Hello, Ric here again and today we’re looking at the pre and early Federation times with
this episode having a focus on the Klingon Empire and its opinion of humanity and the
Federation. The Klingon Imperial Fleet was the collective
name for the entire Klingon Empire’s armada and although a formidable amount of ships
and firepower, they were in fact rather fractured around the time of the Federation’s formation.
It was not until much later on in the timeline, when Starfleet was pushing ever closer to
their boarders and the Klingons had had time to observe the assimilation of multiple cultures
into the UFP, that the Empire unified in opposition to the Federation.
This internal fracturing among houses was generally due to the increase in warrior caste
Klingons. Although in earlier times, the Klingon people had everything a society needed to
grow steadily, in a time of easy conquest for them they began to compete for honour
through combat. Over the generations, younger Klingons followed the examples of those who
came before. As the populous slanted towards greater numbers of restless warriors, the
obsession with glorious combat grew with houses trying to outdo each other.
Klingon ships of the 22nd century were hardy vessels that could achieve warp 6 by the time
of Earth’s NX-01, but this had been a very slow development as most sources claim that
the Klingons obtained warp travel in the 10th century. So over 1000 years of development
only got them to warp 6. Their vessels too had serious security concerns, caused by oversights
and actual exploitable systems, something that would bite them in the butt’leth several
times in their history. Vulcans had tense relations with the Klingons
ever since they destroyed the first Vulcan vessel to encounter them in the H’atoria
system in 2016. In response the Vulcan made sure to fire upon any encountered Klingon
vessel. Soon, in pretty standard Klingon thinking, the Empire identified the Vulcans as more
trouble than they were worth, or perhaps they even grew to begrudgingly respect them somewhat.
Either way, the Klingon aggression against the Vulcans did not persist in to the 22nd
century unless Vulcan ships violated their space. Nonetheless, the Klingons would continue
to sneer at Vulcans and mock their logic, but never really attempt anything aggressive
with them. Starfleet’s first encounter with Klingons
was generally a positive one. Well, I mean Klaang was shot by a farmer, but not fatally
and he was treated at Starfleet medical for his wounds while being protected from Suliban
Cabal agents. While Klaang was probably not too happy about the whole affair, the Enterprise
NX-01 managed to successfully return him to Qo’Nos on its first mission. This resulted
in the completion of Klaang’s charge to deliver intel on the Suliban Cabal to the
High Council concerning their attempted disruptions. This was but one of many pieces of a temporal
cold war that had been waging across multiple times which is a whole ‘nother confusing
mess. The return of Klaang however dishonoured the individual and showed the chief mistake
humanity would continue to make time and time again when dealing with the Klingons. Humans
have their own concept of honour and apply those notions to Klingons, but the two are
not one-to-one compatible. The Enterprise also technically violated Klingon space to
travel to their home world, so the fact they were allowed to leave again was a restrained
action by the Empire. Eventually however, Earth’s first warp 5
vessel was marked as wanted by the Empire for a time, specifically Captain Archer and
attacked often by Klingons. However, these attacks were intermittent and varied in success
showing a lack of a unified effort, again a symptom of the loosely organised nature
of the Empire. There was no singular Klingon Defence Force to manage a coordinated operation
to capture Archer. Eventually, Duras, son of Toral was killed
by the Enterprise crew which would mark the beginning of a strong grudge against humans
in general from the House of Duras in particular. With the prominent number of humans in Starfleet,
the Klingons would adopt the view that the Federation was basically a human organisation.
This was a stereotypical view possessed by a number of other species which persisted
all the way in to the 24th century. It was even mentioned in the pretalks to the Khitomer
accords in 2293 by Chancellor Azetbur that humanity seemed oddly favoured for an organisation
that claimed to preach equality. True or not, Humanity however would go on
to have a rather large influence in Klingon society, a completely unintentional one from
both parties. In 2154, Doctor Arik Soong, obsessed with the augments of Earth’s history
had stolen some of the embryos left over from the Eugenics wars and grown them. These augments
stole a Klingon Bird of prey and killed the entire crew easily. This feat shook the Klingons
more than they let on as suddenly they had notions that this seemingly weak, but meddlesome
race of humans, suddenly had super soldiers. The Klingons began to experiment with their
own augment projects, Antaak, a head scientist obtained some the embryos to use the DNA,
but the initial experiments instead created a super-Levodian flu that began to spread
among the Klingon people, killing them. Trying to contain the situation and keep it secret
so as not to appear weak, a way of thinking that will continue for generations, the Klingons
began to sterilise planets through orbital bombardment. Eventually, a cure was not found
to the augment virus, but it could be rendered into a non-lethal strain which would still
inject human-augment based DNA into the Klingon genome.
This visibly dissolved a Klingon’s cranial ridges causing them to look more human in
appearance. Afflicted Klingons often felt shamed at the appearance (despite not being
treated that differently in Klingon society) and the knowledge that they now contained
human DNA in some form. As a result, the Klingons would evade talking about this topic with
outsiders until the DNA was bred out of future generations and their original appearance
was mostly restored. The Klingons had never been friendly with
the Romulans, skirmishing frequently with their neighbouring Empire and conducting raids
along their border worlds. The Draylax incident in 2155 was a pivotal event in their relations
as the Star Empire developed an intense program that could usurp Klingon security systems
and take complete control of a vessel. Using this, the Romulans used Klingon vessels to
attack the planet Draylax which then had the Coalition of Planets thinking that there would
be a coming wave of Klingon aggression. The Klingons managed to destroy this compromised
vessel but did not explain the situation to the Coalition, again, not wanted to reveal
the exploit in their security. With no explanation forthcoming and Starfleet growing increasingly
riled up by Romuan aggression, the Coalition of Planets was on the verge of declaring the
Klingon Empire as another front in this war. Fortunately, Captain Archer uncovered the
truth in private and war with the Klingons was avoided. Just as well as this would have
weakened both sides while the Romulans sat back and laughed twirling their moustaches.
As it was, when the Earth-Romulan war erupted in earnest, the Klingon Empire was content
to sit back and watch their two rivals fight it out for the most part. Captain Archer overestimated
the amount of influence he had with the Klingons, so when an official request was sent out to
them to ask for aid, the High Council easily turned Starfleet down. Despite this, a token
wing of ships was sent to partake in the Battle of Cheron in 2160 to destroy a Romulan shipyard.
This turned out to be the climatic battle of the war.
When Andoria, Earth, Tellar and Vulcan united to form the United Federation of Planets in
2161, the Klingons became wary of this new power. For the most part, the two governments
simply watched one another for decades, but the tension was continually building as the
Federation expanded, inching closer to Klingon space. It’s hard to pinpoint an exact start
to the Federation-Klingon cold war as several stories paint hostility erupting in 2218 and
2223. The latter date seems more likely as Spock in 2293 mentions the end to 70 years
of hostility between the Federation and Klingon Empire with the signing of the Khitomer Accords.
As is apparent repeatedly in Klingon history, they are very defensive of their territory
and aggressively raid beyond their borders. This has bought them into numerous skirmishes
with almost every species at some point, but their lack of unity prevented them from being
a true threat. On top of this, they placed very little faith in diplomacy and would refuse
to divulge information willingly, even when it would alleviate conflict. After all, a
warrior actively seeks out battle, don’t they? Well, a smart one doesn’t, but like
I said, the disproportionate warrior caste was a problem as much for Klingons as their
neighbours. All the actions Starfleet did in an attempt
to aid the Klingon empire were done from a position of little understanding of their
culture and the results often had the Klingons split on whether to be angry or grateful.
And probably angry that they should be grateful, because it’s shameful for a Klingon. So
inevitably, war would occur numerous times between the Federation and the Klingon Empire,
but there were also times of peace in the face of a common adversary that make the Klingons
a mixed bag when it comes to relations to the UFP.
Thanks for watching this video on the early times of the Federation, I’ve got a couple
of books incoming that cover more of this era so hopefully I’ll be able to bring you
some more apocryphal content to flesh out this time period. If only we got seasons 5-7
of Enterprise. Until then, thanks again, I’ve been Ric and until the next video, may you
earn glory in combat! Or something.