Earth is considered by many in the Alpha Quadrant to be the “capital” of the United Federation
of Planets. It’s the location for both the Federation council and Starfleet Headquarters
as well as the main Academy facility. Because of this, the direction of the UFP has always
been closely tied to the development of humanity, ever since its formation in 2161. But what’s
often overlooked is the influence that Vulcan has had on the organisations over time. As
the first species encountered by mankind after humanity attained warp travel, the Vulcan’s
have had as much time in the development in Starfleet and the UFP as humans and many of
these influences remain in later eras of Trek. Hi Ric here and I’m putting together a short
series of analysis videos based on the lore surrounding early Starfleet leading up to
the founding of the Federation. These are going to be rather short ones focused on a
particular topic, beginning with the influence Vulcan had on early Starfleet.
The Warp programme originated with Zephram Cochrane and continued to evolve through the
exploits and experiments of people like Doctor Henry Archer. Throughout the 2140s, the Vulcans
observed these experiments but preached caution and restraint to the chagrin of many. There
was a general belief among many Vulcans that humans were too impulsive and irresponsible
for their rate of development and the United Earth generally accepted the advice of their
Vulcan neighbours. After all, humanity by the time of the Warp 5 programme, had yet
to really explore beyond the nearby systems except for travel along already established
trade routes and some mixed-success colonisation efforts. In contrast, the Vulcans had been
a spacefaring civilization for the last 350 years or so and already had vessels capable
of easily reaching warp 7. To give further comparison for humanity’s
perceived recklessness, it took Starfleet around 40 years to make it from warp 1 to
2, while Vulcans took over 100 years. Cargo ships were soon running warp 2 engines while
Starfleet booted up the Warp 5 program only a decade or two later in 2119. Warp three
was then achieved in 2144 and the NX-01 launched in 2151.
The Vulcan’s despite this, occasionally offered guidance in the development of humanity’s
technology, but were very careful never to simply give away their tech. As a result,
Starfleet developed a different standardised warp profile for its vessels based on the
more common twin-nacelle design as opposed to the Vulcan’s preferred warp ring. The
reason for the careful nature of the Vulcans was due to their non-interference policy.
This law prevented them from interfering in local affairs of others and causing potentially
unforeseen consequences, for example, in 2053, World War Three was winding down on Earth
and the Vulcans observed but stayed clear. Imagine their surprise when only a decade
later, the T’Plana-Hath scout ship detected a warp signature in the Sol System. Actually
considering this, it adds even more to the Vulcan’s distrust of humans, as far as they
were concerned, humanity had just been nuking each other a few years ago and now they were
space-born. Great. Anyway, as humanity began to find its way
further and further out, it needed to rely on the Vulcans occasionally, although Captain
Archer of the Enterprise was wary of leaning too hevily on Vulcan support as a matter of
pride and principle. Saying that, the NX-01 did have a copy of the Vulcan exploratory
Database in its computer core although it was overseen by the High Command liaison,
Sub Commander T’Pol. So much of its early data was useful in encounters with other species,
and the Enterprise would frequently visit locations that had already been catalogued
by the Vulcans simply because humans hadn’t been there yet. They were even able to add
some missed data for their allies. The most common resource that the Enterprise
relied on were the set of Vulcan navigational star charts which catalogued vast areas of
space. Because of this heavy reliance on Vulcan data, several pieces of terminology carried
over into Starfleet vernacular such as the planetary classification system. In trek,
an M-class world is an acceptably habitable world for human life and the M comes from
the Vulcan word “Minshara”. Minshara was another name for Vulcan according to some
sources, so saying a planet was Minshara-class was effectively saying it was “Earth-like”.
It wasn’t long before early Starfleet explorers realised the need and wisdom behind adopting
a level of non-interference to both curtail potential abuse of less-advanced civilisations
and protect from unintended contamination, cultural or literal. As a result, Starfleet
soon began figuring out some rough guidelines based on the Vulcan’s own non-interference
policy. With the founding of the Federation in 2161, this directive was finalised and
written in to Federation law alongside the operational version in Starfleet, as subsets
of the Prime Directive. As with the Vulcan policy, technological level
would be a guiding factor in the meeting of a new species. The Vulcan’s had long decided
that they should remain away from other worlds unless they developed faster than light travel.
A very logical approach, observe a species and let them evolve naturally until it’s
inevitable that they’ll begin to meet alien cultures. This is what guided the Vulcan’s
first contact with humanity and it was one Starfleet would mirror. There are some differences
though, for example, exceptions are made for the detection of other forms of advanced technology.
According to apocryphal content the Trill for example, developed subspace radio before
warp and therefore were aware of and in communication with other cultures before they became an
interstellar power. Also other species such as the Klingons did not have such laws and
often raided primitive worlds so again, in these cases the Prime Directive was a little
more flexible. This relationship with the Vulcans was a two
sided affair though as humanity was instrumental in the return of the Kir’shara which led
to the Vulcan Reformation in 2154, one of the many elements which lead to the Earth-Romulan
war. Unbeknownst to both the Vulcan High Command and Starfleet however, the High Command had
been under the sway of Romulan operatives for quite some time which in no small part
accounted for some of the Vulcan’s cynical and suspicious behaviour towards other powers,
including to a limited extent, humanity. Even before this however, humanity had been
doing its best to mediate the tensions between Vulcan and Andoria, two neighbouring powers
that had been engaged in a territorial dispute for a century. By bringing these local powers
to the negotiating table, Earth was rapidly shaking things up and making quite the entrance
to the interstellar stage, but that will be a plot thread picked up in the next video.
Over the next two centuries, the Vulcans, alongside humans would become one of the most
prolific species in Starfleet’s ranks, eventually going all in with this Federation alliance.
As with all Federation worlds, they maintained their own organisations but even these enjoyed
great levels of influence among the others with even entire Starfleet vessels dedicated
to all-Vulcan crews. Sufficed to say, like many of Starfleet’s early relationships,
the Vulcan’s began on rocky-terms with humans, but soon became one of, if not the staunchest
of allies. In current era Starfleet, the Vulcans have
spent decades contributing vastly in the avenues of science, philosophy, medicine and their
educational institutes are considered some of the best around. Almost every Starfleet
ship has several Vulcans serving on it and I’m sure it’s nothing to do with the ease
of applying the prosthetics. Thanks for watching the first part in this
series of early Star Trek lore, I’m hoping to be able to produce a lot of these smaller
elements so I have something to release while things are hectic here so if you have a topic
you’d like to see addressed around early Starfleet, let me know. Next up I’ll be
looking into the Romulans influence, but until then, thanks for watching, I’ve been Ric,
Dif-Tor heh smusma.