The Klingons have an empire, so I presume they’ve gone around conquering star systems and things. What happens to the people they conquer?
-FrL-
In the Original series there was several examples. They demanded obedience and if anyone acted up they would slay a hundred in retaliation.
The Klingons originally served as a surrogate for the Soviet Union. The Feds & Klingons were effectively in a cold war.
The Organian Episode shows the Klingons at their most brutal if I recall correctly.
Jim
The same reason any nation ever conquers another - resources. The Klingons would go around looking for planets rich in dilithium crystals or arable land or some other commodity, and take over. If there happened to be intelligent life there already, they’d put them to work mining or farming or whatever. Just look at their most feared prison asteroid, Rura Penthe (ST VI: The Undiscovered Country). It’s a dilithium mine. Also, I bet some of these conquered planets became factory planets, processing material from other parts of the empire and manufacturing whatever the empire needed.
Ditto with the Romulan Empire. So far as I could tell, they only had one planet and I don’t recall their ever being a non-romulan shown who was a citizen of the empire.
That is the episode where Kirk shoots a Klingon with his phaser on “stun” and the guy falls of a fifty foot tower. 
Cardassians too. (With the exception of the Bajorans who were created for one episode and, when Ensign Ro became popular enough to give her her own series, they immediately gained their liberty.)
This always ticked me off – if these three empires really spend all these resources conquering and colonizing other planets, why don’t we ever see any subject of the empires who isn’t a member of the ruling race?
–Cliffy
For some of the conquered it is a good deal.
From “A private little War” TOS
A Klingon speaking to “Apella” a local chieftain,
"You will be rich one day Apella, beyond your dreams a ruler of an entire world. a governor in the Klingon empire".
I guess the locals run things on some level.
Yeah, you figure the Klingons would respect brutality and harshness in their captives, and reward it where it could be turned to their ends.
The Romulan home system includes two planets, Romulus and Remus. ( :rolleyes: ) The Romulans are descendants of Vulcan colonists, the Remans are an indigenous sapient species, conquered and enslaved by the Romulans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reman
I understand your rolleyes but remember that Romulus and Remus is the terran name of their planets not the “Romulan’s” name.
Think about the US using Japan and Italy or Turin. Similar concept.
Jim {Live long and Prosper}
With regard to the Klingons . . . Well, in TOS they were just bandits and conquerors, very like the humans of the piratical Terran Empire in the “Mirror, Mirror” universe. In TNG, with the introduction of Whorf, a sympathetic Klingon character, and the eventual development of plots where the Federation got involved in Klingon internal politics . . . The Klingons had to be re-imagined as having noble and honorable characteristics; a martial, conflict-obsessed culture, but not necessarily an inherently evil or greedy one. (The Ferengi were introduced to fill that role.)
Actually, the Ferengi were supposed to be the new big threat to the Federation. However, the viewers found them so comical that they had to come up with Cardassians and the Borg instead.
This is too easy: Whatever they want.
Seriously, to pick up on an earlier post, what ticked me off was how the Romulans were screwed over in ST:TNG and how the Klingons were raised up. Originally there were strong “Roman” aspects to Romulan culture. They were harsh, brutal, obsessed with conquest, but fundamentally highly intelligent with a strong sense of honor.
Klingons were Vikings – Warlike, unforgiving, brutal, but with an honorable respect for strength.
There is NO reason they had to diddle with this, but no, they elevated the Klingons and s4at on the Romulans.
The Rhinansu will rise again!
As to the “empires”, at least with the Klingons and Cardassians we saw some of the subject peoples (or vassals/collaborators) relatively early in their introduction. With the Romulans, the writers only come up with the Remans by the time of Nemesis.
It could be that any of the referenced Empires would be relatively low on whole-subjugated-nation “colonies” and instead rely on nominally sovereign vassal-states and “enclave” trading-post or military-base “colonies” (a-la Singapore or HongKong). Or just have resettlement colonies of their own ethnicity a-la-Australia. In any case, you’d mostly see only the dominant group if, as the Eenterprise crew does, you are mostly dealing with elite units of the other fleet or with government officials. If the modern-day Enterprise visited a Chinese port-of-call, the crew on liberty would see a whole damn lot of Han Chinese, but would have to look hard to pick out Tibetans or Uighurs. And never mind any among the PLA Admiralty having meetings with the American Officers.
Also, an “empire” need not be colonial. Japan’s polity was styled “Empire” in Western languages even before it gained non-Japanese subject nations and is still styled so. Or rather, Western linguists figured that the best word for “Tennou” was “Emperor” (probably because of the use of stylings of address and reference similar to the ruler of China, which IS an “empire” in the conventional sense). So you can have “Empire” be used as a translation of a styling that the nation in question gives itself to convey a sense of might, or of divine annointment.
As mentioned before, with Worf around, and an incipient Klingon fandom already underway from the movies, that’s where the writers saw the room for development. Also, harkening back to the TOS 1960s vision of the Klingons as the “Reds”, the later writers were probably caught up in a sort of “oh, if only we could really understand each other we’d bith see the other has many worthy qualities, let’s run with that idea” groove. And who better to exemplify that than the Biggest Baddest antagonists from the Kirk age.
In the case of the Romulans, TNG really dropped the ball by implying that an eventual happy ending would come where the R’s will become more like Vulcans again (ending of “Unification”). That was weak.
Wrong on both counts. The Bajorans (and Maquis) were invented specifically for DS9 and even though Kira Nerys was created to replace Ro Laren when Michelle Forbes turned down the contract, Deep Space Nine was never intended to be “her” series.
Correct. The (non-canon but generally accepted) name for their own species is Rihannsu and their homeworlds are ch’Rihan and ch’Havran. Romulus and Remus (and Vulcan) is just the English name for their planets following in our tradition of naming planets after figures of Roman mythology.
What do Klingons do with Conquered People?
… Bernaise sauce.
It is possible that the Star Trek universe is full of Class M planets that have no important intelligent life. In that case, the Romulan Empire might be sixteen (or sixty or six hundred) planets all with Romulans on the top of the food chain.
We’ve had enough mention of colonies belonging to all the major groups in Trek that there may not be that many subjugated races in the Empires that surround the Federation.
Alternatively the conquest of other lesser species by the Empires may end in their annihilation so their planets may be used for settlement by one race only.
Not what I’ve read, but I certainly don’t give enough of a shit about it to get in a fight with you.
–Cliffy
Technically, I believe the Romulans and Remans were both descended from Vulcan colonists. However, only the planet Remus had rich deposits of dilithium. As a result of the Empire’s extensive and environmentally unsafe mining practices, Remus eventually became a toxic wasteland, while the descendants of the miners mutated over time into the ass-ugly Morlock/Nosferatu (Mosferocktu?) offshoot species of Picard’s day. Note however that they still retain the pointy ears of their Romulan heritage. And at least they’ve evolved beyond their ancestors’ racial predilection for unflattering bowl haircuts.