposed Surakian philosophy.

The constraints of having to find a new homeworld and a new resource base, with whatever scraps and fragments they escaped Vulcan with, probably set back Romulan technology to a large degree. Once they found a place to land, they may well have totally abandoned warp travel as simply too complicated for a few hundred thousand people to sustain. And by the time their population on Romulus grew back up to an acceptable level to support an interstellar civilization (as in, billions), they would no longer have the tools to build their own starships, and would have to do it from scratch.

Do the Romulans want the entire galaxy or AQ?

They just seem to want to be left alone.

the RSE is expansionist just not very aggressively so, also their current behaviour is probably a reaction to the Earth-Romulan war and the rise of the United Federation of Planets. the current RSE MO seems to be to provoke others into attacking them in such a way as to make the Romulans seems like the victim rather then the aggressor.

The Romulans seem very, very insular for much of their history, and as exiles from Vulcan, it probably took them quite a while to build a new society and power base, especially if they were plagued by the same brutal internal strife as ancient Vulcan history.

And while they did apparently want to retake Vulcan at some point... Vulcan would have every advantage they had technologically, plus more time, and more resources.

The speculation that the Romulans fell behind from their Vulcan brethen due to various reasons like trying to find a new home world is certainly interesting. However this also begs the question, how did they catch up to the UFP? Especially when they were still fairly isolationist.

I'm not sure they are on par with the UFP in all areas. In fact, I seem to recall that their max. warp speed is lower, though unfortunately I don't recall a source.

It may be that they have focussed on military technology, particularly firepower and cloaks, while neglecting other areas.

I'll add that my sense of Romulan ships is that they're (the Scimitar aside, anyway) generally optimized to be ambushers. Not as durable, perhaps, as some others' ships, but lots of firepower, mostly directed forward, and cloaks.

They did make trade deals with the Klingons in TOS, which may have played a large role in catching up.

Exchanging cloaks for some warp capable ships to study brings them into the ballpark for their scientists to compete.

It is worth noting their ships, in addition to being ambushers, are pretty oversized in TNG. Still some inefficiency in there, perhaps. They definitely went a different power route.

Artificial singularities rather than M/AM cores.

The Romulan Republic wrote:I'm not sure they are on par with the UFP in all areas. In fact, I seem to recall that their max. warp speed is lower, though unfortunately I don't recall a source.

It may be that they have focussed on military technology, particularly firepower and cloaks, while neglecting other areas.

I read somewhere that the most common warp core was quantum singularity, but it was overall less powerful than M/AM cores. The M/AM warp core was a human innovation borne from us having loads of excess antimatter siting around after world war 3 and never having known the "proper" way to build a warp core.

Everybody else rapidly adopted the technology as we got on the galactic stage, and with the trade combined with our alliance with the vulcans, the UFP making rapid technological leaps seems not unreasonable.

The Romulans are one of the few powers, though, that explicitly did not adopt Federation Flying Bomb tech.

The Romulan Republic wrote:I'm not sure they are on par with the UFP in all areas. In fact, I seem to recall that their max. warp speed is lower, though unfortunately I don't recall a source.

Tin Man

The maximum warp speed of a D'Derridex is below that of the Enterprise D, however that's at "safe" modes. They can overload and over-take, but it burns out their drive.

FireNexus wrote: I read somewhere that the most common warp core was quantum singularity, but it was overall less powerful than M/AM cores. The M/AM warp core was a human innovation borne from us having loads of excess antimatter siting around after world war 3 and never having known the "proper" way to build a warp core.

Everybody else rapidly adopted the technology as we got on the galactic stage, and with the trade combined with our alliance with the vulcans, the UFP making rapid technological leaps seems not unreasonable.

The Romulans are one of the few powers, though, that explicitly did not adopt Federation Flying Bomb tech.

I can't recall anyone non-romulan using it (I don't think any where mentioned in all of Voyager, for example), which makes it being the most common seem unlikely to me.

One speculation is that they're better for cloaks, having less of a 'tailpipe' than M/AM, just a need to hide their radiation signatures.

Or maybe the Romulans wanted an alternative to dilithium crystals...? If they didn't have naturally occurring ones in their sphere, then that'd explain why they were still on 'impulse' in TOS, and they wouldn't have picked up on the ability to artificially recomposite them as that was likely past their return to isolation. So Klingons and humans and others with dilithium would use M/AM, while the Romulans discovered an alternative that made them unreliant on mining that resource.

Of similar note, the Promellians also at one point in the past used 'lang cycle fusion engines' for their warp drives, so probably a lot like the TOS Romulans.

And the Bajoran lightships could go FTL thanks to tachyons, but in a way much inferior and more unreliable to even Romulan impulse.

Zor wrote:These militarist guys got booted off Vulcan around 370 CE, then flew hundreds of Light Years to Romulus on some starship and began building up a new civilization with all this technology and plotted their eventual reconquest of vulcan and conquest of the galaxy. Here's the thing. The Romulans have done just that. If we say they had a starting population of 40,000 or so and had an average population growth rate of 0.02 they'd soon have have a population of over a billion people. With that and warp drive they'd basically steamroll any group of iron age feudalists they came across. They got the tech, the ideology and the will. Frankly Earth, Chronos and Cardassia should have ended up as Romulan Colonies by the 1500s century or so instead of the Star Empire playing second fiddle to the Empire of Bat'leth Weilding Morons and the Upstarts who are seventeen centuries behind the times.

What do you have to say about that?

Zor

IIRC, the answer is very simple: the Romulans expanded into the Beta quadrant, not the Alpha quadrant. Presumably they are considered an Alpha quadrant power because quadrants are just lines on a map, and their territory is right on the edge of the map. Likewise, I think the Klingons have holdings in the Bea quadrant as well. Indeed, it would make sense if the quadrants were drawn to reflect political realities rather than celestial facts, as there is no astronomical reason to organize a galactic map this way as opposed to, say, the way the Star Wars galaxy is organized into Core and Rim systems. The only astronomical reality a stellar cartographer would care about is the structure of the galaxy itself (the arms and the core), and the Galactic Habitable Zone. Yes, galaxies probably have those too. If a star system is too close to regions of space that are too dense with stars, its likely that their planets would either get stripped from their orbits, or that radiation from other stars would kill all life (especially the closer to the galactic core you get). Earth actually resides just outside of one of the Milky Way's arms, if I recall correctly.

Moreover, a quadrant is huge, as demonstrated by three things: the decades long journey that Voyager would have had to take if they hadn't discovered shortcuts and stolen advanced Borg technology in order to cross the Delta quadrant; the fact that even after centuries of human exploration of the Alpha quadrant, there is still plenty of uncharted territory left to explore in the home region of humanity; and our scientific understanding of the scale of the Milky Way and other galaxies.

As far as I'm concerned, this is the most parsimonious answer you your question. The scale problem alone makes any socio-political-technological explanation like the ones others have proposed unnecessary.

Oh, it does occur to me: Coming from the direction of Vulcan, the early Romulans would fairly logically conclude, "Ok, if we go back that way, we *know* Vulcan is there and has tech to resist us, so we'll go the other way til we're ready...". And maybe make some generous assumptions on Vulcan's progress too. But end result, Vulcan and systems relatively near it, like Earth and Andor, are in the shadow of area they avoid.

They also could've had some fierce wars in the past with now-gone foes we've never even heard of that slowed their progress. Three century long slow-ship conflict with a coalition of hostile powers that overtook 70% of Romulan territory before the tides turns and the Romulans emerge victorious? We'd not even know!

This would be reinforced when they did eventually head back towards Vulcan only to be beaten back by the Humans when they tried.

Crazedwraith wrote:This would be reinforced when they did eventually head back towards Vulcan only to be beaten back by the Humans when they tried.

They seem to have a whole cycle of 'expand, war, face resistance, turtle, emerge with new tricks.'

Earth war, turtle, develop cloak and plasma and deal with Klingons, get stopped, turtle again, emerge with quantum-singularity powered large ships, better cloaks, etc., is just the part we see on screen, with the early seasons of both series involving explicit returns.

This could've been a historical cycle that has played out multiple times before against foes other than humans. It's slow, so it explains what they're up to, and they do come out formidable enough each time for them to have gains, before loses convince them to cut themselves off again until a newer generation is convinced they're ready.

Hm, if I were to make a Romulan map, I'd make a series of irregular 'rings,' labeled "first expansion, second expansion, third expansion," etc.. With, like, "5th expansion," being the one that stops at the Earth war and establishes the first neutral zone. 6th expansion is TOS, 7th begins in TNG. And the different expansions lasting different lengths of time and having different gaps between them.

Crazedwraith wrote:This would be reinforced when they did eventually head back towards Vulcan only to be beaten back by the Humans when they tried.

Which only gets more embarrassing when they realize that the humans were using exploration vessels, not warships.

That ties into something that often bugs me about Star Trek 'fans' who seem to love ranting angrily about how the Federation's "military" isn't militaristic enough.

Starfleet operates exploratory vessels with a lot more scientific focus than its rivals. And it trains its officers to be diplomats and negotiators as much as military commanders. And this has been a successful strategy for them. Having a wealth of scientific knowledge makes them better able to understand and take advantage of the things around them. Knowing how to negotiate with alien civilizations, understand their cultures, and deal with them by means other than violence means the Federation doesn't waste massive amounts of energy in costly struggles.

The Federation is probably the single most peaceable, science-diplomacy oriented culture in the Alpha Quadrant. And they are also the culture that went from being relatively low-end in 2160 to being the single dominant power in the quadrant in 2360, able to face down any single nation in the quadrant with a reasonable chance of success, and only really threatened by invasions from long-established civilizations from entirely different parts of the galaxy.

How did the Federation outgrow the Klingons and the Romulans and the Cardassians, all of whom canonically have at least as much spacefaring history as them? I'm guessing the answer has a lot to do with all those scientific survey missions, diplomatic negotiations, and willingness to talk and think before pulling triggers.

Right. Rather than conquering and colonizing personally, the Federation was just able to diplomacy entire swaths of territory into them. Cardassian occupation of Bajor vs the Federation setting up a defensive post and aid agreement for a few years, one was clearly far more successful. *And* they still colonize uninhabited worlds, likely at a faster rate than others due to their pushing of exploration to find good ones.

The Federation strategy is less 'aggressive' but allows for much more rapid expansion and gaining of infrastructure. I'm not sure if we've seen how many worlds' joining into the Federation we've seen onscreen but I'm sure it's considerable- and often requires a comparatively small commitment of resources compared to an occupation force.

Heck, it allows them to be generous to others when it comes to disputed claims, because they know they've got more elsewhere, and long-term if the other side joins anyway, or at least becomes friends, it works in their favor.

The Romulan Republic wrote:The Romulans seem very, very insular for much of their history, and as exiles from Vulcan, it probably took them quite a while to build a new society and power base, especially if they were plagued by the same brutal internal strife as ancient Vulcan history.

And while they did apparently want to retake Vulcan at some point... Vulcan would have every advantage they had technologically, plus more time, and more resources.

Again I'll bring up population growth and the timeframe. If we assume that the Romulans arrived on Romulus with 40,000 people in 400 and had a population growth rate of 0.02 per annum (lower than some human cultures have had and from what I gather Romulans don't have the Pon Farr cycle), by the year 1000 they'd have a population of nearly six billion. Even if we assume that there was a big civil war half way that got half the Romulans killed in the year 700, we still end up with nearly 2.8 billion people. Or let's say that those first 600 years had a bunch of smaller scale wars on Romulus that reduced population growth to 0.015 per annum. That still adds up to 303,169,383 by 1000 and 1.3 billion by 1100.

Warp Drives are not terribly hard things to make. Zephram Cochrane slapped one together with an operation which was only a few steps above Tony Stark in a cave and a box of scraps.

Zor

Maybe it was dealing with the Remans who had settled Remus, and making them a slave class? Keeping an entire world's population under your thumb who are right on your doorstep is going to require serious commitment. Eventually the Remans became their cannon fodder and producer of dilithium. But how long did that take?

Maybe there was a long epic war between the two worlds until eventually Romulus became dominant?

But Cochrane's warp craft was probably just a warp-1 slug, and even with Vulcan help by the time of Enterprise Earth had been on warp 2 (which is also incredibly slow) for a good while, only reaching warp 5 90 years after. And these are 'naturally more inventive and risk taking than most everyone' Trek humans working with a good chunk of the Vulcan body of knowledge.

There's a couple known civilizations that were still on crappy drives for a long long time. Promellians had famous battle cruisers and were apparently well known in there area of space historically speaking, but they used fusion as well. Even the El-Aurians used fusion ships as-of Generations, and they're another species who'd been around for centuries.

Romulans can get FTL on impulse engines, so maybe they were working around that warp-2 speed themselves.

FaxModem1 wrote:Maybe it was dealing with the Remans who had settled Remus, and making them a slave class? Keeping an entire world's population under your thumb who are right on your doorstep is going to require serious commitment. Eventually the Remans became their cannon fodder and producer of dilithium. But how long did that take?

Maybe there was a long epic war between the two worlds until eventually Romulus became dominant?

That seems likely. Possibly not the only long epic war they had, but a war early on will certainly slow the population growth.

Though.... do quantum singularity drives or impulse even use dilithium...? I suppose there must've been *some* use for it but search me if I know what, considering it's primary use we know is controlling M/AM reaction of which the only known Romulan ships to use were the ones they bought from the Klingons! I do dislike Nemesis...

Hm, probably the dilithium crystals only became a factor much later.