Jolan Tru, T’Ric here, This is another video exploring the pre-Federation times, based
on the apocryphal content of the era, specifically concerning the Romulan War and the Star Empire
tactics during this early time. Starfleet and the coalition of planets did not do so
great. I’ve already mentioned how the Vulcans immediately chose to recluse themselves from
the conflicts, instead focusing on support. This put the greater strain on Tellar and
Andoria to pick up the slack all the while, Starfleet was the primary target and human
colonies the focus of most of the Romulan’s attacks.
The Vulcan’s had supplied a warp detection grid around Coalition colonies, but this really
didn’t help as within months of their deployment, the Romulans had found a way to circumnavigate
these in a strategy so conniving, so dastardly, that no Vulcan, Human, Adorian or Tellarite
discovered it, for eight months. The Romulans, didn’t approach the warp detection grid,
at warp speeds! Dun-dun-duuun. Just, veering away for a sec, this is a really odd choice
as a story beat as I think it makes the coalition look really dumb. Like, how do you avoid a
speed camera? You slow down. How are the romulans avoiding our warp detection grid? They’re
not using warp. It’s literally the first thing that occurs, surely?
Anyway, The Romulans would routinely approach a defended colony world at warp, outside of
its detection grid in a larger carrier vessel. Then they would drop out of warp out of range
of the detection field and deploy sublight fighters. These tiny ships, often only one
or two crew would then approach the grid and systematically begin to disable it enough
to open a hole. Their work done, they’d return to the mothership which would then
warp on through to the home colony. This gave a slight warning in the form of a destabilisation
of the grid, but it was far more subtle than setting it all off and was still enough of
an advantage for the Romulans to close in on their target before a defence could be
scrambled. The other tactic was to simply coast across
in powered-down warbirds. This tactic is later repeated by the warbird that turns up in TOS,
“Balance of Terror” by a warp-less T’Liss vessel. This sort of stealth attack resulted
in successful ambushes against unprepared colonies at Tarod IX, Deneva, Threllvia IV,
Brenengaria and Altair VI. After these repeated failures, Starfleet pulled back some ships
including the Enterprise to conduct tests at infiltrating Earth’s detection grid.
It was Malcolm Reed who first realised that you could stealthily approach the detection
grid satellites and deactivate them. Just in time to as two days later, March 10th 2156,
the detection grid around Andoria fluctuated in the same way and sure enough…Romulans
had reached Andor. A defence was mobilised and discovered the
Romulans in the act of making a hole in the grid, so the Star Empire ships abandoned stealth
and warped passed the perimeter guard to attack Andoria. On top of this, the Romulans then
managed to successfully deploy their remote hijacking weapon on an NX class starship,
the zero three, Challenger. This was the first successful hijacking of such as vessel and
until now, Starfleet had assumed its vessels resistant to such a takeover. The Romulans
used the Challenger alongside their mothership to lock on to Andorian cities, so the NX-03
self-destructed, taking out the Romuluan ship too to protect their allied planet. This left
earth with only two NX ships. Earlier in the war, November 8th 2155, the
new NX-04 Discovery responded to the sneak attack on Brenengaria and their destruction
of Starbase 1. The Romulans here had deployed a second tactic, one first alluded to by Spock
in Balance of Terror, that of the deployment of an atomic weapon. Now, starship hulls are
made from duranium which is easily able to resist a nuclear blast. On top of this, they
are insulated against background radiation, so nukes are pretty much outdated weapons.
What they could do however, was blind vessels temporarily like a flashbang. Unlike a plasma
or photon torpedo, a drifting nuclear device was hard to detect and no bigger than space
debris that navigational deflectors could sweep aside. It was innocuous enough to make
it very close to a vessel. So the Romulans would let one drift towards an enemy ship,
while facing off against them, then remotely detonate it when it was right in front of
the vessel. Such an EM-charged explosion would white-out the sensors of a vessel for a few
seconds, leaving them unable to then target the smaller and more manoeuvrable fighters
as they cut the target apart. So that is what happened to the Discovery.
As for the hijacking weapon, this took a really long time to counter and resulted in the loss
of many ships across the coalition. Generally, the tactic from the Romulans was to see what
ship they were engaging and if it wasn’t Starfleet, they didn’t have to worry. One
transmitted code later and the enemy vessel’s main computer was slaved to the attacking
warbird. From there, if they had time, they could shutdown life support then board the
vessel to capture it or use it to attack others. Often however, with the last actions, a “telecaptured”
ship would self-destruct. This was the fate of the Tellarite vessel, TCS Miracht at the
battle of Deneva in 2155 and the Andorian Imperial Guard ship, the Ka’Thelan Krotus
near the Threllvia system. In the background to all this was the race
for a warp 7 engine with the Romulans hard at work across several worlds to develop a
faster vessel. On the subject matter of vessels, Starfleet’s main ships of this time were
the NX-class, which were lost at a faster rate than they could be built, the warp deltas
which were only really suitable for patrols and the ageing Daedalus and Intrepid classes.
Construction of the Intrepid had ceased with the launch of the NX-01, and the Daedalus
was too slow to really respond to the Romulan ambush tactics. However construction of the
older vessel was three times less resource intensive than a single NX, so Starfleet shipyards
constantly churned them out. So Starfleet had a dilemma. Spend time making
the more effective NX classes, or churn out cannon fodder at a faster rate in order to
more ships. This was the status quo for the first four months of the war. Right up until
some bright spark thought, hey, why can’t we just tweak the Daedalus to hold an NX style
warp core? Again, stellar thinking on behalf of Starfleet, only took them four months to
think about that work around and a further four to implement it. It’s amazing humans
aren’t all speaking Romulan by Kirk’s era.
So yeah, in the early skirmishes, Starfleet wasn’t doing so great, at least as depicted
in the Romulan War series of books. However a lot of this seems to be based on its own
behaviour. Not, adapting fast enough to the Romulan tactics, not creating adequate counters
or taking the offensive and being generally slow on the uptake. Contrast this to the Star
Empire that alongside being the aggressors, were constantly leveraging weaknesses of the
Coalition, and only perfected their tactics the longer the holes remained unplugged.
Thanks for watching this video on Romulan strategy during the Earth-Romulan War, and
I look forwards to producing more breakdowns of extra canonical stories that not everyone
has experienced. So thanks again, things are almost back to normal in terms of video production
here so until next time, goodbye!