IIRC, Voyager had this problem. I’m thinking of Message in a Bottle and Hope and Fear, but it’s been several years since I’ve seen them. Communications with Earth were rare, and mostly involved wormholes or vastly advanced alien communication arrays. That’s why the doctor was uploaded and downloaded, so that he could communicate in real-time, gather information, and return to the ship as a data stream.
When Starfleet had to send a communique to Voyager, they’d compile a bunch of data into a packet to upload from a ship as close to Voyager as they could get. It was never instantaneous, and occasionally garbled.
Hopefully, Aesiron can explain how it works over shorter distances.
Somone on the SDMB worked out the numbers, and even with subspace communications travelling at Warp 9.9999, there would still be a noticable time lag for interstellar communications. The real-time conversations aren’t really possible.
Diceman is right… even at 200,000c, there’ll be an hour lag between Earth and Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor. It’s just something that they hope fans don’t pick up on.
That was me the most recent time. Others have done it in excrushiationg detail. I just copied it from a book. Eventually, I’ll be bored enough to provide the link, right now I’m going to supper.
The first mention of this was in the Blish version of “Tomorrow is Yesterday,” I believe, before the first novel. Makes sense in a way - except that how did the Romulans get to Romulus, very far away even at the time of TOS, from Vulcan without a warp drive?
In that story also he sneakily mentions the Vegan Tyranny from his Cities in Flight books, by the way - preceding Niven adding Kzinti to the animated series.
Diane Duane (author of “Spock’s World”) gets heavily into Romulan backstory in earlier Trek novels, notably “My Enemy, My Ally” and “The Romulan Way”. She described large colony ships with impulse engines leaving Vulcan shortly after Surak’s logic philosophy took hold. The travellers (who already had Vulcanishly long lifespans and benefitted from time dilation) eventually formed the proto-Romulan Empire after a long space journey
One potential glitch with this is that it implies Vulcans had space travel while we were still in the early iron age, and that they should have been immensely more advanced than Earth at the time of first contact. Vulcan might have stagnated (a possibility, since passion and possibly curiosity had been regimented out of them), or maybe all that hostility Archer showed Vulcans (regarding their holding back technologies) in the first season of Enterprise was justified.
And as my breakfast burrito is congealing rapidly, I’ll end on that note.
Well they had to have stagnated, since the technology they gave to Earth after First Contact advanced so far in the next few hundred years. The Romulans must have left a long time ago, since Spock was genuinely surprised at the similarity in Balance of Terror, and I’m not aware of anything that said that the relationship was a well known but closely held secret. If the Vulcans knew, you’d think they’d have told Earth when the Federation was formed.
An even bigger problem was that it is stated that the Earth-Romulan war was fought before warp was developed - obviously impossible, since Earth could not have fought it before First Contact. How does she get around that one?
I’m pretty sure that the warp speed thing was for the Romulans only and not stated explicitly, only implied. I’d have to watch the handful of Romulan TOS episodes to be sure though.
I’ve always thought that there was something odd about the Romulan/Vulcan kinship. Supposedly, the Romulans are a splinter group of Vulcans, but the Romulans have a huge empire that rivals the Federation, while the Vulcans have one sunbaked shithole of a planet.
It would have made more sense if the Vulcans were an offshoot of Romulans.
Not necessarily. Pacficist cultures are nowhere near as expansionist as agressive, warlike cultures.
I’m figuring the one’s who left to become ‘Romulans’ were the one’s who weren’t buying into the whole ‘peace, love and logic’ thing. So the Vulcans who remained behind went into their deep navel-gazing while the Romulan’s went off a-viking they shall go.
Also, a logical culture is less likely to say ‘screw the expense! We want to go NOW’ in terms of spaceflight and expansion. I have visions of Vulcan accountants saying ‘Spaceflight is illogical. Cost-benefit analysis indicates a negative return-on-investment at this time.’
I was going to make the same point as Jonathan Chance but he beat me to it. Instead, I can just point out all the times in our history that offshoot cultures have wound up dominating their motherlands, like US/England and Macedonia/Greece.
I run a sim (online RPG) based on the Diane Duane/Dorothy Fontana interpretation of the Romulans, as cited by Bryan Ekers.
Here’s my thought. Romulans left and several generations later found their twin homeworlds, which they settled, and lived peacefully ever after… until they made contact with the Federation. Stuff happened and eventually the Romulans realized that they were boxed in, sandwiched in between the Klingon and Federation Empires, and hating them both. Imagine Poland, sitting between Germany and Russia, and Poland having the capacity to protect themselves. The Romulans are basically in a losing position, and are hostile about it.
This is my favorite map, personally. Doesn’t really tell you size differences between the different governments but it shows you perspective on how far apart they are and even has other empires that’re usually left out, like the Ferengi Alliance and the Kazon sects.
