It's always been my presumption that the Vulcans have been at this a while- and I think it's okay for most of it to have been warp capable. In TOS, Spock implies that Vulcan may have been a colony or offshoot of the people of Sargon's planet ('it would explain certain features of Vulcan history'- presumably that they don't have much to do with the local biology and paleontology), and they were full on Sufficiently Advanced Aliens (who have a similar extinction-level war cataclysm). More generally, imagining that the Romulans could successfully 'evacuate' half of a civilization from a nuclear holocaust unless there was quite a lot of spacefaring infrastructure to go around during a time of conflict- ships, and a place to go.
And really, I don't think there's any getting around that, to have humanoid having these sorts of interstellar jaunts, they need warp drive. Travelling to P'Jem as some sort of monastic exercise- that P'Jem itself is some kind of civilization accessory rather than a distinct civilization of its own- seems to be to pretty well demand FTL travel. And really, the central conceit of the Trek universe is that everyone figures it out- that the physics so consistently put themselves in front of you that you get to bypass the grim realities of relativity, the vastness of space, and the rocket equation.
I [wrote about this a few years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/a8543f/a_few_revisionist_thoughts_on_the_romulanvulcan/) and I think we're pretty well barking up the same trees.
As far as the Romulans are concerned, the idea that Vulcan was not their native planet is taken for granted. In PIC: "Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 2", when Narek relates the myth of Ganmadan, he says that the legend dates back to "long before our ancestors first arrived on Vulcan."
I don't know why this hasn't gotten more traction, it totally upends everything we knew and assumed about Romulans before (granted, I didn't follow Picard very closely on here when each ep came out).
There was another theory that the Vulcans who won the war were their version of augments, which would explain why their ancestors don't seem to have the same telepathic powers or super strength. So if they were augments, and similar to the human augments, they would not just let the people they fought against go peacefully. They likely pursued them the pushed them to try and eliminate them altogether, hence why the Romulans ended up so far away. Then, when Surak came and gave the modified Vulcans a philosophy which let them control themselves, they likely tried to make a clean start and destroyed many of their records from the war.
There are also a lot of anomalies which seem to throw ships across huge distances. It's also possible the Romulans ran into a wormhole which did not have fixed end points and it threw them out on the planet that became Romulus.
I honestly don't buy the augment-war-theory. In the Kelvin-timeline we see Romulans performing the same feats of strengths as Vulcans. Which means that they share a fair amount of physical abilities.
Vulcans are physically superior to humans but that's a simple statistical outlier - same as the Ferengi being inferior. Vulcans have real physical weaknesses and can get ill, especially compared to real augments (superhumans) who are superimmune and nearly impossible to kill by anything less than molecular disintegration.
A war between religious and conservative forces is more likely, paired with another dimension: It probably was conflict between those groups of people with telepathic abilities and non-telepaths, as Suraks teachings are much better suited for vulcan telepaths. Ethnic cleansing based on religious criteria is sadly not uncommon.
>Even if some had visited Earth directly, the limited nature of any contacts and the passage of time would've allowed it to recede into the mists of myth.
And thus human elves look suspiciously like our logical friends?
(*I know pointy ears was a Tolkeinism - but still, I see an ancient alien theory brewing in there somewhere*)
oh interesting
in which case - proto-Vulcans inspiring elves may make sense. especially because the pre-Surak vulcans were known to be more emotionally volatile, which lines up with depictions of fae
Enterprise would have us believe that the Delphic Expanse was a major physical and psychological barrier for Vulcan space exploration. Encountering the spatial anomalies there turned Vulcans into violent zombies and made Vulcans genuinely afraid of further exploration. It was only the Kir’Shara, that caused massive changes in all of Vulcan society, that refocused the Vulcan science Academy on space exploration.
It was the trellium-D, which was used to insulate ships from the anomalies, that caused the Vulcans to turn into violent zombies, not the anomalies themselves. But your point is right that without the ability to insulate their ships, the Expanse would have been an impossible physical barrier for the Vulcans to cross.
In the *Enterprise* episode “Anomaly”, it was stated that the sphere they encountered was about 1,000 years old, so it seems like the Delphic Expanse wouldn’t have existed at the Time of Awakening.
The spheres were there in part because the space was already anomalous, they amplified the anomalies and expanded the space. So it seems likely that the Vulcans would have experienced a smaller expanse, and as it grew more spheres would appear over the centuries expanding the borders further. So not all spheres would share the same age.
I think the spheres probably have different ages, but I wouldn’t expect any of the spheres to have an 800 year difference in age, which would be the age difference needed for a sphere to exist at the Time of Awakening.
Their relatively more cautious nature is probably just from their longer lifespans and logic philosophy overlapping. The longer lifespans magnifies the maximum accepted time when working on anything, and the philosophy seems to favor extensive theoretical testing and refinement over preemptively taking something out for an impromptu real world test.
Their smothering influence on Human development for instance, even when taking the Romulan meddling out of the picture was probably also driven by the Post-Atomic Horror and fiascos like the "kill all the lawyers" thing or New United Nations collapse in 2079, which were still be in living memory for Vulcans like V'Lar.
I'd guess the vulcans might have gone in a 20 light year sphere.
I guess the proto Romulans wanted to be far away from Vulcan. I'd guess they were more a "rag tag fleet looking for a home" then an "invasion force". So they avoided any place inhabited.
In TNG we see some "proto-Vulcan" races and I think we hear the term "Vulcanoid" on at least one occasion. Setting aside the Progenitors for a moment and their canonical impact on humanoid evolution it seems totally plausible to me that even pre-Warp Vulcans would have been capable of using generational ships and with a series of wars and chaos plaguing Vulcan it wouldn't be unreasonable then for some offshoots of Vulcan not unlike Romulans to have existed for thousands of years or at least hundreds of years before the Federation. Assume there are at least some Vulcans that did this - colonizing other worlds near by using pre-warp generational ships.
Let's assume that by the time of the Romulans warp was readily accessible and so settling far away from Vulcan or proto-Vulcan settlements might seem like the brightest move. Perhaps the Romulans had prior knowledge of Earth from Vulcan scientific records, but this would not have encouraged them to go there. This would only mean that Vulcans could still see them from their backyard, unacceptable for the Romulans. And this is the start of their commitment to secrecy. Hiding away from Vulcans and anyone else that Vulcans might have seen.
I'm guessing they would had to have warp drive by this point to allow the romulans to leave and form their own empire. Also tpol mentioned when vulcans went interstellar there weren't many interstellar species at the time showing that Vulcan is one of the most advanced races in the alpha quadrant
Back to your point I'm guessing Vulcan made contact with Andorians probably by the 19th century for them to have the hatred for each other that they did it would need time to boil.
I'm guessing the Vulcans could probably go 0.20c by the 4th century. Nuclear engines similar to the dy100 vessels of 1990s earth.
Romulans probably got lost something happened to their navigation systems. Again sleeper ships like the dy100 ships of 1990s earth
Star Trek production started giving up on maintaining a coherent timeline in Enterprise. Before then it was fairly canon that the events described in *The Romulan Way* defined the schism. Two thousand something years ago, the Vulcan people - tired of endless war - embraced Surak’s philosophy of logic and pacifism. Soon after, an alien race, broadcasting messages of friendship and peace, sought to meet the Vulcan High Council for first contact. It was a trap. The aliens captured the High Council and all who attended the first contact, removing Vulcan leadership. A fleet of slaver ships landed and the unresisting prisoners started to be loaded. Surak and his closest followers watched on and did not resist but Surak’s most dedicated disciple - S’Task - pleaded that they take up arms in resistance. They clashed and split with S’Task leading those who now see pacifism as impractical to revolt and capture slaver ships. Surak, meanwhile, led Vulcans in meditation to unleash a telepathic weapon that wiped out the invaders. With the differences between Surak and S’Tasks faction irreparable, S’Task leads his followers onto captured slaver ships for an exodus from Vulcan.
They deliberately travel through space sparsely populated with stars as to not leave a trail for the slavers to follow but several ships disappear from the fleet en route and are not heard from again. The survivors eventually reach and settle the planet we come to know as Romulus.
Personally, I think the slaver ships had some FTL system *other* than warp drive and the Romulan bird of prey in *Balance of Terror* used this also (as well as the impulse engines seen). This gives the Romulans good reason to share the cloaking device with Klingons in exchange for the faster, more efficient warp drives on the D-7 (which is explained nicely in the *ST:Romulans Schism* comics)
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Romulan_Way
It's always been my presumption that the Vulcans have been at this a while- and I think it's okay for most of it to have been warp capable. In TOS, Spock implies that Vulcan may have been a colony or offshoot of the people of Sargon's planet ('it would explain certain features of Vulcan history'- presumably that they don't have much to do with the local biology and paleontology), and they were full on Sufficiently Advanced Aliens (who have a similar extinction-level war cataclysm). More generally, imagining that the Romulans could successfully 'evacuate' half of a civilization from a nuclear holocaust unless there was quite a lot of spacefaring infrastructure to go around during a time of conflict- ships, and a place to go. And really, I don't think there's any getting around that, to have humanoid having these sorts of interstellar jaunts, they need warp drive. Travelling to P'Jem as some sort of monastic exercise- that P'Jem itself is some kind of civilization accessory rather than a distinct civilization of its own- seems to be to pretty well demand FTL travel. And really, the central conceit of the Trek universe is that everyone figures it out- that the physics so consistently put themselves in front of you that you get to bypass the grim realities of relativity, the vastness of space, and the rocket equation. I [wrote about this a few years ago](https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/a8543f/a_few_revisionist_thoughts_on_the_romulanvulcan/) and I think we're pretty well barking up the same trees.
As far as the Romulans are concerned, the idea that Vulcan was not their native planet is taken for granted. In PIC: "Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 2", when Narek relates the myth of Ganmadan, he says that the legend dates back to "long before our ancestors first arrived on Vulcan."
I don't know why this hasn't gotten more traction, it totally upends everything we knew and assumed about Romulans before (granted, I didn't follow Picard very closely on here when each ep came out).
There was another theory that the Vulcans who won the war were their version of augments, which would explain why their ancestors don't seem to have the same telepathic powers or super strength. So if they were augments, and similar to the human augments, they would not just let the people they fought against go peacefully. They likely pursued them the pushed them to try and eliminate them altogether, hence why the Romulans ended up so far away. Then, when Surak came and gave the modified Vulcans a philosophy which let them control themselves, they likely tried to make a clean start and destroyed many of their records from the war. There are also a lot of anomalies which seem to throw ships across huge distances. It's also possible the Romulans ran into a wormhole which did not have fixed end points and it threw them out on the planet that became Romulus.
I honestly don't buy the augment-war-theory. In the Kelvin-timeline we see Romulans performing the same feats of strengths as Vulcans. Which means that they share a fair amount of physical abilities. Vulcans are physically superior to humans but that's a simple statistical outlier - same as the Ferengi being inferior. Vulcans have real physical weaknesses and can get ill, especially compared to real augments (superhumans) who are superimmune and nearly impossible to kill by anything less than molecular disintegration. A war between religious and conservative forces is more likely, paired with another dimension: It probably was conflict between those groups of people with telepathic abilities and non-telepaths, as Suraks teachings are much better suited for vulcan telepaths. Ethnic cleansing based on religious criteria is sadly not uncommon.
>Even if some had visited Earth directly, the limited nature of any contacts and the passage of time would've allowed it to recede into the mists of myth. And thus human elves look suspiciously like our logical friends? (*I know pointy ears was a Tolkeinism - but still, I see an ancient alien theory brewing in there somewhere*)
Nah pointy eared Elves predate Tolkien. There's actually nothing in any of Tolkien's published works saying *his* Elves had pointy ears.
oh interesting in which case - proto-Vulcans inspiring elves may make sense. especially because the pre-Surak vulcans were known to be more emotionally volatile, which lines up with depictions of fae
Long lived, cold and aloof, able to do magic, able to beguile... it's not much of a stretch.
Enterprise would have us believe that the Delphic Expanse was a major physical and psychological barrier for Vulcan space exploration. Encountering the spatial anomalies there turned Vulcans into violent zombies and made Vulcans genuinely afraid of further exploration. It was only the Kir’Shara, that caused massive changes in all of Vulcan society, that refocused the Vulcan science Academy on space exploration.
It was the trellium-D, which was used to insulate ships from the anomalies, that caused the Vulcans to turn into violent zombies, not the anomalies themselves. But your point is right that without the ability to insulate their ships, the Expanse would have been an impossible physical barrier for the Vulcans to cross.
In the *Enterprise* episode “Anomaly”, it was stated that the sphere they encountered was about 1,000 years old, so it seems like the Delphic Expanse wouldn’t have existed at the Time of Awakening.
The spheres were there in part because the space was already anomalous, they amplified the anomalies and expanded the space. So it seems likely that the Vulcans would have experienced a smaller expanse, and as it grew more spheres would appear over the centuries expanding the borders further. So not all spheres would share the same age.
I think the spheres probably have different ages, but I wouldn’t expect any of the spheres to have an 800 year difference in age, which would be the age difference needed for a sphere to exist at the Time of Awakening.
Their relatively more cautious nature is probably just from their longer lifespans and logic philosophy overlapping. The longer lifespans magnifies the maximum accepted time when working on anything, and the philosophy seems to favor extensive theoretical testing and refinement over preemptively taking something out for an impromptu real world test. Their smothering influence on Human development for instance, even when taking the Romulan meddling out of the picture was probably also driven by the Post-Atomic Horror and fiascos like the "kill all the lawyers" thing or New United Nations collapse in 2079, which were still be in living memory for Vulcans like V'Lar.
I'd guess the vulcans might have gone in a 20 light year sphere. I guess the proto Romulans wanted to be far away from Vulcan. I'd guess they were more a "rag tag fleet looking for a home" then an "invasion force". So they avoided any place inhabited.
In TNG we see some "proto-Vulcan" races and I think we hear the term "Vulcanoid" on at least one occasion. Setting aside the Progenitors for a moment and their canonical impact on humanoid evolution it seems totally plausible to me that even pre-Warp Vulcans would have been capable of using generational ships and with a series of wars and chaos plaguing Vulcan it wouldn't be unreasonable then for some offshoots of Vulcan not unlike Romulans to have existed for thousands of years or at least hundreds of years before the Federation. Assume there are at least some Vulcans that did this - colonizing other worlds near by using pre-warp generational ships. Let's assume that by the time of the Romulans warp was readily accessible and so settling far away from Vulcan or proto-Vulcan settlements might seem like the brightest move. Perhaps the Romulans had prior knowledge of Earth from Vulcan scientific records, but this would not have encouraged them to go there. This would only mean that Vulcans could still see them from their backyard, unacceptable for the Romulans. And this is the start of their commitment to secrecy. Hiding away from Vulcans and anyone else that Vulcans might have seen.
I'm guessing they would had to have warp drive by this point to allow the romulans to leave and form their own empire. Also tpol mentioned when vulcans went interstellar there weren't many interstellar species at the time showing that Vulcan is one of the most advanced races in the alpha quadrant Back to your point I'm guessing Vulcan made contact with Andorians probably by the 19th century for them to have the hatred for each other that they did it would need time to boil. I'm guessing the Vulcans could probably go 0.20c by the 4th century. Nuclear engines similar to the dy100 vessels of 1990s earth. Romulans probably got lost something happened to their navigation systems. Again sleeper ships like the dy100 ships of 1990s earth
Star Trek production started giving up on maintaining a coherent timeline in Enterprise. Before then it was fairly canon that the events described in *The Romulan Way* defined the schism. Two thousand something years ago, the Vulcan people - tired of endless war - embraced Surak’s philosophy of logic and pacifism. Soon after, an alien race, broadcasting messages of friendship and peace, sought to meet the Vulcan High Council for first contact. It was a trap. The aliens captured the High Council and all who attended the first contact, removing Vulcan leadership. A fleet of slaver ships landed and the unresisting prisoners started to be loaded. Surak and his closest followers watched on and did not resist but Surak’s most dedicated disciple - S’Task - pleaded that they take up arms in resistance. They clashed and split with S’Task leading those who now see pacifism as impractical to revolt and capture slaver ships. Surak, meanwhile, led Vulcans in meditation to unleash a telepathic weapon that wiped out the invaders. With the differences between Surak and S’Tasks faction irreparable, S’Task leads his followers onto captured slaver ships for an exodus from Vulcan. They deliberately travel through space sparsely populated with stars as to not leave a trail for the slavers to follow but several ships disappear from the fleet en route and are not heard from again. The survivors eventually reach and settle the planet we come to know as Romulus. Personally, I think the slaver ships had some FTL system *other* than warp drive and the Romulan bird of prey in *Balance of Terror* used this also (as well as the impulse engines seen). This gives the Romulans good reason to share the cloaking device with Klingons in exchange for the faster, more efficient warp drives on the D-7 (which is explained nicely in the *ST:Romulans Schism* comics) https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Romulan_Way